ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Performance Comparisons with ET: Quake Wars Details: www.enemyterritory.com
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 16x anisotropic filtering.
Enemy Territory:
Quake Wars
The new Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 perform well in our custom Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark, but once gain fall victim to more powerful NVIDIA hardware at all resolutions. Historically, NVIDIA's products have performed very well with id's game engines and that trend shows no signs of letting up.
The beta drivers ATI provided with the new Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 had issues with ET: Quake Wars when running in dual-card CrossFire configurations. Both cards lost a significant amount of performance running in CrossFire mode and obviously get hammered by the GeForces. We should note that we used the ET: Quake Wars compatible hotfix driver available on ATI's website with the Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire rig, and it didn't show the massive decreses in performance of the other Radeons, but it's performance didn't scale upwards either. There is still some driver work to be done here.
