HIS and Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Face Off
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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. |
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars really tells us two stories here: at lower resolutions the HD 4850s weren't much competition for the majority of similarly priced GeForce cards, with the sole exception being the default clocked 9800 GT from Gigabyte. Compared to the rest of the GeForce cards, we saw a difference of about 10-15 frames per second. However, once we cranked up the resolution to 1600x1200, the dropoff in performance was quite minimal with the HD 4850s, dropping four fps at the most. This moved HIS' and Sapphire's cards right past all other cards except for the HD 4870.
