ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670

Name: ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670 - Page 8
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, November 15, 2007, 12:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with ET: Quake Wars

Details: www.enemyterritory.com

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 16x anisotropic filtering.

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.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, Radeon HD, ATI Radeon, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com