Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Publisher: Activision

Built on an updated version of id Software's Doom 3 engine, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a team-based first person shooter that recently obtained the title of being the first game to use John Carmack's megatexture technology: a single texture that spans the entire map.

ET:QW also makes use of many vehicles and large open areas which means the action in view can get really intensive in this team based shooter. It's also the only game in this suite that utilises OpenGL instead of the pretty much industry-standard DirectX API. We used the full retail version of the game patched to version 1.4.

We recorded a timenetdemo on the Valley level which lasts for several minutes during an online game - this used lots of the different graphical effects to create what we've deemed to be a fairly typical slice of action to stress the system. We also created a custom autoexec file that enabled ultra high video settings, over and above that of the standard in game "high", while soft particles was left disabled for the time being.






Following on from Oblivion, Quake Wars shows a similar performance pattern between the GeForce 9800 GX2 and the pair of GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards in SLI – the GTS 512 SLI configuration is slightly faster, but not notably so in most scenarios and when the gap is larger than a couple of frames per second, the frame rates are already so high that you're not going to notice a real difference in the gaming experience.

The cheaper Radeon HD 3870 X2 has another poor showing in this test from a performance point of view – while it's around £150 cheaper, it's currently the fastest single card solution that AMD has to offer. One thing we'll be looking at in the next week or so is how well CrossFireX scales on this card to see if it can match the GeForce 9800 GX2 for performance when the two are price comparable.