The latest offering from Id, Activision and Splash Damage, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set in the Quake universe. Here are a few basic facts: It will involve humans fighting aliens. As the invasion begins, players choose to battle as one of five unique classes in either the EDF (Earth Defense Force - humans) or the barbaric alien Strogg armies, each augmented with specialist weapons and combat hardware. The game features John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small textures.

The splendor that is called megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory. Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays nice and works high end graphics cards robustly. We test the game with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with one exclusion, soft particles are disabled as the Radeon HD series does not support this feature; obviously we measure at 4X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

Recently added in our benchmark suite is Quake Wars. I can only show you the results of the competing GeForce 9600 GT as two days ago I was looking at the NPD charts and figured we really need to include performance results of this game.

There's a little discrepancy in the lower resolutions that I can't just yet explain. So peek at the results starting at 1600x1200.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Soft Particles disabled (as it's not supported by the Radeon HD cards).

Gaming: Crysis - Single Player v1.2

With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right?

Image Quality setting Medium:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

So we discarded the internal benchmark for Crysis as I felt that the in-game gameplay performance does not match up with a large fly-by at all. We took the beach scene and started using fraps to measure the actual framerate. As you can see, Crysis is a tough nut to crack for any graphics card but at medium settings you can play upto 1920x1200 just fine.

We measured with the full game patched to v1.2