8 - Game Performance: Quake Wars ET
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.
New in our benchmark suite is Quake Wars; I can only show you the results of the competing GeForce 9600 GT board partner as two days ago I was looking at the NPD 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. For now, the entire range of 9600 GT cards we already tested.
Image Quality setting:
- 4x Anti Aliasing
- 16x anisotropic filtering
- Soft Particles disabled (as it's not supported by the Radeon HD cards).
NVIDIA GPU based cards always fared very well in id produced OpenGL titles, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is not different in that matter. You'll play easily with high-quality settings up-to 1920x1200. But when we enable SLI we see a very nice performance increase.
If you are wondering why in 1024x768 SLI performs slower than a single card. This is due to CPU overhead. There is slightly more data to be processed by the CPU.
