Quake 4

Version and / or Patch Used: Default install

Timedemo or Level Used: necro666.demo (download here)

Developer Homepage: http://www.idsoftware.com

Product Homepage: http://www.quake4game.com

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Quake 4 is one of the latest new games to be added to our benchmark suite. It is based off the popular Doom 3 engine and as a result uses many of the features seen in Doom. However, Quake 4 graphics are more intensive than Doom 3 and should put more strain on different parts of the system.

Quake 4 is a bit more on the modern side of things, so should give us an idea as to how well the x1900XT can handle the newer methods of rendering graphics. It doesn't take long to see a decent improvement, either. This game shows an increase of 17% at 1024x768 and an increase of 16% at 1280x1024. This goes a long way in letting us see how well the new kid on the block is going to handle more modern titles.

As an aside, I began playing a little with this benchmark. Since the X1900XT comes with an impressive 512MB of memory, I decided to use the "Ultra" setting within the game. This setting, just like the same setting in Doom 3, is designed for graphics card that have 512MB or more of onboard memory. At the 1024x768 resolution, the frame rate only dropped from 131.9 FPS to 128.4 FPS. This reflects only a 3% drop in frames when using the massive texture files within the game.

I also wanted to see how the AA/AF worked with a game using the Doom engine, so ran my normal 4xAA and 8xAF settings at the 1280x1024 resolution. The resulting score showed a drop in score from 126.7 to 110.1, or a 15% decrease. Even with this drop, the resulting 110 FPS is more than playable and also gives you a much smoother image.