ATI Radeon X1950XTX

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Quake 4

Publisher: Activision

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.3.0. 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.

Quake 4 has been a game that ATI has typically suffered with ever since it was released and the same could be said for Doom 3 too, as the former uses the Doom 3 engine. The Radeon X1950XTX delivered a similar gaming experience to the BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC, but game play wasn't quite as smooth on ATI's latest flagship part. We encountered some really choppy frame rates through portions of the game, especially when firing the grenade launcher for the first time in a while.

We encountered the same problems on the Radeon X1900XTX too, albeit slightly worse than on the Radeon X1950XTX - the memory bandwidth advantage helped the latter here. Meanwhile, the BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 delivered the best gaming experience by some distance. We were able to play the game with 4x transparency supersampling enabled, with the frame rate never dropping below 20 fps.