ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra, Liquid Cooled SLI
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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. |
ET: Quake Wars shows a clear progression moving from the HD 3850 up to the HD 4870, but a much thigns were murkier on NVIDIA's side. The "newer" 9800 GT came in behind the others, our overclocked 8800 GT nudged past the 8800 GTS 512, and the 9800 GTX+ and GTX 260 each came out on top, depending on what resolution settings we had tested at. The gains we attained while running two 9800 GTX+ cards in SLI were mostly negligible at 1280x1024, where me may be getting more CPU- than GPU-bound, but at 1600x1200 we picked up an additional 20fps. That's close to a 30% swing in our favor, and almost exactly the same frame rate that we had recorded at the lower resolution.
