Doom 3 v1.1

Doom 3 (OpenGL)


Without a doubt, the release of Doom 3 has been one of the most anticipated gaming releases 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. 

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 36

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 37

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.

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 38

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 39

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 40

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 41

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 42

ATI Radeon X800 XL 512 MB GPU Preview - Graphics Cards 43

The NVIDIA 6800GT is still the performance leader of these three cards, as is evident by the results above.  Notice that at least in Doom 3, running the game even in Ultra Quality mode, which uses uncompressed textures, we see very little performance difference between the 256 MB and the 512 MB X800 XL cards.  Is this 256/512 performance similarity an exception in this case, or the rule for all games?

« PreviousNext »