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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.'"
How about some benchmarks for a card I actually have, like a ti4800? ;-) Saying "suprisingly good gaming experience" on a GF4MX means nothing... are you seeing a creepy title screen and playing a pong minigame, or actually seeing 30fps+?
Sorry, but dropping $500 on a video card is just not an option, this would be more useful if we had some everyday specs.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
BS.
There is no way Carmack would neglect almost half of the gamers out there. The fact is, Radeons have always had less than stellar performance with OpenGL. They are built for D3D.
If you're running the most recent CPU/GPU with a $hitload of RAM.. you're going to have a good gaming experience
WELL NO SHIT! What did you expect? The game to only run acceptably on hardware that doesn't exist yet? Geez..
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
Why no benchmarks of this? IMO much more useful than a benchmark of a P4 3.6GHz system with 4GB of RAM and a 6800 Ultra..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Are you implying that Carmack made the above statement? Because...he didn't. That's Kyle Bennet, the author of the HardOCP article speaking. Carmack only made the brief statement at the beginning (it's color coded to help you spot it), which states that "all of the modern cards play the game very well," and "there is no egregious cheating going on," and most importantly, "Nvidia drivers have been tuned for Doom's primary light/surface interaction fragment program."
I don't think Doom3 will be significantly changed to help out ATI, but I'm positive ATI will change their drivers to help out Doom3's performance. As Carmack pointed out, the Nvidia drivers have already been fine tuned for Doom. My guess is that ATI, after the fiasco with releasing the Doom alpha, hasn't had as much opportunity to optimize for Doom.
On the other hand, it's no surprise to see ATI losing to a card that obviously has more horsepower. Frankly, I'm impressed that a card that's so much cooler, smaller, and quieter does so well against Nvidia's monster. But in this case, at least, we see Nvidia's power fully utilized. Hopefully, ATI gets so more performance out of theirs, though.
-Dan
With the new cards in the GeForce series you have expensive requirements like massive power supplies extra slots, high-end cooling, and you need to not mind the dustbuster sound coming from your machine
Massive Power Supplies: 6800 GTs are happy in shuttles with 250W PSUs
Extra Slots: The 6800 and GT are single-slot
High-end Cooling: See whats cooling your CPU, then count the transistors on each. Besides, it's much better to have a good cooling solution with headroom for overclocking than something that barely makes the grade
Dustbuster Sound: I think you're confusing the 6800 series with a certain FX card. Besides, there is nothing stopping third-party manufacturers changing the fan, and many do.
supid things like bringing back SLI
SLI is a really good idea - it allows those who want to to have a very fast setup without increasing the price for those who are content with a fast setup.
Now NVidia is positioning itself in the difficult, obtrusive ultra-high end space where 3Dfx was when it died.
Not at all. nVidia has sold zillions of FX5200s to OEMs.