ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review
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. |
Our custom Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark has the Radeon HD 5970 well ahead of any of the singe-GPU powered cards, but trailing the dual-5800 series CrossFire configurations. This test is more memory bandwidth bound than shader bound, and as such the Radeon HD 5970's additional stream processors don't help it to pull ahead of the similarly clocked Radeon HD 5850 cards running in CrossFire mode. Instead, the dual-Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire configuration finishes just a bit ahead of the 5970 and the Radeon HD 5870's take the top spot.
