GeForce 7900 GTX Roundup

Quake 4

Publisher: Activision

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.1.0. 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 45-50 frames per second in our test section was deemed to be playable across the rest of the title.

As with NFS: Most Wanted, all three GeForce 7900 GTX cards were playable at the same settings. We found that we were unable to increase the highest playable settings without turning off transparency antialiasing completely. Even with 4xAA at 1600x1200, we still found that the frame rate was considerably lower than what we experienced at 1600x1200 2xTSS AA 8xAF with ultra quality in-game details. There were some small gains in image quality, but there was also a reduction in some areas too, due to the lack of transparency antialiasing at 4xAA.

ATI has struggled with OpenGL for a long time, and this game is no exception. There was one point during our manual run through where the frame rate dropped to zero frames per second momentarily. This wasn't pleasant, but it was impossible to remove without dropping the settings down massively. It only happened when we fired the grenade launcher for the first time - after that, the frame rate was pretty comparable to the GeForce 7900 GTX. However, both the Radeon X1900XT and Radeon X1900XTX were running at high quality, meaning that the gaming performance was more comparable to Gainward's overclocked GeForce 7800 GTX.

This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for ATI's hardware at the moment, and it seems to be driver related. We're told that ATI is still working on a fix for its OpenGL driver, but the performance needs to be drastically improved if we're going to be able to experience Quake 4 at its highest quality settings on ATI hardware. We've been told this for a long while now, and we're still waiting to see the fruits of their work on improving performance in OpenGL titles.