nVidia GeForce GTX 280 - Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

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.





The positive story continues with Enemy Territory - GTX280 simply blows away everything else. Even the 9800 GX2 consistently has to play second fiddle and this is a game that scales very well in SLI.