XFX 8800 GT 256MB XXX Alpha Dog Edition
Test Results with ET: Quake Wars
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 Enemy Territory: Quake Wars |
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is based on id's radically enhanced 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 extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small 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 8x anisotropic filtering. |
As you can see, the more interesting results here are once again at the 1600x1200 resolution. What is odd is that the 8800 GT 256MB XXX Alpha Dog Edition puts up a really great score (compared to its competitors) with no anti-aliasing (AA) and no anisotropic filtering (AF), but once 4x AA and 8x AF are enabled, the 8800 GT 256MB XXX Alpha Dog Edition takes a huge hit. Neither the 8800 GT 512MB nor the Radeon HD 3850 take as significant of a hit (not even close really). We ran the test a few extra times just to make sure we were getting the correct results. We're not sure what caused the 8800 GT 256MB XXX Alpha Dog Edition's performance to drop so much at the higher resolution one AA was enabled, but we suspect its smaller frame buffer we being taxed.
