Gaming: Doom 3

Doom 3


Putting Doom 3 in our motherboard test suite was yet another attempt to see some difference between the AGP and PCIe motherboards, as this will soon become a bigger topic of discussion among gamers and enthusiasts.  I ran the default timedemo, ‘timedemo demo 1’, three times on each resolution and quality setting, and took the average of the second and third scores.  We ignored the first one as it was always much slower than the following ones as the game was caching textures off the hard drive.  The tests were done in Medium Quality (MQ), High Quality (HQ) and Ultra Quality (UQ) and in both 0xAA and 4xAA modes. 

VIA K8T890 - PCI Express Reaches AMD - Chipsets 54

VIA K8T890 - PCI Express Reaches AMD - Chipsets 55

VIA K8T890 - PCI Express Reaches AMD - Chipsets 56

At 640×480, we saw minor performance gains going to the K8T890 motherboard.  At first this doesn’t seem significant, as the average framerate differences are small.  Keeping in mind though that the reference board is slower than retail boards will be, the wins here in Doom 3 take on a bit more leverage than they normally would.  On these first 0xAA tests, the PCI Express system wins all the UQ results, and a few of the other ones as well. 

VIA K8T890 - PCI Express Reaches AMD - Chipsets 57

VIA K8T890 - PCI Express Reaches AMD - Chipsets 58

VIA K8T890 - PCI Express Reaches AMD - Chipsets 59

Turning on AA  doesn’t change a whole lot of what we see, but the same slight performance gain on the PCIe system is seen at the higher resolutions and at the higher quality settings.  As the quality setting increases, so does the texture sizes used in the Doom 3 engine, and thus bandwidth for the video card become more important.  

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