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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:
A small side note first. There are some sites out there that are reporting the most weird issues with Quake 4 benchmarking. We have not seen any issues so far and thus continue to use this software to test graphics cards. The results above are a test run of our own custom timedemo with no image quality settings like AA and AF enabled. Furthermore, Quake is configured at the best possible settings, everything is maxed out and enabled. We can see only a few results as recently I received Quake 4 and made the timedemo. With time that passes we'll add more and more results in the upcoming reviews.
Anyway, this was a surprise but the Crossfire card performs beautifully up-to 1920x1200.
When we crank up difficulty for the graphics cores a notch by enabling 4xAA and 8 levels of anisotropic filtering we see the performance fall drastically in the higher resolutions, yet it is still playable up-to that 1920x1200 with an average of 72 FPS. That is do-able I'd say :)
Let's boost difficulty up yet another notch .. with 8x AA and 16xAF enabled most cards have to give up. Crossfire at 1920x1200 is still doing 60 FPS.
Mind you, I also enabled and included the results with 14x AA samples and 16x levels of Anisotropic filtering in there and the Crossfire rig was still doing 54 FPS in 1920x1200. This actually is the Super AA as ATi calls it. Each GPU will render the same frame with AA and each GPU will use different sample locations each.
