Benchmarks: F.E.A.R, Enemy Territory Quake Wars
We tested using F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, a standalone expansion pack to the original PC game F.E.A.R. The expansion was developed by TimeGate Studios, the same development team behind the first expansion, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point. The game was built using the Lithtech: Jupiter EX game engine and was released on November 2007.
F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate is one of the oldest games that we are going to be testing with. That said, it is still quite a demanding game for mid-range budget graphics cards. As you can see, using the maximum in-game quality settings with 4xAA/8xAF enabled, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ averaged 77fps. The Radeon HD 4850 was just as impressive with 76fps, while the Radeon HD 4830 was slightly slower with 70fps.
Unlike previous tests, here the GeForce 9800 GT drops below at 59fps, making it only a fraction faster than the GeForce 9600 GT. After this pack, the performance drops off considerably and therefore reducing the resolution becomes necessary.
Even at 1440x900 the older cards struggle however. The GeForce 8600 GTS averaged a playable 46fps, while the 9500 GT wasn't nearly as good with just 37fps, which will provide moments of choppy performance. The Radeon HD 4650 still couldn't handle the game as well and it's clear that AA/AF will need to be disabled with these graphics cards.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Benchmarks
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a first person shooter game that follows up the action from Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. The game is set in the same science fiction universe as Quake II and Quake 4, with a minimal back-story serving as a prequel to Quake II. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was developed by Splash Damage using a modified version of id Software's Doom 3 engine with MegaTexture rendering technology. The game was released on September 2007.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is another first-person shooter that is starting to get a little long in the tooth, though it is an important addition to our benchmarking phase as it is the only OpenGL game included.
Here we see that the Radeon HD 4850 does very well averaging 85fps at 1920x1200. The Radeon HD 4830 is also very impressive with 77fps, making it 12% faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. The Radeon HD 4670 was able to fight off the GeForce 9800 GT, beating it by just a single frame per second as it averaged 53fps.
The GeForce 9600 GT was able to deliver playable performance at 1920x1200, averaging 50fps with 4xAA/8xAF enabled along with the maximum in-game quality settings. The Radeon HD 4650 fell over at this resolution with just 31fps, followed by the GeForce 8600 GTS with just 22fps. Dropping the resolution to 1440x900 allowed the GeForce 8600 GTS to average 39fps, while the GeForce 9500 GT managed just 30fps.