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.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Despite there being a six percent drop in performance at 2560x1600 with 4xAA applied--where in my opinion the frame rates were too low for a smooth online multiplayer experience--there wasn't really anything to report.

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2

Again, there's very little variance here - you'll get an extra one frame per second at 2560x1600 4xAA at most...