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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 annihilate 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 paid 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:

Small sidenote first. There are some sites out there that are reporting the most weird issues with Quake 4 benchmarking. We have not seen any issues so far and thus continue to use this software to test graphics cards. 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 very recently I received Quake 4 and made the timedemo. With time that passes we'll add more and more results in the upcoming reviews.

Anyway, it was a surprise but the card performs beautifully up-to 1280x1024.

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 1024x768. We used the latest reference drivers to make sure the OpenGL game performance what it deserves. Still, 43 FPS at 10x7 with 4xAA and 16xAF does not suck at all for a 119 product.

Far Cry

If you haven't played the demo or the game, well shame on you! Far Cry's story centers on Jack Carver, who has put a mysterious past behind him in favor of a less stressful life chartering boats in the South Pacific... or so he thinks. After delivering a female journalist to an uncharted island, Jack's boat is attacked and he subsequently finds himself stranded against a group of mercenaries, at which point his adventure begins. Graphically Far Cry is amazing; the action takes place in a huge, brightly colored environment with dense jungle style shrubbery, peacefully quiet beaches and large indoor areas. The excellent shadow effects simply bring the game to life with reflections on walls and even on your own weapons as you creep through the trees. Its like something straight out of a movie, helped along by the lighting and tight, crisp textures.  

For Far Cry we did things a bit different then normal. First off, the game has been patched to version 1.3. Secondly where possible we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 3.0 if possible. Next to that we are using our own Guru3D.com constructed timedemo to prevent driver cheats.

The results (frames per second) that you see below are a lot lower then in normal conditions as we modified configuration settings and make it as rough as it can get on the graphics card. All in all, at this time and moment, this is one of the best tests we can offer you to benchmark DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards.

As you can see, not a huge lead here. I can explain this though. I've been telling you for many months now that this game is CPU limited and we need a faster CPU to make the GPU produce better scores.

With that being said, nice performance. We always go for the highest possible image quality during our tests. So our regular testing uses a personalized configuration file. The Far Cry scores you can see here are a little lower then you'll have at home, as we enable all possible graphics settings from the game engine. This goes for things like maximum texture sizes to looking at water and actually seeing sand banks underneath the water surface. So that's like the highest game setting available plus a few additions from our side and that does affect the framerate.

Below are the results with 4x Antialiasing and 8 levels of Anisotropic filtering enabled.

The AA and AF tests are shown above. 4xAA and 8xAF is what we enabled here and you'll notice that the game is enjoyable up-to a resolution of 10x7 with the 6600 GT in very close proximity. The framerate is measured over an intensive shader rich timedemo, also with a custom Guru3D.com written configuration file with everything maxed out. Again, not bad.