I remember the hype when ID announced the development of Return
To Castle of Wolfenstein. Everyone was running around like crazy
trying to find out as much as they could about this title. If
I recall correctly it was the E3 (2001) that spread the propaganda
of RTCW. ID's booth was nicely decorated. It sure gave creeps
:) Looked like they exposed an entire scene from the game! Pretty
awsome.
The game is based on an improved Quake III engine. Of course
the graphics are far better than Quake's. So is the gameplay :)
We've tested the retail version along with a patch (1.41). All
details were set to high/maximum. As to the game type we ran all
the benchmarks in a multiplayer mode as it always performs a bit
worse than single player. MP_Beach was used as our testing map.
It has both outside and inside environment.
As you can see, three resolution modes were benchmarked: 800x600,
1024x768 and 1280x1024. Despite the system specs, both cards performed
pretty well. No AA and No AF gave us pretty numbers: 90, 81, 72
respectively. Even enabling 2X Antialiasing and 2X Anisotropic
filtering, the game was very playable at both 1024x768 and 1280x1024
resolutions. Our Ti4200 did quite good with lower resolutions,
but then again not many of us hardcore gamers use it (it's good
if you want to run Aniso at application mode and bump up that
Antialiasing to 4X). Even applying 4X Aniso wasn't that bad at
all. It started to get jumpy at 1280x1024 though. Hell...if you
want to run 4X AA without any AF you will be golden.
The ultimate mode? Again, this is not the perfect card for games
at 1280x1024 with AA and AF enabled. Believe me you won't be happy
with the performance. There is not enough fillrate to satisfy
those resolutions and IQ settings. You will be a happy camper
with 1024x768, 2X Antialiasing and 4X Anisotropic filtering. BUT
if you want to remove some of the jaggies from the screen, 1280x1024
resolution will do the trick quite well.
