Nexuiz 2.4 Offers Impressive Graphics

As Nexuiz 2.3 was released almost a year ago, we decided to fire up this updated version for a few hours to explore the latest work of AlienTrap Software. While many criticize open-source games as looking like something they'd play back in the 80's or early 90's, the developers behind Nexuiz have turned this around and produced great looking graphics for this game that is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Nexuiz 2.4 is certainly playable with a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT with an AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core and 2GB of RAM, but we were surprised to see how much it was able to strain the system once turning on the full graphic capabilities of this game. The frame-rate had remained stead between 20 to 30+ frames per second, but it had dropped as low as low as 12 FPS in some areas.

While this game cannot be compared by any means to id Software's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, we were much impressed by Nexuiz's graphics as well as the overall game-play for being a free software title. We are engraved so much by this game's graphics capabilities and it pushing the limits of modern-day hardware that we are looking to adopt Nexuiz as part of the Phoronix Test Suite. The developers behind this open-source game have done a truly amazing job. Specifically in Nexuiz 2.4 we appreciate the improved menu system, performance (including network and memory) improvements, and AI bot updates.

Nexuiz 2.4 can be downloaded from the AlienTrap website.