Testbed and Methods

Waiting for the official release of ET: Quake Wars we couldn’t help trying to run the demo of the game on graphics cards we had in our labs. We used the official demo version of the game that contained one level, Valley, and allowed playing with bots in offline mode.

We tested our graphics cards in Quake Wars on the following testbed:

• Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU (3.0GHz, 9x333MHz FSB)
• DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G (AMD RD600) for ATI Radeon cards
• Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI) for Nvidia GeForce cards
• Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5 memory (2x1GB, 1066MHz, 5-5-5-15, 2T)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 hard disk drive (250GB, SATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Enermax Galaxy DXX power supply (EGX1000EWL, 1000W)
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30”, 2560x1600@60Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
• ATI Catalyst 7.9
• Nvidia ForceWare 162.22

We recorded about 60 seconds of gameplay in real gaming conditions, with a team run, shooting, explosions, etc. The integrated frame rater limiter and the performance smoothing mechanism were disabled with the console commands “seta com_unlockFPS 1” and “seta com_unlock_timingMethod 0”, respectively.

It is necessary to point out that the game speed is limited at 30fps and this is the rate at which the physical model is being refreshed at the server. This must be enough for EQ: Quake Wars to run smoothly according to id Software. Thus, every result above 30fps is considered acceptable unless the speed drops below 30fps. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t show the minimum of speed.

The choice of the 30fps limit must be due to the fact that ET: Quake Wars is a multi-platform project to be released not only on the PC, but also on the new-generation consoles Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3.

We set up the AMD Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare drivers in the usual way:

AMD Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: On
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• High Quality AF: On
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Texture filtering - Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Other settings: default

We selected the highest graphics quality settings in the game. The performance data were obtained with the command “timenetdemo”, which would run the recorded clip and report the average frame rate.

We tested the following graphics cards, divided into four performance classes:

Ultra High-End

• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX

High-End

• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
• ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
• Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2

Mainstream

• ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
• Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS
• Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS

Entry Level

• ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT

The cards were all tested at three resolutions, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 pixels, except for the entry-level solutions which were not tested at 1920x1200. The top-end cards were tested with enabled 4x FSAA besides the ordinary mode with maximum anisotropic filtering.