Conclusion

It really is hard to believe that Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is based on the same fundamental game engine as Doom 3 from three years ago. The engine clearly has come a long way in that time span. We also think Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will finally silence id’s critics who claim John Carmack and company can’t create a game engine that scales well outdoors.

The debut of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is living proof that id can do it, thanks in large part to id’s MegaTexture technology.

In terms of performance, it looks like you’re going to need a very powerful CPU if you plan on running this game with a high-end setup like GeForce 8800 SLI. We were obviously CPU-bound the majority of the time with the GeForce 8800 GTX SLI configuration, only at 2560x1600 were we finally beginning to push the GTX SLI config in this game. The GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI setup was also CPU-limited in a lot of cases.

The other major point you can draw from today’s performance numbers regards the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. In single-card configuration, it performs surprisingly similar to the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, even under 4xAA. In our opinion, this is a tribute to just how efficient id’s MegaTexture technology is, naturally you’d assume with half the memory the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB would suffer tremendously in a large outdoor game like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars but apparently that isn’t the case. id’s use of one massive texture (megatexture) does seem to make efficient use of the card’s limited amount of graphics memory. Only at the demanding resolution of 2560x1600 does the card really begin to suffer. Curiously though, the card doesn’t seem to scale as well as the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB with SLI -- after completing all the performance testing, we actually went back and re-ran all the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI results and got similar performance numbers.

Despite this, we’d still recommend if you can spend the extra $80-$100 you’d be better off with the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. The latest crop of games we’ve tested (World in Conflict and BioShock strictly when AA is enabled) definitely take advantage of the added memory found on the 640MB card. Odds are good that upcoming games like Crysis will likely behave similarly.

Obviously the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra are even better options if you can afford them.

As far as the performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, in our opinion, it’s way too early to draw any final conclusions about how this card will perform with the game. As we mentioned before, we saw artifacts when CrossFire was enabled, and ran into some stability issues at 2560x1600. Performance was also lackluster. Based on all this, it looks like AMD has more driver work ahead of them in this game.

If you think back to the launch of ATI’s R520 GPU, you’ll remember that ATI’s OpenGL performance was initially pretty underwhelming; in fact many were quick to judge it as the card’s achilles heel. But with subsequent driver releases, OpenGL performance in Quake 4 was eventually on par, if not better than the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB in some cases. The Radeon HD 2900 XT is certainly no slouch in Quake 4 today, so we’re pretty certain that the 2900 XT is being held back by its driver in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: add this title to the list of games that AMD’s driver team needs to spend more time optimizing for.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set to debut in less than a month, so that doesn’t leave them with a whole lot of time to get things running better. Hopefully for AMD’s sake, the other games we mentioned at the outset are also receiving driver optimizations as we speak…