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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 3rd October 2007
Graphics
Let’s face it – gameplay isn’t everything and we usually want a game to look good as well as play good. That’s especially true with a game attached to id Software, as the engines are often designed to be incredibly powerful and good-looking beasties.Of course, decent graphics come with increasingly demanding system requirements, so it’s a good thing that we’re here to let you know just what you can expect to get out of your game in terms of graphical fidelity.
Below we break down the most important graphical settings in the game and show you screenshot of the different settings so that you’ll know if it’s worth buying a new stick of RAM or overclocking your GPU for the game.
All of the screenshots below were taken on our standard gaming rig – housing 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra which Tim still hasn’t taken back since I pinched it for my hands-on preview of Crysis.
Presets
So, let’s kick things off by getting the obvious out of the way. Graphical presets. Quake Wars has three graphical presets for players to choose from and will auto-detect the best one for your system if you just want to jump straight in and play. There are three presets to choose from, so check them out below.
Graphical presents high (left), medium (center) and low (right), click to enlarge
Obviously the higher preset is the preferred setting and the main differences seem to be in the water quality and texture details. The higher setting makes the textures look more detailed whereas the lower setting has textures which look bland, blurry and not entirely finished.
Honestly, I could create better textures than those using vomit as my paint and my tongue as a brush. If the low preset is the best you can manage then I feel very sorry for you. Honest!
Anti-aliasing
Ah, our old friend anti-aliasing. A process of smoothing out the jagged edges on straight lines and vertices in the game, AA comes in five different flavours in Quake Wars; 16x, 8x, 4x, 2x and Off. We’ll take a look at the 16x, 4x and Off settings below because frankly the difference between the other settings isn’t that massive.
AA 16x (left), 4x (center) and disabled (right), click to enlarge
Again, the higher the setting the better the game will look obviously. However, unlike the presets option the increased AA can have a substantial effect on the performance of the game and the last thing you want to be doing is lagging out of a game just so you can see a wire fence with slightly reduced jagged lines.
If you want to get some training in and play the game against bots in the offline modes then, by all means, turn the AA up as far as you can. No doubt when you're playing online, you'll want the smoothest experience possible - if that's the case, we’d suggest that AA should be the first thing you turn down. We did and the game still looks good with 2x or even completely disabled AA.
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