Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire

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 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:

Now at 1680×1050:

All of these video cards and CPU combinations at any clockspeed have no trouble handling this game fully maxed out. Phenom II at all of its tested clocks, trades blows with Penryn and Core i7. We do see faster frame rates with our tri-core over our dual Phenom II but not with four cores, suggesting that this game takes a small advantage over dual core with faster graphics. Only the Phenom II 550 X2 lags a bit behind the rest of our CPUs. In some cases, Tri-Fire paired with the slower CPU is slower than the HD 4870-X2; until it is overclocked, then Tri-Fire is faster.