AMD 780G Chipset and Athlon X2 4850e Preview

Based on id’s Doom 3 engine, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demands enough from discrete card; never mind the integrated graphics cores we’re throwing at it today. We created our own timedemo benchmark using the Pacific map and turned the graphics options all of the way up. For the sake of mercy, we didn’t use any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering.

The bare 780G chipset is nearly able to deliver playable frame rates at 800x600. Tweaking the settings down does, in fact, help ratchet up performance to the point of fluid playback. With Hybrid Graphics enabled, there’s no question that 800x600 is playable. Even 1024x768 is reasonable. More important, though, is that playback looks the way it’s supposed to—lush and detailed. Swapping over to the G35, the performance situation looks dismal and the rendered output is completely out of whack. All of the textures go yellow, giving you the impression that you’re fighting in the desert rather than an island in the Pacific.