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.
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.
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.
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.
Bumping the resolution up to 1280 without the AA enabled all three cards are competitive again and run at playable speeds.
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.
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.
I don’t think any of these cards are really playable here with min FPS scores in the teens, sorry.