Doom 3 – HQ and 0xAA

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. 

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 88

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 89

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.

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 90

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 91

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 92

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 93

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 94

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP - Finally! - Graphics Cards 95

Even from the first run at 1024×768 with no AA enabled, we see the NVIDIA 6600GT taking a good sized lead over the ATI 9800 Pro card.  At that low of a resolution, the line graphs show a better picture of what I mean than the min/max/avg graphs do.  At 1600×1200, the 6600GT stomps on the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, with an average framerate 63% lower than the NVIDIA card. 

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