Introduction

After taking the high-end cards for a quick spin around the block in Quake 4 last weekend, today we’re here to evaluate the performance of today’s latest mainstream 3D offerings. Since Quake 4 is based on the DOOM 3 engine from id, a lot of the same concepts from DOOM 3 still apply to Quake 4. For instance, Raven uses the same settings for the game’s low, medium, high, and ultra quality modes. We used the game’s medium quality mode for the bulk of our testing, but we also dedicated a portion of our benchmarking to the game’s high quality mode as well.

If you recall, the medium quality mode uses compression for the game’s normal, specular, and diffuse maps. You’ll still get high-resolution, 512x512 textures in medium quality mode, which is something you won’t see if you go down to the game’s low quality mode.

The low quality setting also drops specular maps to 64x64 and was originally designed for 64MB cards, so it really wasn’t designed for today’s mainstream graphics offerings (the performance difference between the two modes isn’t very significant either). Fortunately if you are running older hardware and needed to run DOOM 3 in low quality to achieve decent frame rates last year, the visual difference between low and medium quality continues to be rather insignificant in Quake 4, as you’ll see in these screenshots:

Low quality mode

Medium quality mode

Low quality

Medium quality

Low quality

Medium quality

In fact, we, along with quite a few other hardware reviewers were pretty surprised by just how good the lower quality modes looked in comparison to the higher quality modes in DOOM 3 last year. DOOM 3’s ultra quality mode looked largely the same as high quality, while high quality looked pretty close to medium quality (remember that DOOM 3’s high quality mode removed normal map compression and set anisotropic filtering to 8x by default). We concluded Part 2 of our DOOM 3 performance roundup by saying “It’s really surprising to see how well DOOM 3 scales with older hardware.” We can’t help but feel the same way about Quake 4.

Sure, you will see a dramatic decline in performance as you scale down to less expensive hardware, but at least that decline isn’t accompanied by a large drop off in visual quality. The game largely looks the same, only with lower frame rates. The sharp visuals help to keep the gamer immersed in the game’s many dark environments.

But the next question we’ve decided to answer is how does the game look on the new X1000 cards with ATI’s latest hotfix driver?