AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut


ET: Quake Wars Performance

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

The Radeon HD 6800 series cards performed very well in our custom ET:QW benchmark. The Radeon HD 6870 was able to outrun the GeForce GTX 470 and almost caught the Radeon HD 5870, while the 6850 pulled ahead of the stock GTX 460. Although, the Radeon HD 6850 couldn't quite catch the Radeon HD 5850 or overclocked GTX 460 here.
 



 

6870

6850

5870

5850

GTX 470

GTX 460

% Increase

 37.9%

56.3%

34.5% 

49.3% 

58.1% 

59.6% 

This game is getting a bit long in the tooth and was somewhat CPU-bound once we introduced a second GPU into the equation. None of the dual-GPU configurations scaled quite as well in this game due to the CPU limitation. And the same performance trend that we saw in the single card tests played out again here.


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