NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216: EVGA, Zotac


Enemy Territory Quake Wars

NVIDIA Accelerates the Search For a Cure

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
OpenGL Gaming Performance


Enemy Territory:
Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on a radically enhanced version of id's Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some.  In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two.  ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many smaller textures.  The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory.  Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously.  The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

This benchmark chart, like a couple of the others in this article, clearly illustrate what NVIDIA is trying to do with the new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216.  As you can see, the first-gen GeForce GTX 260 just barely lost to the Radeon HD 4870 in ETQW.  The new Core 216 cards, however, finished ahead on the 4870.

 

Although the deltas were much different, the same thing plays out in the multi-GPU ETQW tests.  Here, once again, the first-gen GTX 260 SLI rig loses to the Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire rig, but the new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 SLI setup finished well ahead.


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