High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an objective-driven, class-based first person shooter set in the Quake universe. It was developed by id Software and Splash Damage for Windows and published by Activision. Quake Wars pits the combined human armies of the Global Defense Force against the technologically superior Strogg, an alien race who has come to earth to use humans for spare parts and food. It allows you to play a part, probably best as an online multi-player experience, in the battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive.

Quake Wars is an OpenGL game based on id’s Doom3 game engine with the addition of their MegaTexture technology. It also supports some of the latest 3D effects seen in today’s games, including soft particles, although it is somewhat dated and less demanding on video cards than many DX10 games. id’s MegaTexture technology is designed to provide very large maps without having to reuse the same textures over and over again. For our benchmark we chose the flyby, Salvage Demo . It is one of the most graphically demanding of all the flybys and it is very repeatable and reliable in its results. It is fairly close to what you will experience in-game. All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ and we also apply 4xAA/16xAF in game.

First we test at 1920×1200 resolution with the HD4870-X2:

And now at 1920×1200 with the GTX 280:

Salvage Demo fly-by at 1680×1050 resolution with our HD 4870-X2:

Finally at 1650×1080 with the GTX 280:

There are no longer any serious issues with artifacting with Catalyst 9-6 and our HD 4870-X2 that we had with the earlier 9-5 driver. Still, all of these video cards and CPU combinations at any clockspeed have no trouble handling this game fully maxed out.  But this time, the situation dramatically reverses and it appears that ET:QW is simply faster on the AMD architecture with the drivers and hardware that we used.