Windows Benchmarks, Continued

Quake 4

Quake 4 features a slightly newer and more advanced engine than Unreal Tournament 2004. Even after Quake 4 was released, two more games were released using the same, yet upgraded, engine: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Prey. The initial release of Quake 4 saw a FPS limit locked at 60FPS, but subsequent tweaks and patches have successfully removed this cap. The benchmark was run using the HardwareOC Quake 4 Benchmark utility. Graphics were set to the max, and symmetric multiprocessing was enabled to take advtanged of all four cores of the Phenom.

Both cards, on average, were far past the 60FPS Quake 4 was originally limited at. The 8800GTX pulls a little farther ahead in this game, but that could be based completely on the game's rendering engine.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 has some of the most impressive graphics that can be found in games made before Crysis and games featuring the Unreal 3 engine. In addition to fantastic graphics, Half-Life 2 also features great physics, making using of the CPU as well as the GPU.

Half-Life 2 was designed for ATI cards, so it's no wonder that the HD3870 Toxic far outscores the 8800GTX in this benchmark. Before looking at performance in Linux, I want to look at one recently-released game — Unreal Tournament 3 — as well as Futuremark's latest gaming benchmark, 3dMark Vantage.