Shootouts

Q3 2006 Midrange GPU Shootout

By Vincent Chang - 4 Aug 2006

Results - Quake 4 (OpenGL SM2.0+ Benchmark)

Results - Quake 4 (OpenGL SM2.0+ Benchmark)

There would probably be quite a few ATI fanboys jumping on us for including Quake 4 in our benchmark list. Historically, ATI hasn't done that well compared to its rival for OpenGL games but to give the red team credit, they have improved the performance of their cards with tweaks in the Catalyst drivers. Especially with antialiasing enabled, the effect has been quite noticeable and we feel that it would be wrong to write ATI off here. Besides, the Quake franchise and game engine is still one of the marquee names in the industry and quite a number of games have been and will be utilizing the various engine versions. Meaning, it's difficult to avoid the Quake engine unless first person shooters are not your cup of tea.

And the results do show the impressive gains made by ATI for Quake 4. The Radeon X1800 GTO puts up a stern challenge to the GeForce 7600 GT and only just lost out when antialiasing was not enabled. So perhaps it wasn't that much of a surprise when the X1800 GTO overtook the GeForce 7600 GT at the higher resolutions with antialiasing enabled. The second ranked ATI card, the Radeon X1600 XT also showed competitive scores and fared quite well against the NVIDIA cards. It even lead the GeForce 7600 GS when anti-aliasing was enabled, dispelling any notion that ATI cards are not up to the challenge of OpenGL games like Quake 4. Also, despite the fact that we are looking at midrange cards, games too are taking advantage of the greater rendering power available to them so with the antialiasing enabled, 1024 x 768 is your best bet for reasonable performance. Fortunately, that too seems to be a resolution favored by many users still. However, if you are not very particular of gaming quality, you can opt to forgo antialiasing and bump up the resolution by a notch. Some prefer the latter method because it yields the same net effect and is actually less taxing on the graphics card.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.