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.


The XFX 790i and Gigabyte X48 boards perform almost identically and strangely the boards are faster with the E8500 installed on both DDR3 boards. One interpretation is that this is partly because we could set slightly tighter memory timings for the E8500, which had its memory clock at 1,333MHz. However, the memory bandwidth doesn't seem to be a particularly important part of the equation in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as the DFI X48-T2R keeps up with both DDR3 boards. The XFX 780i doesn't stand out quite as well though and doesn't even break the 50fps barrier with either CPU.

The bigger picture is that there's only a relatively unnoticeable three frames per second difference between everything, regardless of CPU core count, memory type and motherboard.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

For our gameplay testing in Call of Duty 4, we did a 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game. All of the in-game settings were set to their maximum values, including texture details which were configured to 'Extra'. The 'Dual Video Cards' option was enabled for the multi-GPU configurations, but was disabled for all single GPU cards.

Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.


Call of Duty 4 switches things the other way though and the XFX 780i comes out trumps in average framerate here, despite the relatively low minimum fps. The Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 isn't far behind this and also beats the XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI by several frames per second. In fact, even the DFI X48-T2R matches the DDR3-based XFX 790i in this test.