X-bit labs

Unreal Battlefield: Enemy Territory Quake Wars Performance Preview (page 6)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 09/21/2007 | 12:39 PM ]

High-End

Nvidia hardware triumphs in the high-end sector, too, with its GeForce 8800 GTS. By the way, the 640MB version of the card has no great advantage over the 320MB version. The gap between them is less than 1fps. We don’t think a mega-texture can fit entirely into 320 megabytes of graphics memory even in compressed form, so this implies that id Software implemented dynamic loading of textures during play.

The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is about 15% behind the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB in the resolutions of the 4:3 format. In the more resource-consuming 1920x1200 resolution the gap shrinks to 10-11%, probably due to the ATI card’s 512-bit memory bus. Anyway, the gap isn’t as large as to call the Radeon HD 2900 XT a hopeless loser. We can say that all modern high-end solutions can ensure a comfortable speed in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at the highest image quality settings.

As for the last-generation solutions, the Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 does well enough, but this card cannot ensure an appropriate quality of anisotropic filtering. The ATI Radeon X1950 XTX is a definite loser. Although it can keep above 30fps in the most popular resolutions, we suspect its speed is going to drop below the acceptable minimum in the heaviest scenes with a lot of players and equipment models. We recommend you to limit your Radeon X1950 XTX to 1600x1200 in order to avoid slowdowns while playing this game.