Dell XPS 730 H2C Performance Gaming System
ET Quake Wars
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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. |
Our Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark tells a much different story than the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 test. Here, we see that the dual Radeon HD 3870 X2 is no longer the best configuration. In fact, all of the systems equipped by Radeon graphics cards performed nearly identically. This is likely because Quake Wars is a Open GL game. This shows that Crossfire configurations still aren't scaling correctly for Open GL games in Vista. Our XPS system depends on Crossfire to function at its best in games and in this case, that advantage has been stripped. As a result the XPS posts a relatively mediocre score. Thankfully, a simple driver update could easily resolve this problem in the future but for now the XPS will have to settle for less than the best performance in ET: Quake Wars and other Open GL games as well. Luckily (in this case) most games aren't powered by Open GL, favoring Direct X instead.
