Wolfenstein Graphics Performance In-Depth

Nice Review Julio covered everything i needed to know plus more good to see the old Q6600 and 9800GTX wont have to much trouble
Thanks for your time and effort

Great review, as always!
Would really like to see the same for GTAIV as it's a far more demanding game. Also, the CPU scaling on it is well worth a look.
Mirror's Edge would be nice as well, especially to compare PhysX vs. No PhysX.

Does the game not allow one to turn up the detail settings if you have an older system like mine? Or is the framerate hit just too high to make such settings useless? I'm asking because you guys haven't tested the HD 4850 or GTS 250 on Maximum Detail.

Thanks for the good review & gpu breakdown.
Sadly thou, I feel let down by the game & iD. I mean this is Wolfenstein, the grandaddy of all FPS games. This game should be held to a higher standard imo. From everything I've read and seen the single player looks very solid but nothing new. And the multiplayer, one of the more important aspects of the game to me at least sounds disturbing. From graphical downgrades, lag & choppiness too no vsays, removal of two classes and many more issues. I'm seriously getting the feeling of a very poorly implemented console port (MP). A step backwards from where the ET franchise has taken us. I mean if this game didn't carry the name of Wolfenstein would it be something more then a blip on the radar?
Maybe I'm making to much of it, and I'm sure in the coming months the MP will have some patches to iron out the issues. I just feel disappointed with where the game stands MP wise at release and not worth purchasing for now.

“Hmmm lets not support SLI, wait lets make it even worse. Let’s not support SLI and make the game run worse if someone has it.... “I would have expected better all around for a game with a title that has such historic meaning.

I did not quite get you Mr. Julio...

Heh, I believe it was for me
I know they're "old", but just saying that they're a lot more interesting to look at than this game from a performance stand point.
And since you put it that way, a similar in-depth performance review for Red Faction: Guerilla and Batman: Arkham Asylum would be great .

I think Julio's point is that by now those interested in playing those games will have worked out if their hardware can play it at a desirable level. I also do not think they would have made for more interesting test subjects. Wolfenstein is a newly released game that is surrounded by a lot of hype, regardless of whether it may or may not be a letdown.

Also to address the "Guest" concern with SLI not working in the game yet. This should not be at all surprising and in fact we should only be surprised that Crossfire does work. As we always say when reviewing dual-GPU graphics cards such as the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 295, the biggest problem with these products is that while they are extremely fast it often takes weeks of months before they will support a game correctly as they are 100% driver reliant.

was gtx 280 not tested?

We no longer use the GTX 280 for testing, there is little point. Performance wise the GTX 280 and GTX 285 are very much alike. Furthermore the performance difference between the GTX 285 and GTX 275 is small enough as it is.
This is the same reason why we no longer test with the original GTX 260 and only use the GeForce GTX 260 216SP.

Theres a small discrepancy as to whether the gtx 275 card you were using is 896mb or 1gb?

Seeing the article it seems that the 9800GT handles the game very well at medium settings at the tested resolutions.

With an X3 720, 9800GT, 2GB RAM in XP 32 Bit what kind of performance can I expect at high settings but at a res of 1280x1024?

Yeah there is no such thing as a 1GB GTX 275 so I have fixed the graphs thank you.

This is essentially flawed review!!
why?
Simply 'cos Wolfenstein Single player uses DirectX9
and
Wolfenstein MP uses OpenGL!

Benching this game with multiplayer timedemo will give you some sense of MP part of the game and OpenGL performance of the engine+drivers combo!

For Single player performance evaluation one must benchmark under single player part of the game, and obtain DX9 results!

As we explained in the review when testing various single player levels against various multiplayer timedemos we found that the performance was very similar though multiplayer did appear to be slightly more taxing. We decided to benchmark using the multiplayer component in what we believed was the most demanding scene. Therefore it stands to reason that a particular graphics card could deliver playable performance in our test it would be able to play all single and multiplayer levels using the tested quality settings.

Steve, with all due respect I'm having a hard time believing that ATI's driver is delivering same D3D i OGL performance!

Also FSAA under Singleplayer doesn't work, regardless how you tweak cfg... and the reason is that Single player part of the game uses Deferred Lightning tech.

Under Multiplayer, FSAA works 'cos of OGL engine.

Also as mentioned in the review the GeForce GTX 285 was used to measure the cross over performance. Whatever the case we have shown accurate performance that can be expected from the multiplayer portion of the game. Given that most people will spend far more time playing multiplayer Wolfenstein we feel that the article is still very useful.

article is useful, no doubt about it it's just misleading!

first of all title should be " The New Wolfenstein Multiplayer graphics performance In-depth"

And second you're showing exact "timedemo" fps scores that are repeatable... in other words quantifiable, and on the other side you're giving general impression or even better feeling of Single Player performance 'cos SP isn't "timedemo-able"!!

You absolutely have no quantifiable proof that Radeons would be inferior to GeForces under SP part of the game!

Yeah, saying that both cards deliver playable frames is one thing, but you're illustrating exact performances in the graphs, and those graphs are telling only MP performance...

saying that people will only play MP is just unprofessional excuse from a reviewer!