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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars distinguishes itself from all our other tests by using 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, as well as a whole host of vehicles. 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.

ATI has always struggled with games written using the OpenGL API so it's no surprise to see its single-chip cards falling behind nVidia's cards. However, for the HD 4870 X2 to scale quite so badly is something we didn't expect. Yes it's an improvement but based on this game alone you'd be better off getting an nVidia GTX 280.

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