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.






Finally, Quake Wars shows the EAH3870 X2 as a valid competitor for the single GPU competition from Nvidia, but there’s no hope in competing with the hugely faster GeForce 9800 GX2. On another note, there are some decent performance increases as a result of installing the latest Catalyst 8.4 driver – at 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA 16xAF, the difference equates to around eight percent which isn’t too shabby when you’re talking about extra performance for free.

That increase gives it a pretty profound edge over the competition at these settings – you’re looking at the difference between a mediocre online gaming experience and one that’s satisfactory. Of course, for those of you wanting to run around at 60 frames per second with everything turned on at 2,560 x 1,600, you’re going to need a GeForce 9800 GX2 at the bare minimum.