Inno3D GeForce 7950 GT

Quake 4

Publisher: Activision

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.3.0. It is the fourth game in the Quake series, based on the technically-sound Doom 3 engine. However, unlike Doom 3, we found that the game benefits from at least 2x anti-aliasing, and the experience with anti-aliasing at a slightly lower resolution was better than increasing the resolution with no AA applied.

Both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game. When you select "High Quality" mode, 4xAF is automatically enabled, and when the "Ultra Quality" mode is enabled, 8xAF is automatically applied to the scene. We forced anisotropic filtering values via the console using "image_anisotropy".

We did a manual run through from a five minute section of the Nexus Hub Tunnels level and found that a minimum of 15 frames per second and an average of 45-50 frames per second in our test section was deemed to be playable across the rest of the title.

Inno3D’s GeForce 7950 GT performed really well in Quake 4 and delivered an awesome gaming experience at 1600x1200. However, it was just edged at the finishing line by the pre-overclocked XFX 7950 GT 570M Extreme, which was capable of maintaining smooth gameplay with transparency supersampling enabled. Meanwhile, Inno3D’s card was only capable of a smooth gaming experience with transparency multisampling.

These differences are very small, and in the grand scheme of things it is not going to affect the overall gaming experience greatly. The lack of any transparency/adaptive anti-aliasing on the Radeon X1900XT 512MB and Radeon X1900XT 256MB cards was more noticeable though – we started to see some moiré on areas that benefited from transparency/adaptive anti-aliasing.

Although the Inno3D GeForce 7950 GT didn’t deliver the absolute best gaming experience out of the cards tested, it wasn’t too far behind the experience delivered by the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme. Catalyst 6.9 seems to have closed the gap between ATI and NVIDIA in this title, but the game still seems to play better on NVIDIA hardware.