Gaming: 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.
Once again we see the Intel 3.46EE processor take the crown on the Intel platform, but is stll left behind by AMD’s processors. The 3.46EE is actually out performed by the A64 3500+ at 640×480 and 1024×768 here until the graphics card bottlenecks our systems completely at 1600×1200.
Our results with AA enabled show a couple of points. First, yes the Intel 3.46EE processor is the fastest Intel processor for gaming but still is behind when directly compared to the AMD line up. The other point is that even the Intel 550 is comparable to AMD FX-55 processor at 1024×768, so for very high-end games, the graphics card is the most important feature if you have a reasonable system.
