Test
Before starting the actual test, I would like to point out another performance variable with Quake 4 and OpenGL games in general. Back in late October/early November of 2005, stories were totally flooding the internet about some driver “hack” that ATI had that would improve their cards’ performance in games that utilize OpenGL. ATI cards have pretty much always been inferior to NVIDIA in OpenGL games, so the notion that this situation might be reversed was big news. It turns out that the “hack” was nothing more than the Catalyst version 5.11 drivers. The new drivers were supposedly able to deliver another 15%-20% performance increase in OpenGL games for the Radeon X1K series. Eventually, users discovered the update had a positive effect on X800 series parts as well. This claim is also too significant to ignore, so it will also be tested.

Setup

• Shuttle RS300+IX150 based motherboard<
• Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz with Hyper-Threading
• ATI X800XT All-In-Wonder
• 2x512MB Mushkin Enhanced PC3200 RAM
• Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit
• 80GB Western Digital Caviar Ultra ATA 133
• Video Drivers: Catalyst versions 5.10, 5.11

(All parts running at stock speeds for this test. Audio was not disabled.)
(Note: in order to enable SMP once the Quake 4 patch is installed, the console command “r_useSMP 1” must be entered.)

Every test was run with the following programs running in the background to mimic a real world gaming setting as closely as possible: mIRC, Xfire, AIM. Speedfan, ZoneAlarm firewall, and AVG virus scanner were also running for the tests.