The Big GPU Shootout: Part I, Upgrade Now or Wait?

Quake Wars

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 in the desperate battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive.

Quake Wars is based on id’s Doom 3 game engine, with the addition of their MegaTexture technology. id’s MegaTexture technology is designed to provide very large maps without having to reuse the same textures over and over again. Usually before this, in many games, these textures would have to be loaded from memory or off the hard drive which impacts performance. Instead with MegaTexture, a single extremely large texture is used to handle the basic terrain, with texture management handled by a pixel shader program – and this is all done with a small memory footprint.

By using this technology, QW’s artists could construct one very large map that is unique with no repeating terrain tiles. For example, battlefields can be rendered completely to the horizon with no fogging needed and no piece of terrain detail ever needs to be repeated. With texture compression these large images only take up a small bit of video RAM so as you move through each map there are no repeated pieces of detail. QW:ET is an OpenGL based game as it is based on the the Doom 3 engine. Many new game features are present that supports self-shadowing and an HDR-like bloom effect with dynamic lighting, high texture quality, and soft foliage. While QW is an OpenGL game, it supports some of the very latest 3D effects seen in today’s latest DX10 games, including soft particles.

Salvage Demo fly-by

In this follow-up to the free Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Quake Wars becomes the second multiplayer-focused game in the Quake series, featuring similar gameplay to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but with the addition of 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 it’s setting is updated from WWII to 2060. Online and offline play modes are available as PC versions let you play individual campaignsgames 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 demanding of the flybys and very repeatable and reliable in its results. It is fairly close to what you will experience in game. Of course, QW:ET is mostly multiplayer.