Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Publisher: Activision

Built on an updated version of id Software's Doom 3 engine, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a team-based first person shooter that recently obtained the title of being the first game to use John Carmack's megatexture technology: a single texture that spans the entire map.

ET:QW also makes use of many vehicles and large open areas which means the action in view can get really intensive in this team based shooter. It's also the only game in this suite that utilises OpenGL instead of the pretty much industry-standard DirectX API. We used the full retail version of the game patched to version 1.4.

We recorded a timenetdemo on the Valley level which lasts for several minutes during an online game - this used lots of the different graphical effects to create what we've deemed to be a fairly typical slice of action to stress the system. We also created a custom autoexec file that enabled ultra high video settings, over and above that of the standard in game "high", including soft particles, as ATI has now remedied the display corruption present with that option enabled.







Quake Wars was a game that worked pretty well with CrossFire in the past, but there seems to be something funky going on with the latest 1.4 patch, as there is now very limited CrossFire scaling available. This results in what is probably the most disappointing performance from all of the testing we’ve done, because there’s so much untapped potential there.

There’s really not a lot to say about this game, other than that there is really no competition as things currently stand.