ATI Radeon X1900 family

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.

In Quake 4 we had a few teething problems with the Radeon X1900XTX and Radeon X1900 CrossFire configurations but they seemed to iron themselves out after a driver uninstall and reinstall. We still experienced a small hitch when firing the grenade launcher for the first time during our Nexus Hubs manual run through, but the performance was there this time.

We found that the EVGA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 was faster than the Radeon X1900 configuration in both single card and SLI modes, as we were able to turn on Ultra Quality. ATI knows that there is a bug in Quake 4 and we understand that the Catalyst team are working on it as we speak - expect it to be fixed over the next couple of months. This was the only title where we found that there was not enough performance available to allow us to enable high quality anisotropic filtering. We suspect this will be fixed at the same time as the Ultra Quality performance-related bug.

We were able to increase the antialiasing quality from 2x to 4x when we enabled CrossFire mode, but we were still unable to turn on Ultra Quality mode. As a result, the image quality was slightly better on the GeForce 7800 GTX 512's. The best gameplay experience fell into the hands of the NVIDIA cards too - we felt that they offered a slightly better experience due to the higher quality settings. This might change when ATI fix the performance-hampering driver bugs and also work on their OpenGL performance.