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 1.1.

We recorded a timenetdemo that 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".

However, because of some display corruption on the Radeon HD 2900 XT, Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire and Radeon HD 2900 Pro configurations, we had to disable soft particles on all cards to give a fair apples-to-apples comparison. It’s worth bearing in mind that you’ll be able to turn this effect on with GeForce 8-series hardware.






With Quake Wars we used high levels of anti-aliasing to determine performance, as there is generally enough performance on offer from these cards to deliver a decent gaming experience right the way up to 1920x1200 4xAA 16xAF. Performance in this title was more in line with what we saw in World in Conflict where the differences would go largely unnoticed in a blind taste test.