GPU Shoot-Out – Part II – Setting New Benches
Quake Wars: Enemy Territory
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. The back-story actually takes place as a prequel to Quake II. 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, and 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 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. With MegaTexture, a single extremely large texture is used to handle the basic terrain, with texture management handled by a pixel shader program. By using this technology, which uses a small memory footprint, QW’s artists could construct one very large map that is unique with no repeating terrain tiles.
In this follow-up to the free Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Quake Wars adds controllable vehicles and aircraft as well as multiple AI deployables, asymmetric teams, much bigger maps and the option of computer-controlled ‘bots; and of course, its setting is updated from World War II to 2060. 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, some unique and some similar to what the humans have.
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.
Salvage Demo fly-by:
Unlike with Catalyst 8.8, CrossfireX3 now runs with Quake Wars – but there is still visible artifacting and color banding. Unfortunately, the ATi drivers for crossfireX3 are probably still immature as well, as the game is probably heavily CPU-bound and thus we see reverse scaling for crossfireX-3 compared to 4870-X2. GTX280 also turns in a very respectable performance results, but sits at the bottom of the chart.
