CPU scaling in games with dual & quad core processors - 8 - CPU Performance - Enemy territory: Quake Wars

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.

With this benchmark we consistently see some weird FPS behavior at 1024 & 1280, likely random in-game stuff is affecting the CPU. Once the CPU matters less, we see more consistent results. Therefore we ask you to look at the resolutions above that for a more objective perspective.

Again very nice performance throughout the scope.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Soft Particles disabled

Quake Wars loves CPUs, that's a fact, and it's definitely multi-threaded. Look at that QX9770 go, BTW.

At 1280x1024 we get pretty much the same performance.

As in 1600x1200 ...

At 1920x1200 things normalize a little. Meaning that at the next resolution we finally will hit the brick GPU wall. Quake Wars therefore is an excellent tool to measure performance with. Look at the Q9450 by the way ... I think we are looking at a winner here.

And yes, as projected, we hit a massive GPU limitation here.