BFG's GTX 295 H2OC: Water-Cooled Graphics
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
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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. |
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We tested ET:QW at 1680x1050 with 4xFSAA and "High" shaders, and at 1900x1200 with shaders set to "Ultra High." In our first 1900x1200 resolution, AA was set to 8xQ for NVIDIA cards and 8x (Box Filter) for ATI, while the second test used 16xQ for both GTX 295's and an 8xAA "wide tent" filter for ATI. 16xQ and 8x wide tent should be a fair point of comparison, and the point is rendered somewhat moot by the difficulties I ran into when attempting to force non-standard AA modes in general with both cards. The H2OC's margin of victory increases slightly as we move to higher resolutions, but the two cards remain in close proximity throughout. The Radeon can't quite match the performance of the NV cards, but none of the solutions we tested have any trouble here.
