Doom 3

Doom 3 (OpenGL)


Without a doubt, the release of Doom 3 has been the most anticipated gaming release on the PC market, ever.  And it’s easy to see why; 4 years of heavy press-covered development and a promise to change the way computer games look.  John Carmack and the id Software team are never one to disappoint. 

For our purposes, Doom 3 is the current software title that best represents the “next-generation” of gaming and thus is a crucial benchmark for graphics cards.  For our testing, we set the Image Quality to High and turned on all the options that you see in the screen shots below. 

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 111

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 112

For our image quality settings during testing, we set both ATI and NVIDIA drivers to “Application Controlled” Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering, leaving the Doom 3 engine the task of setting the options.  Since we left the game on High Quality mode, 8x AF was always enabled, and we ran tests with both Antialiasing set at Off and at 4x.

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 113

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 114

On our easiest test, all three cards perform perfectly with only a couple of quick drops below the 60 FPS limit in the Doom 3 engine. 

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 115

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 116

Turning 4xAA on already puts some stress to these graphics cards.  Both the 6800NU and the Apogee AA6800 perform better than the more expensive X800 Pro card, and would still be considered a playable image quality setting for Doom 3.  The ATI X800 Pro should still be acceptable as well. 

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 117

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 118

Bumping the resolution up to 1280 without the AA enabled all three cards are competitive again and run at playable speeds. 

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 119

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 120

While all three cards being tested show sizeable drops here, the NVIDIA cards have a pretty good advantage over the ATI X800 Pro.  While the playability of either of these configurations is debatable, look at the AA6800 over the stocket 6800NU shows only slight gains in performance.

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 121

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 122

With the NVIDIA cards, this 1600×1200 resolution is playable without the AA enabled, and does quite well.  The AA6800 with its 10% overclock does help performance by giving you a better minimum framerate that should help during busy fighting.

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 123

Chaintech Apogee AA6800 GeForce 6800 OC - Graphics Cards 124

I don’t think any of these cards are really playable here with min FPS scores in the teens, sorry.

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