GeForce 8800 series round-up

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 used a custom-recorded demo from a section that represents fairly typical performance throughout the rest of the game. We set the in-game details to high quality and left Vsync disabled. Both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled inside the game using console commands. Anti-aliasing was adjusted using the "r_multisamples" cvar, while anisotropic filtering values were set using "image_anisotropy".






All of the cards didn't really start to stretch their legs until we got up to 2560x1600 2xAA 8xAF, where the three 8800 GTXs began to show their power. At 2560x1600 4xAA 8xAF, EVGA's 8800 GTX KO Superclocked ACS³ card was 9% faster than the reference GeForce 8800 GTX, while XFX's XXX Edition card was 7% faster. Quake 4 appears to be more shader dependent than fill rate dependent, which helps to explain why EVGA's pre-overclocked card is again faster than XFX's despite the lower core clock speed.

The increased shader clock on XFX's card made it the fastest GeForce 8800 GTS of the bunch. However, because there is virtually no image quality difference between high quality and ultra quality in Quake 4 - especially when you can control anisotropic filtering via the control panel too - it makes next to no sense to use it. Thus, you'll get a similar gaming experience from the 320MB and 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS video cards - this is why EVGA's Superclocked 8800 GTS 320MB card is faster than BFGTech's 640MB GTS OC.