Quake 4

Quake 4 takes the Doom 3 engine and advances it a little further. Doom 3's primary rendering principles still apply, though, with the unified lighting model playing a heavy role. Quake 4 does appear to have higher geometry levels than Doom 3, leaning on the geometry processing capabilities of a system a little more.

Quake 4 (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 130.5 128.7 129.5 124.5 110.8
7800 GTX 256MB 110.3 105.3 96.1 85.5 73.5
6800 Ultra 256MB 97.7 88.2 75.3 62.1 51.0
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB 18.3% 22.2% 34.8% 45.6% 50.7%
6800 Ultra 256MB 33.6% 45.9% 72.0% 100.5% 117.3%

With our Quake 4 test we see that the performance of the 512MB GTX is over 50% higher than the 256MB which, given that this exceeds any of the theoretical metrics, is likely due to the increase in local RAM and the quantity of data Quake 4 likes to store locally with the Ultra detail settings enabled - when the quantity of data exceeds the local framebuffer space then more will be pushed across to system RAM thus having to be addresses over the PCI Express interface, which is much lower performance then the local memory.

Quake 4, 4x AA + 8x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 130.2 129.3 122.9 105.0 85.9
7800 GTX 256MB 101.9 92.1 80.4 66.0 54.8
6800 Ultra 256MB 80.2 68.8 56.5 44.6 33.8
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB 27.8% 40.4% 52.9% 59.1% 56.8%
6800 Ultra 256MB 62.3% 87.9% 117.5% 135.4% 154.1%

With 4x FSAA and 8x AF enabled the performance gap opens up a little more as 4x FSAA has even greater frame-buffer requirements, which will result in more data being addressed from system RAM for the 256MB board. Here the GTX 512MB is approaching nearly three times the performance of the 6800 Ultra.

Quake 4, 8xS TrAA & 16x AF (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 512MB 106.1 104.1 91.6 69.3 45.9
7800 GTX 256MB 89.2 72.2 64.8 47.6 29.3
7800 GTX 512MB % Faster Than: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
7800 GTX 256MB 18.9% 44.2% 41.4% 45.6% 56.7%

With 8xS TrAA and 16x AF enabled the performance difference between the 7800's is again at around 57% at high resolution.