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Quake 4

The Quake 4 story picks up where Quake 2 left off, with the Space Marines fighting the Strogg, but this time on the enemy's home planet of Stroggos. You'll take the role of Corporal Kane as the Marines attempt to basically annihilate their Borg-like enemies. You'll crash land in the middle of trench warfare, and it's off to the races as one superior officer after another sends you off to retrieve people, destroy key locations, and infiltrate deep behind enemy lines. Sometimes you'll be accompanied by game-controlled team members -- typically a technical officer who can repair your armor, and/or a corpsman who can heal you up to full health. Quake 4's built on id Software's impressive DOOM 3 engine. It was first thought that the engine was only good at showing dark, indoor areas, but this is the proof that id's engine is actually much more robust. And the amusing part here is that while Quake 4 gives us environments that are every bit as detailed as DOOM 3, it's also got much faster-paced action with both squadmates and half a dozen enemies going at it at once.

If your computer was able to play Doom 3 at a reasonable frame rate, you should be able to play it without major problems. This is a beautifully rendered game featuring a lot of bump mapping, specular lightning and 16x anisotropy option. It has a lot of small details like panels ripped out of the walls, huge machines in the background doing what huge machines usually do and even bullet decals on bodies. Raven paid a lot of attention to the small things which in the end makes all the difference. Another part that should concern a lot of potential gamers is it's The way it's meant to be played mark. Even if the logo doesn't appear, it's already obvious that it's going to have an edge over ATI graphic cards. With that being said, all modern cards can play Quake 4 quite well. We created our own time-demo and defined a configuration based on the best image quality settings possible. Let's have a look:

Quake is configured at the best possible settings, everything is maxed out and enabled yet we left AA and AF disabled as we did not want the graphics card to become a bottleneck. Now in all honesty, we used a 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX here .. it's really hard to stress that card .. trust me ;)

We scale in resolutions from 1024x768 towards 1600x1200 and surprisingly enough, memory makes a big difference. With a good timed 512 MB memory kit we achieve 98 frames per second in 10x7 .. yet Quake 4 REALLY likes more memory and we end up with 117 FPS. The fastest 1GB kit is from PDP memory with some really nice timing, yet it's a good 6 FPS slower over the 2 GB kit.

This however is just one of two games that really made a difference when we look at one versus two GB gaming. None-the-less .. really impressive huh ?

3DMark 03 Professional Edition
3DMark 05 Business Edition
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.

The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.

This benchmark is not based on any game. Please remember this, never buy a graphics card based solely on the 3DMark score. I'm not bashing the 3D Mark suite here, it's good software but definitely not the sole basis for you to make an informed decision on to buy a graphics card, especially after what happened in 2003.

Let's have a look at 3DMark 03 and 05 scores. First up 3DMark 05 .. Default is the standard 1024x768 reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default. Very respectable performance. 3DMark is designed in a way that excludes the CPU/memory in the score calculation and tries to focus purely on DX9 graphics card performance. The difference therefore is nil.

With 3Dmark03 we already noticed a little CPU limitation, therefore logic assumes that memory will have no effect also.