ET: Quake Wars - NVIDIA Performance

The Linux client for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was released yesterday, but can you expect this Linux-native game to run with your existing hardware? In addition to this first person shooter being very multi-core friendly, it does require more graphical horsepower than any current Linux game. While there is a "low quality" mode for ET: Quake Wars, quite frankly it looks like crap. On the opposite end of the scale, this game does support Soft Particles and other improvements to make this a stunningly beautiful experience. To help you determine what works on the NVIDIA side, we have taken three midrange GeForce graphics cards and tried them out with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

The graphics cards used was a GeForce 6600GT 128MB, 8500GT 256MB, and a Gigabyte-overclocked 8600GT 256MB. The other hardware included the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (X38 backed) motherboard, 2GB of DDR3-1333 memory, Western Digital SATA drive, Intel Pentium D 820 processor, and Mushkin 780W power supply. The NVIDIA Linux driver used on the three graphics cards was v100.14.19. As we were already benchmarking before learning of the NVIDIA 100.14.23 beta, we had stuck with the 100.14.19 release.

For the benchmarks, we had recorded demos on the Valley, Refinery, and Slipgate. These maps had met our criteria for benchmarking and were able to stress various areas of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Valley is also the map, which is used by the Quake Wars Linux Demo. With the full Linux client having come out less than 12 hours ago, we had just benchmarked each map with the standard High Quality settings at 1280 x 1024.