NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580: A New Flagship Emerges
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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 |
Roughly, the same trend we witnessed in our 3DMark Vantage testing plays out in our custom ET:QW tests. Here, the GeForce GTX 580 is clearly the fastest GPU in the group, when tested at the "lower" 1920x1200 resolution. But with the resolution cranked up to 2560x1600, the dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 is able to retake the lead.
| 6870 | 6850 | 5870 | 5850 | 5970 | GTX 460 | GTX 470 | GTX 480 | GTX 580 | |
| % Increase | 37.9% | 56.3% | 34.6% | 49.3% | 15.4% | 59.7% | 58.2% | 28.2% | 21.7% |
Once again, however, due to superior performance scaling on the part of the GeForce GTX 580 SLI configuration, it is able to hold onto first place--regardless of resolution--in our multi-GPU ET:QW benchmark tests.
