XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme

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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.

The higher resolution meant that the choppiness problems that we've documented many times were even more prominent on ATI's Radeon X1900XT 512MB, giving the two NVIDIA cards a clear win in Quake 4. The higher clocks on the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme enabled us to use transparency supersampling, while the reference card had to be reduced to transparency multisampling in order to deliver similar frame rates and a similar gaming experience.

The filtering quality issues didn't seem to plague NVIDIA in Quake 4, so while ATI's high quality anisotropic filtering delivered sharper textures in the distance, it wasn't massively noticeable when playing the game as a typical gamer would do. Any serious gamer would take the smoother experience delivered by NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GT over the apparent choppiness that comes as standard with the Radeon X1900XT in this title.