NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX GPU Review

Doom 3 v1.3

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. 

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.

Our first set of results comes from the single card configurations only.  You can see that because of the 60 FPS lock on the Doom 3 engine that the performance differences between the three cards here are probably somewhat smaller than they would be otherwise.  The 7800 GTX is able to out perform the X850 XT PE and the 6800 Ultra without a problem, though the playability at 4xAA  with the 7800 GTX is an improvement.

Now, with using the 7800 cards in SLI mode, our Doom 3 test never dropped below the 44 FPS mark at 4xAA, a full 13 frames higher than a single 7800 GTX.  The 6800 Ultras in SLI are coming in just barely faster than a single 7800 GTX.