8 - Game Performance: Frontlines & ET: Quake Wars

Frontlines: Fuel of War

This is a game that's got a couple of big ambitions. The first is to provide a large-scale multiplayer experience along the lines of Battlefield: Modern Combat. That means in addition to running around on foot, you can jump in and control a variety of vehicles on the battlefield. However, it also wants to add what Battlefield sorely lacks, which is a compelling single-player experience. Perhaps the most impressive level is a completely war-torn cityscape that has gutted skyscrapers everywhere. Even more startling is that you can actually get into some of these towering husks, which gives you an incredibly high perch. While that might seem a bit unfair, keep in mind that there are many ways for other players to get at you, such as the remote-controlled air drones that can fly up and shred you with guns or rockets.

Frontlines: Fuel of War is a new title we just added, over time more and more results will be added obviously.

That actually quite amazing performance, in-game everything is maxed out. The BFG GeForce 9800 GTX setup in SLI definitely brings in a nice boost in performance. At 2560x1600 we see 32 FPS with one card and 59 FPS once we have two cards setup in SLI.

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.

Pretty new in our benchmark suite is Quake Wars - Enemy territory; a while ago I was checking the NPD (USA sales for games) charts and figured we really need to include performance results of this game.

Quake had a bit more of a problem scaling in SLI, though at 2560x1600 we still notice a good improvement.

Image Quality setting:

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