Quote:
...Quake Wars...the terrain also was pretty low poly...
You really must have another copy of the game 
If I fly over the desert level of it then I can see small dunes in the sand. They are not only painted they are also modeled and I dont see any edges. It looks organic and soft. I even wondered how many polies they only spent just for so small details. And I am talking about an area outside of the battle field, just a bit decoration at the borders of the level.
Maybe some graphic options are only available when you have a shader3.0 card?
I did the same with the UT3 demo. The terrains at the border of the maps are very (extremely) blocky with very low res textures large scaled.
Models, Textures and Games from Dexsoft
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