Quake 4

Publisher: Activision

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.3.0. It's 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".






In Quake 4 the Zotac GeForce 8800 GTX AMP! Edition manages to just about fend off the assault from AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and isn't too far behind EVGA's card - less than half a frame per second. It's quite a long way ahead of the standard clocked GeForce 8800 GTX though, which suggests that this particular spin of the Doom 3 engine is more fillrate heavy than shader heavy - almost the opposite of Prey.