Big GPU-Shootout; Part III, PCIe 1.0 vs. PCIe 2.0
Quake Wars: Enemy Territory
Enemy Territory, Salvage Demo
Quake Wars: Enemy Territory is an objective-driven, class-based first person shooter based 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 (GDF) 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 desperate battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive. Quake Wars has controllable vehicles and aircraft as well as multiple AI deployables, asymmetric teams, big maps and the option of computer-controlled ‘bots. Online and offline play modes are available as PC versions let you play individual campaigns against bots and allows the player combat as both sides. The Human weapons and vehicles are mostly based on modern combat weapons and vehicles but updated for the 50 years into the future. The Strogg have alien weapons and vehicles.
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 very latest 3D effects seen in today’s latest DX10 games, including soft particles. 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, from Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. It is one of the most graphically demanding of all the flybys and 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.
Salvage Demo fly-by:
Our GTX280 liked our X48MB better than P35. Except for a single maximum frame rate at 1920x12oo, all the other tests showed gains in the newer motherboard. 4870 got rather mixed results and the 1GB version is generally edging out the 512MB version. 4870-X2 strangely preferred the P35 MB, but not crossfireX-3 which had much better performance on X48. This time crossfireX-3 with a 512MB version in the second slot was beaten badly when it was compared to “true” CrossfireX-3 [4870×2-2GB + 4870-1GB] – 56 FPS as a minimum at 1920×1200 to 83 FPS !!
Consider this a warning to those who use “FrankenfireX-3” – 512MB is a limiting factor when it happens.
Curious, why’d you set Catalyst A.I. to “Advanced”?
How about a few links to explanations of Catalyst AI and what “advanced” really does? Here is an old article on it:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjY2LDI=
Here is the tweak guide which supports my own research:
http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_7.html
“Catalyst A.I. allows users to determine the level of ‘optimizations’ the drivers enable in graphics applications. These optimizations are graphics ‘short cuts’ which the Catalyst A.I. calculates to attempt to improve the performance of 3D games without any noticeable reduction in image quality. In the past there has been a great deal of controversy about ‘hidden optimizations’, where both Nvidia and ATI were accused of cutting corners, reducing image quality in subtle ways by reducing image precision for example, simply to get higher scores in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark. In response to this, both ATI and Nvidia have made the process transparent to a great extent. You can select whether you want to enable or disable Catalyst A.I. for a further potential performance boost in return for possibly a slight reduction in image quality in some cases. If Catalyst AI is enabled, you can also choose the aggressiveness of such optimizations, either Standard or Advanced on the slider. The Advanced setting ensures maximum performance, and usually results in no problems or any noticeable image quality reduction. If on the other hand you want to always ensure the highest possible image quality at all costs, disable Catalyst A.I. (tick the ‘Disable Catalyst A.I.’ box). I recommend leaving Catalyst A.I enabled unless you experience problems. ATI have made it clear that many application-specific optimizations for recent games such as Oblivion are dependent on Catalyst AI being enabled.
Note: As of the 6.7 Catalysts, Crossfire users should set Catalyst A.I. to Advanced to force Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) mode in all Direct3D games for optimal performance. Once again, Catalyst A.I. should only be disabled for troubleshooting purposes, such as if you notice image corruption in particular games”
In other words, one can choose the aggressiveness of your optimizations, either “Standard” or “Advanced”. The Advanced setting ensures maximum performance – as for benchmarking games – and with no noticeable image quality reduction. However, if you are doing IQ comparisons as BFG10K did, and want to guarantee the very highest image quality, then disable Catalyst A.I. [but not for crossfire; set it to “Standard”]. I have always recommended leaving Catalyst A.I enabled unless you experience any glitches in games.
You have to realize that Cat AI is not necessarily supposed to give you a boost in every single game. It tries to do optimizations, if possible, but many times these are either not possible with a particular game, or the settings you’ve chosen in the game may be too low for it to make any noticeable impact.
That is why I recommend leaving it on “Advanced”; you get a possisble performance boost; if not then you lose nothing. Or you can set it to standard or off if you feel your image quality is being degraded.
Hope that explains it.
Very interesting, I’ll definitely be I check your site on a regular basis now.