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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.'"
I guess an upgrade is in my future, although I'm not sure I'll get to the "cinematic" level that's possible in D3's rendering.
Sigs cause cancer.
It'll be interesting to see how ATI responds to this. They pulled ahead in the last generation, but it seems to be Nvidia has learned from their mistakes. Nice to see that uberhardware isn't needed to get decent framerates. Too bad for the hardware industry though...
Vandemar.org
"If I had to make a list of high end video cards to purchase to play DOOM 3, the GeForce 6800Ultra and GeForce 6800GT would easily take the number 1 and number 2 spots with the ATI Radeon X800XT-PE rounding out the number 3 place."
6800GT continues to look by by far the best price/performance card currently available.
Second, they did not run these benchmarks, and they were done at the iD offices: "Today we are sharing with you framerate data that was collected at the id Software offices in Mesquite, Texas. Both ATI and NVIDIA were present for the testing and brought their latest driver sets." It sounds as though Hardocp was not even present for the tests.
Their review of the BFG 6800GT OC convinced me to get that card. This article, however, does not convince me of...much of anything. I do have certain questions about their journalism, but it's best saved for a more appropriate time.
I agree. The article makes it seem like they tested a range of cards when they really only tested cards priced at 400 plus. For those of us who aren't doctors/lawyers/senators we need some benchmarks for our cards. I have a All-In-Wonder 9600Pro and I wanna know if it will work. I don't see myself spending 500 bucks to play this game. well.....unless I have to...um....hmmm.....maybe.
Well I didn't expect this. Not even released yet, Doom 3 runs at 1600x1200 on "high quality" at 68 fps on the Nvidia 6800 Ultra, or 42 fps with 4x antialiasing. In other words it can just barely make use of the best hardware at the time of its release. That's fairly conservative in my book.
Please, please, please let this be a joke. The thought of you being serious is just plain scary. Apple are shipping 2.5ghz water cooled G5s as standard and you're excited about an 800mhz G3? I owe my career to what I learned on my Amiga while at high school, but I moved on. OTOH, if this is a joke, then ha! You had me laughing.
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
Have any of you noticed that the comps they're using to run these benchmarks have a minimum of 2 GB RAM? I wonder how much that actually affects the performance, because the majority of we gamers have 1 GB (like myself) or 512 MB.
Also, seeing as how this is one of the most hotly anticipated games in recent memory, it's really painful to see ATi's cards lose out so severely to the Nvidia offerings. I mean, the $300 (MSRP) 6800 GT beats out the top of the line X800 XT ($500 MSRP).
What exactly is holding ATi back with writing better ATi drivers? They can write decent drivers for Direct3D, but what's with this years long problem with OpenGL? I'm not bleeding edge or incredibly demanding; I own a Radeon 9600 myself, but I'm always saddened by ATi's generally poor performance in OpenGL.
www.google.com
It's comforting to know that said vendors are so honest and reliable, that if you make it physically impossible (or at least extremely improbable), that they will not "egregiously cheat" on published benchmarks.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Sure, in theoretical terms they might be equal, except that what I want to do with my overpriced video card is play Doom 3. Nvidia actually is superior.
6800 and FX 5x range of Nvidia are using teh SAME CODE PATH (ARB2) as R300+ .. writing a specific R300+ codepath will improve nothing..
i togi-video-hl2-wxp-1280.html
The code paths are
NV10 -- geforce 2/4 MX
NV20 -- Geforce 3/4
R200 -- Radeon 8xxx/Early 9xxx like 9000
ARB2 --- NV30/R300 and up
ie Carmack isn't favoring a card..
http://www.ixbt-labs.com/articles2/digest3d/0604/
as you can see here, NV4x performs just as well as R420 with Halflife 2 Beta, and the final should see the same thing.. ATI Fanboys, Just accept things are even now, yes hte FX still sucks but meh its even at the top.. Nvidia Fanboys, yep you guys are in the lead, but don't go too nuts or you end up like the die hard ATI fanboys..
