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.
All three cards doing very well in our first test (thank goodness!) though the ATI X800XT PE and the 6600GT do dip to below 50 FPS a few times.
Turing on the AA and AF we see the 6600GT card take a hit in overall performance. Looking at the two competing cards though shows similar performance.
The V9999 Ultra card shows the power of the 6800 core in Doom 3 by keeping the min FPS at 55 while the ATI X800XT PE drops down to 44 FPS. Both cards do manage to keep the average around 60 FPS.
At 1280, turning on the AA settings brings about a big change. The V9999 Ultra and the X800XT PE average FPS drops to about 53 fps though the Asus card is able to keep the minimum FPS at 27 versus the ATI’s 21.
In what many consider to be the best settings for overall gaming experience in Doom 3, both the NVIDIA and ATI cards do fairly well, though the NVIDIA has a higher average framerate and a much improved minimum framerate.
Turning on the 4xAA here puts both Asus’ card and ATI’s reference card on nearly equal footing, though the V9999 Ultra keeps a minor performance gain.
