13 - Game Performance: Frontlines FOW & Quake Wars ET

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 new title we just added, over time more and more results will be added obviously. With the new Beat driver SLI finally started to work opposed to previous driver releases. I did not have the time to test other SLI configurations yet, but this gives a nice perspective I'd say. Look at the difference between that 8800 Ultra and the 9800 GTX above 1600x1200.

That's just amazing.

Note to NV driver team, 8x AA and higher does not work just yet.

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.

Pretty new in our benchmark suite is Quake Wars - Enemy territory; a while ago I was checking the NPD (USA sales for games) charts and figured we really need to include performance results of this game.

Benchmarking is however a little more complex with this game and therefore we first had to record a proper and objective timedemo. Secondly I had to program a script that would execute and collect the final data.

In the future more and more results with diverse cards will be added. Appearantly Quake like more than 512MB memory, this is why you see the peak in 10x7. But that resolution is just not interesting for a product like the 9800 GX. You buy it to play games abobe 1600x1200, fair and square. And as you can see, the 9800 GTX does what it promises.

At 2560x1600 that's a strong FPS increase over the 8800 Ultra.

Image Quality setting:

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