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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 Quake 4 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:

The results above are a test run of our own custom timedemo which you can download from our download section.

Half-Life 2

Your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. Its up to you to set things right.

The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.

For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.

Above is the average framerate displayed versus it's resolution with no AA or AF settings enabled. Half-life 2 always has been in favor of Radeon cards bigtime but with the latest ForceWare drivers NVIDIA was able to close the gap. Normally we see massive CPU limitation. It's really easy to recognize. Once the scores go flat line for all graphics cards you are running into a limitation.

With CPU limitation the CPU can deliver geometric data fast enough to the graphics processor driver and therefore it can't render faster then it's capable of. Obviously with this new rig we have some more CPU and memory power to play around with. Therefore it's also memory bound.

And it shows ..