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Official Doom 3 Benchmarks Released
Rogerpq3 writes "Before the game goes on sale, id Software has been kind enough to release some benchmarks for DOOM 3 with the latest video cards on the market from NVIDIA & ATI. HardOCP has published the five page article which should help anyone trying to decide if they should upgrade their video card for DOOM 3. There's also an introductory note from John Carmack, mentioning: 'The benchmarking was conducted on-site, and the hardware vendors did not have access to the demo before hand, so we are confident that there is no egregious cheating going on.', and the HardOCP writers comment: 'As of this afternoon we were playing DOOM 3 on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card and having a surprisingly good gaming experience.'"
Both the Nvidia 6800 and ATI X800 run on the same ARB2 rendering path. Older cards have their own paths.
Hey, the ATI 9800, which was benchmarked in the article, is only $147 if you're in So. Cal. and $179.99 anywhere else (BestBuy, even.) GeForceFX5950 isn't much more, if not less (online.)
Yes, the ATI high end and amazingly-high-performance nVidia6800 Ultra are $500ish, but the nVidia6800GT trounced the $500 ATI card and it's $100 less. That's three choices $400 and under, two under $200!
everything in moderation
I wouldn't be surprised that within a few months of Doom 3's release there will be a Version 1.1 of Doom 3 with internal code changes that will fully take advantage of the registers of ATI's R300 and newer graphics chipsets.
Funny, seems Carmack would:
Looking at the cream of the crop in video cards, it is painfully obvious that ATI is going to have to make some changes in their product line to stay competitive, at least with DOOM 3 gamers. There is no way for a $500 X800XT-PE to compete with a $400 6800GT when the GT is simply going to outperform the more expensive card by a good margin. I am sure ATI is trying their best to figure out their next move and it will certainly be interesting to see if their driver teams pull a rabbit out of their hat or not.
everything in moderation
Heres the list from that pcgamer clip.
NV10 path: geforce4 mx.
NV20 path: geforce3 and geforce4.
R200 path: ati 8500/9000.
ARB2 path: nvidia FX/ati r300+
I assume radeon 9800 is included for arb2 because they use the r350 and r360 cores.
The arb2 path and r200 path use 1 pass, the nv20 path uses 2 passes, and the nv10 path uses 5 passes.
Also arb2 is the only path using that vertex/fragment programs which adds slightly to a few effects. (a heat-shimmer effect was mentioned).
Subscribers can read (and not write to) the post, but have just as much knoweldge as anyone else about when it is going to go live.
This turns out not to be the case. The 6800GT uses one Molex, one slot, is not loud, and runs just fine with a 300W PSU or thereabouts. The 6800 Ultra, however, does indeed fit your description, although I have heard no particular complaints about noise.
"The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins."
"The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while Nvidia internally supports three different precisions with different performances"
So basically, Nvidia's cards can cut a few corners, with minimum, if any, visual impact, while ATi's cards can't, even with optimised code path.
Basically, Nvidia screws up when it comes down to standard ARB2 code path, but it does so well with their own path that developers have to code it, and Nvidia gives them a lot of support. It looks like a fair deal to me.
Oh yeah? Try playing Quake3 on a minimally configured machine and see what the gameplay is like. 320x200 with software rendering can be get good framerates, but you can't see a blooming thing!
Quake3 doesn't even support software rendering. You don't know what you're talking about, do you?
The reason Nvidia kicks ATI's ass in Doom3 is because Doom3 is HEAVY on the stencil buffer shadows. Nvidia's newer FX cards can render two-sided stencil buffer volumes in one pass, which is a huge speed win for stencil shadows. It also supports stencil shadow volume clipping, which speeds things up even further.
The long and short of it is, any game that uses a unified lighting model like Doom3's, using stencil-buffer based shadows, will run noticably faster on Nvidia hardware. There is no driver trickery or coder bias.
Something to keep in mind when you upgrading. ATI does a good job of keeping up with Nvidia on D3. Nvidia is obviously quicker, but ATI isn't bad. However, on he HL2 benchmarks that have been released, ATI has been smoking Nvidia.
? pg =2
Here is a review of some cards that are actually in my price range and from the sounds of it might be in yours.
http://tech-report.com/etc/2003q3/valve/index.x
Just something to keep in mind.
I'm sorry.. 'ATI does a good job of keeping up with Nvidia on D3'?
