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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).
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.