Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3870 Showcase
Enemy Territory: 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. 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. |
Although the megatexturing techniques used in Quake Wars require a smaller amount of a card's memory buffers, we found that the 1GB laden Viper HD 3870 outperformed all other cards except the 8800 GTS 512. Even more surprising was the placement of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT, which found itself in an unfamiliar location: the basement in our house of cards. The Diamond Vipers' performance levels bookend themselves around Sapphire's entry, with the 1 GB mostly on one end, and the 512 MB version on the other.
