Enemy Territory Quake Wars

Quake Wars jumps it's FPS in brackets of 30 during game play, increasing the maximum frames to the next limit (30, 60, 90) as it becomes possible; hence the apparent limiting in the graph above. Running an in-game timedemo removes this limitation hence the radically different numbers from the graph. In the graph, it's easy to see that the experience is smoother and more visually appealing on the R4850. Shadows and High Lighting, and even Shaders on Ultra setting become possible and the visual difference is quite drastic to look at. We are still running at the same resolution for both however the doubling of the MSAA to 4x and again twice the amount for Anisotropic Filtering (up to 8xf from the 8600GT's capable 4x) all helps to improve the visual experience. For the timedemo (average FPS above), the playable settings for the 8600GT were used for both cards, which shows just how much of a difference in performance there is between them.

Race Driver: GRID

Race Driver: GRID astonished me the most out of the 4 games tested here today. Obviously, I knew the numbers for each game would be much higher on the R4850 than on the 8600GT, but I was quite content with medium settings and realised that without a higher performing card that GRID would remain that way. What I wasn't expecting was to have a jump to near maximum settings for the game. I think I need a bigger monitor. The 8600GT allowed for Level1 Anti-Aliasing at Medium settings. Move over to the higher resolution play of the R4850, and we get 8xMSAA with Ultra/High settings. Right from the opening credits and menus you can see the difference with a much higher and smoother visual appeal, and that's before you even start to race.