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 BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GTX OCX performs well in Quake Wars at lower resolutions, where it matches the Radeon HD 3870 X2 fairly closely until we get to 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA 16xAF. At these settings, it’s no surprise that the Radeon HD 3870 X2 establishes a bit of a performance advantage over BFG Tech’s 9800 GTX OCX – even the GeForce 8800 GTX manages to outperform it, signifying that there is a serious lack of bandwidth—even though the card’s memory is screaming along at 2,300MHz. This isn’t BFG’s fault – it’s merely a problem with the GPU design and the choice to opt for a 256-bit memory interface.