BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC AGP

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.

Quake 4 followed a similar pattern to NFS: Most Wanted, with the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC taking the honours by a considerable margin over the ATI Radeon X850XT. We were able to increase the resolution from 1024x768 and also increase the antialiasing quality from conventional AA to transparency supersampled AA, greatly improving the detail on textures and edges that are not sampled by conventional antialiasing pattern.

As we mentioned in our Radeon X1900 family preview, ATI knows about its poor performance in OpenGL applications and the companys driver team has repeatedly said that they're working hard to improve on the current state of affairs. However, with older R4x0 based cards being somewhat redundant since the launch of Radeon X1000-series, we'll have to see whether OpenGL gaming performance on the Radeon X850-series cards improves over time.