Unreal Tournament 2004
Our UT2004 demo shows yours truly putting the smack down on some bots in an Onslaught game.

The Pentium M at 2.4GHz whups up on the Pentium 4 in UT2004, too.

However, could the picture change during actual gameplay? Some folks from Intel suggested to us that we should consider testing gameplay performance with the FRAPS frame rate capture program instead of relying on an in-game benchmarking function. The suggestion makes some sense, because timedemo playback tools don't always use every aspect of the game engine, such as physics, A.I., and user input routines.

I tried using FRAPS with a couple of games, including Doom 3 and Rome: Total War, but frame rate caps in those games prevented us from being able to show meaningful performance differences between different processors. UT2004, which is very much a CPU-bound game, was a different story. The results below are the averaged from five different 150-second gaming sessions played on the same Onslaught map as in our timedemo above, ONS-Torlan. I was playing against computer-controlled bots, so UT2004's A.I. was working overtime.

The in-game results don't differ too much from what we saw above. The Pentium M's real-world gaming performance is very solid.

Before we move on, we tried one more thing with UT2004. We tested CPU performance using its software renderer, just to see what would happen.

What happened is that the Pentium M took the rest of the processors to the woodshed. If you happen to have a Centrino laptop with lousy 3D acceleration and you want to play UT2004, the software renderer might be a good option.