Refine search for Graphics

  1 comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars distinguishes itself from all our other tests by the fact it uses the open source OpenGL API rather than Microsoft's DirectX. It's a team-based first person shooter set in a dystopian future war scenario. As a player you get to choose from an enormous range of character types and playing styles, and there's a whole host of vehicles to choose from too. Battles can span vast areas of open space and involve a huge number of participants. All in all, it's multiplayer heaven.

We test using the 32-bit version of the game, which is patched to version 1.4. We use a custom timedemo from the Valley level, which we feel is about as graphically intensive as the game gets. We feel a framerate of at least 50fps is required for this game as the intense multiplayer action and high speed mouse movement demands it.

All in-game settings are set to their maximum and we test with 0xAA 0xAF, 2xAA 4xAF, and 4xAA 8xAA. Transparency anti-aliasing is also manually turned on through the driver, though this is obviously only enabled when normal AA is being used in-game.

Both ATI's new cards are soundly beaten by the nVidia GTX 260 in this title but the HD 4850 does at least comfortably beat all its price competitors. Most impressive, though, is the Asus EAH4850 TOP, which is pushing close to HD 4870 performance.

Add your comment