NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB

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 used a custom-recorded demo from a section that represents fairly typical performance throughout the rest of the game. We set the in-game details to high quality and left Vsync disabled. Both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled inside the game using console commands. Anti-aliasing was adjusted using the "r_multisamples" cvar, while anisotropic filtering values were set using "image_anisotropy".



OpenGL performance has been one of ATI's downfalls in the past, and the situation hasn't really changed with the latest Catalyst 7.1 drivers. At the lower resolutions, all of the GeForce 8800's outperform ATI's two ageing Radeons and the lower memory quantity doesn't appear to make much difference to performance either, as the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS Superclocked 320MB is faster than BFGTech's 8800 GTS OC 640MB video card.


Things got even more interesting at 2560x1600, as EVGA's Superclocked 8800 GTS 320MB still outperformed the BFGTech 8800 GTS OC 640MB with both 2xAA and 4xAA enabled. The two Radeons seemed to kick themselves into action at this resolution too, with playable frame rates when 2xAA was enabled. The frame rates weren't quite as high with 4xAA enabled, but some may find gameplay acceptable on the pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS cards.