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Quake 3: Arena
id Software's last game engine has spawned several excellent games since the release of Quake 3: Arena a few years ago. It's getting a little old, but many still use it as a measure of a video card's OpenGL performance. 1024x768 is a piece of cake for most new video cards now, so let's take a look, starting at 1280x1024.
The GeForce 4 Ti4600 flexes it's high resolution superiority by over 30%, when compared to the competition. Still, the older Ti500 and Radeon 8500 do very well, and any framerates in excess of over 150 will do more than enough for most people. Then again, with this much power in the Ti4600, why not go for more?
At over 150 frames per second, at maximum resolution, this is an impressive showing indeed, besting the previous "framerate kings" by over 25%. The differences between the PNY Verto and Xtasy Ti4600 are less than 1%, and well within our margin of error.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Grey Matter licensed the Quake engine to revive a classic. Return to Castle Wolfenstein uses a heavily modified Quake engine (it's actually modified Team Arena code), and therefore demands a more robust system to maintain Quake 3 framerates.
We no longer see the 200 frames per second we were used to with Quake 3, but all our contenders do quite well for themselves. Although not totally maxing out the Ti4600, it does keep a little over 11% in terms of framerates over the competition.
It's all about high resolution when we're talking about with the Ti4600. Older cards just can't keep up with the improved speed, and memory enhancements of the GeForce 4.
At over 100 frames per second, it's obvious who is the current high resolution king. Keep in mind that these are "averages", but the higher the average, the more likely the peaks and valleys of actual gaming will remain consistent.
Jedi Knight 2
Unless you've been swearing off anything Star Wars, mostly because of Jar Jar Binks, any action gamer will probably have heard of Jedi Knight 2. Instead of developing their own engine, LucasArts contracted Raven, who in turn contacted id for the engine. The graphics have again been overhauled, and huge environments are the end result. This, of course, will strain your system more than Quake 3 did.
Quite a difference from before, but it seems like we've found a game that will make the Ti4600 sweat it out a little. Although over 20 frames per second separate the slowest from the fastest, actual game (i.e. playing it) performance is similar.
Unlike the Radeon and Ti500, the Ti4600 doesn't suffer the same performance hit as we move up in resolution. Looks like the the LMA II is kicking in.
We see an even bigger hit at maximum resolution, but the Ti4600 still maintains playble framerates. I'm not really sure why the Radeon 8500 dropped to below 20fps, but this was my result with both the 6025 and 6043 drivers. I'll have to retest with the newer drivers, but as far as I know, the 6043 were quite good.
In terms of performance between the PNY and Visiontek cards, there was almost no difference exceeding 1% in all our tests. I guess the old saying of "a GeForce 4 is a GeForce 4" applies here.
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