US in the middle (who switch between makers card based on performance and price) enjoy, we can make a choice and not be wrong..
"nVidia's back, I guess. This will sell a lot of 6800GT's. "
Well, I guess that depends on what you thing "a lot" means. At $661CDN for a 6800GT, I don't see too many being sold in the near future. The Radeon X800XT is even worse, at $800CDN. WTF!? This is narrowed down to the very hardcore of gamers, and they represent a very small percentage of the gaming population.
Many people likely will upgrade, but I just don't see this game selling $600+ cards to a large number of folks.
If a codepath were written for the X800 series of cards, I'm sure the scores would be closer to each other.
Even if that never happens, I won't even consider purchasing any of the current GeForce 6800 series. NVidia has fallen into the trap that killed 3Dfx of forgetting that their products are a small part of a multi-purpose computer.
You can pretty much throw a 9800 or X800 series card into any machine and get a really good gaming machine. 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. All those extras add to the cost of building a system with the card and the real market for video cards isn't $500 upgrade cards, it's OEM's. NVidia's high end cards suck because of the expense and inconvenience they add to the machine and their middle end cards just simply suck.
ATI is winning, by a lot more than benchmarks indicate. I think NVidia kept too many of the 3Dfx people, they are starting to stink of death. They need a new, more power efficient and transistor efficient design but instead they work on supid things like bringing back SLI. I've been a fan of NVidia since the days of the Riva 128 and the first TNT. Back then they were mopping up the mid-high range with simple cards that were much more OEM friendly than 3Dfx's although slightly slower. Now NVidia is positioning itself in the difficult, obtrusive ultra-high end space where 3Dfx was when it died. Let's hope they change course before it's too late.
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After reading these benchmarks I feel the need to mention something many gamers already know. The D3 engine renders using OpenGL, which ATI's cards have never been good at and NVIDIA is known to be good at. If you were to take a look at benchmarks from a Direct3D game you would be seeing the X800XT blowing away the 6800. If you don't believe me take a look at this.Another point you may want to notice is that ID software is partnered with NVIDIA (Expect to see the the little way it's meant to be played logo). Also from what I have read about Carmack, he seems to be biased towards NVIDIA anyway.
The only possible reason I can make out of my mind, is that with all the shinny/shader/sexy/lighting features turned off, the game could actually run much faster.
You can't show how great the new GF6800 is, if GF440 could run at same (or better) framerate
This reminds me that there are no screen shots to show how The Game looks on different video cards.
This is the exact mistake 3Dfx made. They weren't a video card, they were a "gaming platform". They wanted people to see them like they saw playstation. They went with a proprietary interface (GLide), didn't see the need to provide 2D capabilites (which sucked for OEM's) and even went so far as to supply an external power supply with their cards. They started fixing all that and just trying to make a good 3D video card eventually but they never made it.
NVidia apparently ended up dying because managment refused to put out a card that wasn't better than the competition even though they were running out of money and nobody was buying their old products. NVidia did a little of that with their last two series cards. They need to stop trying to win through marketing partnering and driver tweaks and go back to trying to win through superior chip design.
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To write ATI off so easily would be rather silly. Do you think that those silly Canucks are honestly sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and raking in the cash? ATI chose to extend their existing architecture simply because it was so good the first time around. Nvidia couldn't really do that with the FX series because they, well, sucked. ATI just won a bunch of OEM PCIexpress design wins, and they hold the XBOX and Nintendo console contracts. I think they know more about their business than you do.
This is why I'm not too optimistic about ATI. ATI and nVidia put 3 teams on designing the next generation. One does the high end, ones does the next high end, and one does the one afte that. RO so I'm lead to beleive. Witht he contracts to Nintendo and MS they now have to make 2 more teams, diluting the talent in their core design teams. So they might get smacked liek nVidia did when it made the chips for the xbox, their offering for that generations were piss poor.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."