Friday, October 21, 2005

Quake 4 Demands High-Eng GPU and CPU. Quake 4 Game Performance Levels Unveiled

1:39 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

There are a handful of game titles which are considered as legendary. Those games became brands, with a huge support from loads of dedicated admirers. This week one of the most known game titles of the history received a fresh version: Activision has unveiled the Quake 4. 

The original Quake game was introduced back in 1996 as a single-player game and became the world’s first “truly 3D” title. In late 1997 id Software released Quake II, which continued the storyline of the first episode, but was considered by many as the best deathmatch shooter ever, which is why Quake III Arena released in 1999 became the deathmatch only title. Now, eight years after the Quake II the saga continues: Quake 4 begins only moments after the events of Quake II and enlists the player in the role of Matthew Kane, a member of the Earth Defense Force’s legendary Rhino Squad, to penetrate deep into the heart of the Strogg war machine and engage in a series of missions to destroy the barbaric alien race.

No matter about what was the Quake, all the game titles under this name were popular and hardware demanding, becoming de-factor performance benchmarks for personal computers. The newly released Quake 4 is yet to establish itself as a legendary game, but can serve as PC performance benchmark from the very beginning. The game is based on the Doom III engine, which proved to be quite a challenge even for high-end graphics cards. HardwareZone has investigated Quake 4 performance demands both for CPU and GPU power.

“Sometimes tables do turn when anti-aliasing is introduced and this is what happened for Quake 4. At the very echelon of performance sits the GeForce 7800 GTX while the Radeon X1800 XT is at a close second place. Over in the mid-range segment, the Radeon X1600 XT’s higher memory throughput helped it clinch better performance than the venerable GeForce 6600 GT. Overall, the performance ranking of the graphics cards with anti-aliasing seems to better mimic their hardware capabilities,” writes HardwareZone

“SLI does heaps to improve high-resolution gaming and if you combine it with a CPU boost, you’ll get even more for your mileage. However, the single most bang-for-the-buck method to crank up performance in Quake 4 is undoubtedly doubling your graphics rendering power and SLI delivers just that,” adds the author.

“As the results show, upgrading to one of the fastest consumer CPUs isn’t the way to go to crank more performance if you already have a mainstream class CPU like the AMD Athlon 64 3500+. Given the 12% performance boost at low and mid-range resolutions and none at the high resolutions, the extra investment to obtain an FX-55 class CPU isn’t too justifiable,” emphasizes the web-site.

• HardwareZone: Quake 4 Performance Review.

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