Introduction and Test Bed Setup

Let the Fragfest begin!

Quake 4 first arrived in stores around a month ago and has made a big impression amongst avid gamers. As you probably know by now, Quake 4’s graphics engine is based off of id software’s Doom 3 and is very intense. With the use of per-pixel lighting, anti-aliasing, and beautiful effects, this game boasts system requirements somewhat similar to F.E.A.R. With that said, let us see what our test bed consists of.

Test bed setup and explanation

The range of cards used in the guide is a little different than for our Battlefield 2 guide. We are using mostly mainstream cards in this lineup, while still using the budget cards. We are going to use both PCI-E and AGP cards on newer and older motherboards to test out how CPU dependant the game is. The motherboards and CPUs we will be using are the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ with the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (for the PCI-E cards) and the Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with the P4S8X (AGP Cards). Our memory configuration is 1GB of Corsair Dual Channel DDR memory for the Athlon board and 1GB of memory for the P4S8X board. Below you can see pictures of the cards and the systems.

The AMD Bechmarking machine in all its glory!

The PCI-e cards in no particular order.

The AGP cards on my Pentium machine.

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 3800+
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum Motherboard (for PCI-e cards)
Pentium 4 2800Mhz
ASUS P4S8X (for AGP cards)
1GB Corsair XMS TWINX DDR400 Dual Channel DDR Memory
1GB DDR SDRAM
80GB Western Digital SE Hard Drive
60GB Seagate 7200RPM Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Quake 4
Timedemo C

Video Cards used for Testing

ATI Cards, using Catalyst Version 5.11 (non-CCC)
Sapphire Radeon X850XT PE, PCI-e
Sapphire Radeon X700Pro 256MB, PCI-e
MSI Radeon RX600XT-TD128E, PCI-e
Tyan Tachyon G9500 Pro (unlocked), AGP

NVIDIA cards, using Forceware Version 81.85
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT, PCI-e
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, AGP