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Quake 4
The Quake 4 story picks up where Quake 2 left off, with the Space Marines fighting the Strogg, but this time on the enemy's home planet of Stroggos. You'll take the role of Corporal Kane as the Marines attempt to basically annihalate their Borg-like enemies. You'll crash land in the middle of trench warfare, and it's off to the races as one superior officer after another sends you off to retrieve people, destroy key locations, and infiltrate deep behind enemy lines. Sometimes you'll be accompanied by game-controlled team members -- typically a technical officer who can repair your armor, and/or a corpsman who can heal you up to full health. Quake 4's built on id Software's impressive DOOM 3 engine. It was first thought that the engine was only good at showing dark, indoor areas, but this is the proof that id's engine is actually much more robust. And the amusing part here is that while Quake 4 gives us environments that are every bit as detailed as DOOM 3, it's also got much faster-paced action with both squadmates and half a dozen enemies going at it at once.
If your computer was able to play Doom 3 at a reasonable frame rate, you should be able to play it without major problems. This is a beautifully rendered game featuring a lot of bump mapping, specular lightning and 16x anisotropy option. It has a lot of small details like panels ripped out of the walls, huge machines in the background doing what huge machines usually do and even bullet decals on bodies. Raven payed a lot of attention to the small things which in the end makes all the difference. Another part that should concern a lot of potential gamers is it's The way it's meant to be played mark. Even if the logo doesn't appear, it's already obvious that it's going to have an edge over ATI graphic cards. Nvidia launched in the same day some beta drivers (81.85) with a Quake 4 profile. The next drivers from ATI (5.11) should give better performance in OpenGL driven games.
With that being said, all modern cards can play Quake 4 quite well. We created our own time-demo and defined a configuration based on the best image quality settings possible. Let's have a look:
The results above are a test run of our own custom timedemo with no image quality settings like AA and AF enabled. Furthermore, Quake is configured at the best possible settings, everything is maxed out and enabled. We can see only a few results as over the weekend I received Quake 4 and made the timedemo. With time that passes we'll add more and more results in the upcoming reviews. Anyway, the cards perform beautifully in all tested resolutions.
Once we enable 4xAA and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering we see the performance fall drastically in the higher resolutions, yet it is still playable up-to 1280x1024. We used the newer Catalyst 5.11a drivers to make sure the OpenGL titles get what they deserve. Unfortunately only the X1K series of ATI cards benefit well from it as it has to do with the programmable ringbus memory controller.
Still, 40 FPS at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 16xAF does not suck at all. Yay for the GTO.
