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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.
Of course Nvidia's card is going to do better. Doom3 has a specialized codepath for nvidia hardware, while the ATI card does not.
If a codepath were written for the X800 series of cards, I'm sure the scores would be closer to each other.
I take the superiority of one card over the other with a grain of salt.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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.
I'm just glad I won't have to go out and upgrade my video card for this game. Seems like every time there's a new game out, I'm upgrading.
Oh, yeah, Linux is better than Windows... blah blah blah.
Any news on the possibility of an Amiga port? The new Amigas have some awesome hardware. G3 800mhz or higher than 1GHz G4 cpus, DDR and some kind of Radeon.
I think it's a quite obviously untapped market there for games authors, an entire community that grew up on THE games machine clamoring for more.
That's the most important question... would my p3-450 with a voodoo2 break 1 fps or not?
Speed Demos Archive - Lots of speed runs!
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
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.
...I won't need to sell some organs on the black market, after all?
they have only 3 cards listed in the test and none of htem are widely in use
Keep R'ing TFA -- they test (1) nVidia Geforce6800 Ultra (1st place with a bullet), (2) nVidia Geforce6800GT (strong second), (3) ATI X800XT-PE (3rd and more costly than (2)), (4) and (5) nVidia GeForceFX5950 and ATI9800XT (pretty much a tie -- ATI is a tad faster with AF [anisotopic filtering] but no AA [anti-aliasing], add in the AA and nVidia edges ahead.)
That's five, and at least two of them are what I'd call "widely in use." YMMV.
everything in moderation
For those of use who are still stuck on Intel 386 hardware with a VGA card, can somebody please convert those benchmarks into something understandable? Also, if I did upgrade to more recent hardware, how many extra monsters could I have in DOOM1 for the same frame rate? Ach, mein Leben!
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
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
They were surprised it even ran on a GeForce4 MX 440. That in itself is a good gaming experience. ;)
"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.
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
Its, its, its. ITS. Fucking ITS. Not "it's"!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Hey just realized while typing this that JC's initals are JC, it all makes sense...
Just a couple of quick notes. First off, you must bear in mind that all of the cards they tested are DX9 capable, this is going to help out framerates quite a bit. In fact, when you look at benchmarks for the newer games, framerates drop off quite a bit when you start looking at cards like the GeForce 4.
:-D
More importantly, the boxes they did the benchmarking on were maxed out with specs like 2GB of DDR400 and an Athlon 64 or comparable processor. Unless you've got all the other specs to match the test box, you're looking at the best possible framerates you can get under the very best possible conditions on those systems. In addition to that, they had anti-aliasing turned off for several of those benchmarks.
Now compare those 60-70fps on that kind of box with whatever setup you've got...then swap out the video card for a GeForce 4Ti 4X00 and you're looking at maybe25-30fps with medium effects at 1024x768. That's almost unplayable.
Granted, I'm doing a good bit of guessing here, but this comes from a number of years of experience playing the latest games on older hardware. The basic sys-req's for the game are a GF3 or better - we can interpret that to mean it'll give you about 25fps at 800x600 with all the eye candy turned off if you're sporting a top-of-the-line GeForce 3. I doubt you're going to see good performance out of Doom 3 without anything better than a GeForce FX 5600.
Luckily, we'll all find out in a little less than two weeks
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
You are in a twisty little maze of passages all alike. There is a pink demon here.
Use rocket launcher
You died. Play again?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.
Did you set everything to maximum or did you lower it? I found that terrain could be on high or normal and everything else needed to be normal except characters. Characters needed to be on low.
-]Phreak Out[-
Awwww, the wide-eyed innocents are posting! Look at this one-- he actually believes that one of the graphics card manufacturers is NOT cheating! It's tough life-lesson time, kiddo-- they BOTH have a history of cheating. Also, there is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny was paid $5M by ATI to optimize his egg-rendering scheme for their hardware.
Nvidia Cheating
ATI Cheating