6 - SLI Game Performance in Frontlines: Fuel of War and ET: Quake Wars

Frontlines: Fuel of War

This is a game that's got a couple of big ambitions. The first is to provide a large-scale multiplayer experience along the lines of Battlefield: Modern Combat. That means in addition to running around on foot, you can jump in and control a variety of vehicles on the battlefield. However, it also wants to add what Battlefield sorely lacks, which is a compelling single-player experience. Perhaps the most impressive level is a completely war-torn cityscape that has gutted skyscrapers everywhere. Even more startling is that you can actually get into some of these towering husks, which gives you an incredibly high perch. While that might seem a bit unfair, keep in mind that there are many ways for other players to get at you, such as the remote-controlled air drones that can fly up and shred you with guns or rockets.

Frontlines: Fuel of War is a great title we recently added to our benchmark suite

That's actually stunning performance, in-game everything possible image quality wise is maxed out. SLI doesn't do much here as we apparently run into a nasty CPU bottleneck, that or an in-game limitation of some sort.

Gaming: Enemy Territory - QUAKE Wars

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.

Quake Wars is CPU bound and that actually shows pretty badly. Two cards means more to compute for the CPU opposed to one card. Once you hit a CPU bottleneck the SLI results therefore will be lower until you bump into the GPU being more limited. This is a very a-typical situation where your invested SLI bucks are a waste of money.

Image Quality setting:

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