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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Beta Performance - PAGE 1
Kevin Spiess - Monday, August 27th, 2007 Like ShareThe original Quake came out back when a 90 MHz Pentium processor with 8 megabytes of RAM, running with a video card with 2 MB's of video memory, constituted a respectable gaming rig.
Needless to say, the Quake series has been around.
Fast forward to the present: it's the summer of 2007 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is in the second stage of an open-beta. In anticipation of this team-based, FPS game hitting the masses on October 2nd, we decided to take a in-depth look at the performance of this game. If you've been looking forward to getting this game for a while, this performance preview will help you decide whether or not your video card is going to cut the mustard.
For this guide, we'll be taking a close look at every single graphics option in the game. We benchmarked extensively to find what kind of performance hit that every 'high' setting brought, and what which settings are best left on 'low'. After taking a look at the graphics options, we ran 9 different video cards through the paces, in order to give you a better feel of what kind resolutions different cards are capable of running Quake Wars smoothly at.
Keep in mind we tested the current 2nd Open Beta version of the game. By the time this title is released, optimizations might change things somewhat. Nonetheless, if you are one of the thousands of beta testers for this game you will probably find the following information helpful; and, if you plan to get this game in the future, you might find our video card benchmarks telling as it whether or not you're going to want to upgrade or not.
I hope you like benchmarks! Because if not, your on the wrong web page. Let's start this off with look at all the graphic options available...
With openbeta2 you can record demo and benchmark it with 'timeNetDemo demofile' command.
With my 7900GTX I prefer to put aniso to 2, for my system it gives minimum impact but still looks nice enough.
There are also plenty of cvars you can tweak from console. The gfx menu is enough for most users but there might be some usefull things there...
For example:
See vehicles and other objects from as far away as possible.
r_visdistmult 1.2
Default is 1.0, 1.2 is the maximum (and enough) allowed by servers.
Other filosophy for making graphics settings, especially by online progamers is: Maximum Performance and the ability to see the enemy as good as possible.
This means reducing everything to minimum, shadows off, grass off etc...
I personally hate this. Ofcourse the server doesnt allow very extreme settings but still you are kinda forced to play very low settings to be able to compete with others that are using the very low cfg.
This message was edited by Nanite on Aug 28 2007.
The main reason I used FRAPS over the ingame benchmark was so that I could better get a grip on the visual differences between the settings. I must have done the FRAPS run somewhere around a 100 times or so... I would do the run, watch it, then after the run is over, I would go to a certain area of the map to take screen shots.
I'd could totally see you setting AF to 2. The bump, specular, and diffuse settings did not seem to really do all that much -- they had minor affect. The AF worked as it always does in other games. I thought the AF at 16 worked for me, but I definitely could see the value of setting it to 2.
Addressing your last point, apparently (from what I've read in forums) the visual quality of the game has actually gone down somewhat, in the latest releases. Many of said the old screen shots were of much higher quality, but apparently, they had to reduce this quality in order to get more machines to be able to properly sync for [more performance] for online play.
If you have a good system, one console setting I came across that improves the look of things, and you might want to give a whirl is :
r_megaDrawMethod "0"
and
image_useCompression "0" [for ppl with 512 MB+ cards]
Actually, here is a link to the thread I learnt these from -- one guy actually has a 79000GTX as well, so set options specifically for good image/performance for your card:
http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5400&highlight=texture+diffuse
How do you like the game in regards to fun-factor? I haven't had a chance to really play it more than a couple of hours.
I like the game, have been waiting this for years. Current beta server lags are a bit bad. Otherwise I feel confident this will be fun. The devteam seems very committed and listens players. You can see them every evening on irc also.
Lets see how the game is improved as the demo is coming in couple of weeks.
And the game has gone Gold!
I'm in the process of buying a new pc to get back into pc shooters. I got hooked on the next-gen consoles and haven't looked back for a while.
I don't have the time to build one right now being in school full time and working so I'm forced to buy at this point. ET : QW is the game I'm looking forward to this fall, console or pc. While we still don't know how all these setting will work until the game is released, it was a great read nonetheless and gives me a better glimpse of what I'll need when Quake Wars hits in October.
I'll definitely be doing more in the future, so keep checkin' back with us here at Neoseeker.
I'm really excited to work on one guide in particular -- it's probably about a month away, and I want to go into greater depth on it...I'd say which game it is, but I won't want any spies from other sites to find out, and beat me to the punch
My rough specs are:
8800GTS 640mb [the one used on the initial test]
4gb RAM
E6600 2.4ghz
I went into single player after entering these commands in console:
but for some reason, when the game had finished loading and I was running FRAPs the FPS cap seemed to stay on 30. I'm not sure whether the console commands were not working or not, but it came as a bit of a brick wall. Anyone know as to why this is? At that moment in time [and I tried twice], all the settings were on Max or checked. Maybe some commands have been changed since BETA testing [or removed, for that matter]. Would you be able to confirm this?
And I hope to read some more of these style articles kspiess, I found it very interesting and can't wait to check the difference caused.