Radeon X1900-series roundup

Quake 4

Publisher: Activision

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.0.5. It is the fourth game in the Quake series, based on the technically sound Doom 3 engine. However, unlike Doom 3, we found that the game benefits from at least 2x Anti-Aliasing, and the experience with Anti-Aliasing at a slightly lower resolution was better than increasing the resolution with no AA applied.

Both Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game. When you select "High Quality" mode, 4xAF is automatically enabled, and when the "Ultra Quality" mode is enabled, 8xAF is automatically applied to the scene.

We did a manual run through from a five minute section of the Nexus Hub Tunnels level and found that a minimum of 15 frames per second and an average of 40-50 frames per second in our test section was deemed to be playable across the rest of the title.

In Quake 4 we had a few teething problems with the Radeon X1900XTX configuration but they seemed to iron themselves out after a driver uninstall and reinstall. We still experienced a small hitch when firing the grenade launcher for the first time during our Nexus Hubs manual run through, but the performance was there this time.

We found that the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 was faster than the Radeon X1900-series cards, as we were able to turn on Ultra Quality on the Radeon X1900XTX and X1900XT video cards. ATI knows that there is a bug in Quake 4 and we understand that the Catalyst team are working on it as we speak - expect it to be fixed over the next couple of months. This was the only title where we found that there was not enough performance available to allow us to enable high quality anisotropic filtering. We suspect this will be fixed at the same time as the Ultra Quality performance-related bug.

The Radeon X1900XT was slightly slower than the Radeon X1900XTX, and we found that we had to disable adaptive antialiasing all together in order to attain a smooth gaming experience. We still had the same grenade launcher problem. Catalyst 6.2 was released last night, and we spoke to an ATI representative this morning because we didn't see Quake 4 mentioned in the release notes. They confirmed that the Quake 4 issue has not yet been fixed; hopefully this will be fixed in Catalyst 6.3.

We had to drop the resolution with the All-In-Wonder X1900 in order to attain a smooth gaming experience, but the performance was good at 1280x1024 2xAA 4xAF with high quality details. Due to the card only having 256MB of memory, it's not going to benefit from the Ultra Quality fix. Also, we didn't experience the 'grenade launcher stutter' problem on this card.