AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
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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. |
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the only OpenGL-based game in our test suite, proved to be somewhat of a showcase for the Radeon HD 5870. Here, AMD's latest and greatest outperforms every other card we tested, regardless of resolution, and regardless of whether or not the cards were powered by one or two GPUs. The performance deltas versus the singe-GPU based cards are huge, but the dual-GPU powered cards hang tough. The Radeon HD 5870 is triumphant nonetheless, though.
