Radeon HD 2900XT Linux Game-Play

When using these settings with the Radeon HD 2900XT, the beta version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars had worked remarkably well. Playing through various areas of ET: Quake Wars there were no problems with either slow performance or graphical deficiencies. The experience was fluid with no lag during game-play and the graphics were stunning. As you can see from the screenshots, the colors looked great and playing it first-hand was amazing for being a Linux-native title. The main area to improve upon though is with anti-aliasing, but that should be enabled for the ATI R600 user series in the fglrx 8.42 or later driver releases. When AA and AF are supported, the gaming experience under Linux will be incredible with the Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB.

We are not permitted by id Software to publish any benchmarks for their Linux beta software or sharing too many details, but with this hardware and graphical settings the game had run very well. The ET: Quake Wars Linux client is still a ways out from being finished as it currently lacks MegaTextures optimizations and has other work left, so the performance of the retail version should run even faster than what we had experienced in this article.

The screenshots in this article are cropped to show specific areas of the screen and were taken from the original TGA file format. Clicking on the screenshots in this article will yield the JPEG version rendered through PHP's GD library with no compression. Once the retail version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for Linux is available we will present additional frame-rate and image quality results from various GPUs under Linux. We just wanted to let you know in this article that the graphics are stunning with ET: Quake Wars powered by the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT. The game is certainly playable even with the maximum settings, which would have only been a dream with the previous Linux driver architecture. Our only issue is with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and that is just because it is not yet enabled for the R600 graphics processors. It is only a matter of time before the AA/AF support is added back into the driver. We'll also be testing Unreal Tournament 3 once available.