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.

Quake Wars - Enemy territory; so many of you are playing it. No need to comment here, the card is more than powerful enough to play the game at very nice image quality settings.

In fact up-to 1600x1200 at the very best IQ settings we see the game being CPU bound. That's just fricking awesome performance. I took out the 3870 performance here and threw in a GeForce Ultra just to see how close performance really is.

Image Quality setting:

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

Gaming: World in Conflict

Impressive gameplay and graphics that will make you go into shock and awe. Yes, World in Conflict has been released. This game offers a serious graphical challenge to you guys, the gamers. Wars often end in either victory, loss or compromise.

Vivendi Universal recently was kind enough to send us a copy a couple of days prior to the release of the game. You are an avid Guru3D reader so that means you also know we'll do things a bit differently. It's not moving very fast, but slowly we see more and more DirectX 10 titles becoming available on the market.

World in Conflict is a late Cold War real-time strategy game with a strong focus on unit tactics, action, team play, and destruction. Players take on a specific role commanding air, armor, infantry, and support units to form a combined arms force against the enemy. By controlling key strategic points on the map, you sway the battle in your favor. There is no resource-gathering, so every second not spent fighting the enemy over a piece of land is a second wasted.

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

What you are observing above are the results done with the medium settings. Traditionally we see good performance for any mid-range card up-to a resolution of 1920x1200 yet then only the high-end cards can do the job. The Radeon HD 4850 pushes onwards to 2560x1600 with an average framerate of 47 FPS.