Test system

• BFG GeForce 9800 GX2 1024MB (x2)
• eVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI
• Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3200 Mhz / 1600 MHz FSB (=QX9770)
• Crucial 2GB DDR3 - 2000 MHz
• WD Raptor HDD
• Tagan 1100 Watt ESA PSU
• Windows Vista 32-bit
• Latest DX runtime
• Forceware 174.53

Gaming: Enemy Territory - QUAKE Wars

The latest offering from Id, Activision and Splash Damage, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set in the Quake universe. Here are a few basic facts: It will involve humans fighting aliens. As the invasion begins, players choose to battle as one of five unique classes in either the EDF (Earth Defense Force - humans) or the barbaric alien Strogg armies, each augmented with specialist weapons and combat hardware. The game features 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 splendor that is called 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. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays nice and works high end graphics cards robustly. We test the game with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with one exclusion, soft particles are disabled as the Radeon HD series does not support this feature; obviously we measure at 4X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

All right, we are starting off with Quake Wars - Enemy territory.

• In all benchmarks, the red line represents Quad SLI performance. What you'll see a lot is CPU overhead. Despite the 790i being optimized for optimal data transport to the GPUs/framebuffer, using four GPU's is going to create a more challenging task for the processor. Therefore very often you'll notice in the games that the lower resolutions will perform slower than a single 9800 GX2. It's a bit of a handicap, but it's the way it is.
• The yellow line represents the same 790i system with a quad core processor at 3200 MHz with a 1600 MHz FSB, yet now with "only" one 9800 GX2.
• The green line represents single card 9800 GX2 performance on our 680i baseline test system.

As you can see, expected slightly less performance in the CPU bound resolutions. Pretty much after 1920x1200 the performance gain will really kick in.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Soft Particles disabled (as it's not supported by the Radeon HD cards).