Quake 4

Quake 4 is a game that is pretty heavily CPU limited on the low end. We have shown this many times in other reviews. Because of this, we don’t expect the 8800GTX to offer any tangible performance increases at high performance / low quality settings. However, the CPU limitation of any and all games tends to decrease with an increase in resolution, so let’s see if the 8800GTX makes Quake 4 at low settings even more CPU limited than usual.


Here you can see that while scores for the lower resolutions are essentially the same, the drop off at the higher resolution of 1280x1024 was diminished with the 8800GTX. Whereas the 7900GT experienced a drop of over 16 FPS, the 8800GTX suffered only a 6.7 FPS loss. These are not particularly impressive results since the numbers involved are relatively small, so let’s crank the settings up to high quality and see what the 8800GTX can really do.


From these results the performance advantages of the 8800GTX become far more distinguished. Not only is the 8800GTX beating the 7900GT by as much as 63%, the game becomes far less GPU limited. Without going into too much detail, the extent at which a game is GPU limited is evident from the slope of the line created when connecting the frame rates at various resolutions. Graphics cards will strain more to pump out high quality textures and lighting effects at higher resolutions than they will at lower resolutions, and as such they will experience a performance hit. Since the FPS of the game at this point is pretty much entirely dependent on the video card, it is then GPU dependent. These are some really impressive scores for the 8800GTX in Quake 4.