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", including soft particles, as ATI has now remedied the display corruption present with that option enabled.






Nvidia has a strong showing in our final test, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, where it manages to outperform the Radeons pretty convincingly at both 1280x1024 and 1680x1050 with 0xAA applied. Like Oblivion though, the Radeon HD 3870 doesn't disappoint when anti-aliasing is enabled and it manages to edge a lead over the stock GeForce 9600 GT at 1280x1024 while the lead is a bit more convincing at 1680x1050 4xAA.

That isn't enough to beat off the Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition though and again, the card manages to perform at the very least in line with where we would expect it to, if not exceeding our expectations. It's right on the heels of the standard GeForce 8800 GT, which suggests that the game isn't as shader limited as some of the other games tested.