In a desperate war for Earth's survival, against an unrelenting alien enemy, the only way to defeat them is to become one of them. Armed with advanced weaponry and vehicles and aided by an elite squad of marines, you take the battle to the heart of the Strogg home planet and become Earth's only hope for victory.

Quake 4 is a First Person Shooter developed by Ravensoft, based on the Doom 3 engine, and the graphics and gameplay certainly reflect that fact. For those who really hated the one-way corridors of Doom 3, new outdoor areas have been added to the game. The feeling however, still remains the same as these areas are quite small-scale, contrary to what other games have to offer.

- Benchmark Settings

As Quake 4 includes no default benchmark, we decided to go with another publicly available demo to measure performance. What we chose is a demo from HWSpirit, which involves a small outdoor scene followed by a long indoor combat. As preloading the stage once again failed miserably and the average framerate varied a lot, the second time we ran the demo, we ran it twice every time we restarted the game and measured only the second run.

The resolutions we used are 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. We measured performance with and without Anti-aliasing.

You can see most cards performed fairly well, offering an average framerate above 35 under all resolutions. The one that stands out is the X600XT which represents the older generation mid-range cards.

Now enabling anti-aliasing begins the nightmare for the N6600GT cards. Even SLI doesn't help in this case. In fact, SLI brought out worse performance than running the game with one card. Maybe a driver update is needed from NVidia to set things straight. None of the 7800GT based cards faced any difficulty, rendering the benchmark and all managed to deliver a steady framerate above 50.