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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.
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).
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 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.
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.