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 1.1.

We recorded a timenetdemo that 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".

However, because of some display corruption on the Radeon HD 2900 XT, Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire and Radeon HD 2900 Pro configurations, we had to disable soft particles on all cards to give a fair apples-to-apples comparison. It’s worth bearing in mind that you’ll be able to turn this effect on with GeForce 8-series hardware.








Had we only looked at performance with 4xAA enabled in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, we wouldn't have learned a great deal about how the Radeon HD 3870 compares to the cards around it. For example, the GeForce 8800 GT is a much quicker than the Radeon HD 3870 with 4xAA enabled at all three resolutions that we've tested here.

However, once you increase to 8xMSAA, the GeForce 8800 GT's performance tanks and the Radeon HD 3870 delivers a very similar frame rate. Meanwhile with no anti-aliasing enabled, there's around a 10 percent performance difference between the GeForce 8800 GT and the Radeon HD 3870 in GT's favour.

When it comes to multi-GPU performance, SLI excels, but what's more interesting is the performance difference between the Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire configurations. There's a pretty healthy gap opening up when 8xMSAA is enabled, while the gap appears to be more realistic when either 4xMSAA or no anti-aliasing is enabled -- this could be where the combination of the optimisations to RV670's render back-ends come into play.