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Unreal Battlefield: Enemy Territory Quake Wars Performance Preview (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

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

Conclusion 

The demo-version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars proved to be not a very hungry consumer of hardware resources. It runs at a normal speed (for a classic shooter, at 50-60fps) not only on top-end graphics cards but also on rather affordable solutions such as Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB and ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB. We’ve also seen again that the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB at its default frequencies is not really worthy of its price and is only meant for overclockers. Enabling 4x FSAA results in a considerable performance hit, making some resolutions unplayable unless you have an Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra/GTX.

Considering that the game has a frame rate limiter set at 30fps, owners of mainstream graphics cards shouldn’t have any performance-related problems, either. This category of cards even have a reserve of speed in the most popular 1280x1024 resolution. The ex-kings of 3D graphics, ATI Radeon X1900 XT/XTX and X1950 XTX, seem to be able to run the game normally at 1600x1200. Thus, it’s only entry-level cards such as GeForce 8500 GT and Radeon HD 2400 XT that are out of the play, yet this is true for every other modern game with high-quality visuals.

It’s clear that the engine of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars prefers Nvidia’s solutions, probably due to their higher texture-mapping and rasterization performance. This is true for top-end solutions, at least. The mainstream cards from ATI and Nvidia do not differ much in their technical characteristics, and Nvidia’s ones do not have an overwhelming advantage. What we could see too is that the game makes no use of the advanced features of the super-scalar ATI Radeon HD 2000 architecture and, as the results of the GeForce 7950 GX2 suggest, is quite satisfied with the capabilities of the last-generation graphics architecture, having a high enough speed on it. In fact, ET: Quake Wars focuses on the number and performance of texture-mapping units while the computing power of shader processors is not the decisive factor, which is actually the case with all the previous games from id Software.

From the gameplay point of view, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a well-made multiplayer shooter based on the Quake game universe that does not bring fundamental innovations into the genre. As we’ve written above, it may get some degree of popularity among the fans of id Software but may not stand the competition against the upcoming Unreal Tournament 3 which promises a new level of visual quality.