If you take a comparison of ATI's and nVidia's $400 cards, the X800Pro and 6800GT, nVidia is almost twice as fast as ATI. I'm not sure what your definition of 'Keeping up with' is, but half the performance for the same price really doesn't cut it for me. Actually, that sure sounds like 'smoking' to me.
Now.. if you compare ATI's golden sample overclocked $500 beast to nVidia's $400 card.. oh wait.. yeah, nVidia is still smoking it...
tsk tsk.. *shakes head at ATI fanboy, still defiant in the face of defeat*
Even the Ultra runs just fine on a more modest poewr-supply. NVIDIA recommended 400 watt PSU just to be on the safe side, but many reviewers ran the card with 350 watt PSU just fine. Later NVIDIA reduced the requirements on the Ultra. So it does not need 400 watt PSU. Not in theory, and not in practice.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Its, its, its. ITS. Fucking ITS. Not "it's"!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Umm I speak as someone who had just purchased two GeForce 6800 GTs (well I only got one, but my friend got one too, and I installed and played on both systems.) He has an AMD 64 FX-53 and I have a 3200+. The loudest part of my computer is the fan on my chip, second to that, my hard drive (my old 40 gig samsung, my new serial ata WD is pretty quiet, so is my older WD drive.) The video card takes up one slot, I only have a 450 watt PSU (was like $40, and I didn't buy it cause of the video card, I bought it because a while ago my 260 watt PSU died, and I figured why not get a 400 watt PSU in case I ever wanted to do water cooling and stuff like that.) My friend has a 500 watt PSU he bought, I figured he should get it just in case the card doesn't like his 300 watt PSU, it was only $50 (he could have gotten one for $30 that would supply more than enough power, but the 500 watt one looked really nice so we got it, and when you're buying a $400 video card a $200 motherboard and an $800 CPU a $50 PSU is so increadibly cheap.)
I don't really know what you're talking about, ATI is winning? They charge $100 more for a video card that performs worse in what will be the hottest new game this year, and they're winning? NVidia is going to have support for 2 video cards (2 insanely fast video cards) with PCI express, and ATI is winning? Maybe you were just upset with the NVidia FX series (I was upset too, it really killed me, I love NVidia mainly for their linux support and opengl performance, but the FX was just total CRAP, and when I saw the 6800 was gonna be a monster I was a little upset and even feared it was the end for NVidia but I was VERY surprised when I saw the final product, especially the benchmarks.) With the 6800, I see them as being back on top. You just sound like someone who has read one article a long time ago when NVidia first showed off the 6800, I think you should really check out the 6000 series, you'd be surprised at how well NVidia did this new series.
By view couldn't be any more different. ATi is losing the battle, and by a long way. Here's why.
Over the last 2 generations of cards, nvidia has made huge leaps in terms of features, particularly in terms of shaders. Pixel shaders can now be very long. They support conditional branching, so if statements and loops are possible without unrolling.
Now the geforce FX series, while great in terms of features, had well documented problems with 32-bit performance. However, these problems have been completely resolved in the 6 series. The 6 series of cards are superior to ATI's offerings in every sense, except possibly power consumption (and FYI, the GT doesn't require 2 slots).
OTOH, ATi has completely failed to innovate over the last 3 years. Every revision since the 9700 has been effectively just a speed increase. Their latest cards give basically nothing new in terms of features over the 9700 pro. In terms of capability, their latest cards are inferior to nvidia's FX cards.
As an owner of a 9700 and a hobbyist developer, I'm very familiar with the limitations. The shader length is highly restricted, conditional branching can't be done, so loops have to be unrolled. For this reason, even the latest ATI cards can't fully support the OpenGL Shading Language. What can be done on an FX or a Geforce 6 in one pass could take 10 or more passes on an X800. Many important features for shadow mapping are hopelessly missing, such as rendering to a depth texture, and hardware linear filtering.
So it looks to me like ATi are struggling to keep up in terms of performance, and they've put so much resources into just keeping the peformance acceptable that they've completely failed to innovate. And while gamers might not have noticed this before, they are starting to with Doom 3, and as developers push shader tech to its limits, they will really start to see the limitations of their cards. Hopefully they can fix the situation with their next generation of cards, but my next card will certainly be a nvidia.
The film is at 24 FPS, but the display is 48, although I'm reasonably sure that you can get that on old Hardware too. And here is a discussion of why movies can get away with 24/48, and games cannot.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed