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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.
"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.
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.
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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