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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.
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.
Both the Nvidia 6800 and ATI X800 run on the same ARB2 rendering path. Older cards have their own paths.
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.
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.
Last I heard/saw, the 6800 still needed 2 molex connectors, and took up two expansion slots, sounded like a jet engine, and required a minimum 400 watt power supply. The ATI card uses much quieter cooling, requires one slot, and one power connector. For a machine that's on 24 hours a day in the same room I sleep in, noise is a big factor. If I needed the caliber performance of the latest/greatest card, and had an extra 400 to spend on a video card who's price will most likely be half that in 6-8 months, the extra $100 would be worth it, when factors other than an extra 3-5 fps come into play.
That's not to say I don't respect Nvidia, I swapped out a Radeon 9700 pro for a GF4 Ti4200 in this box, because the linux drivers from Nvidia gave me slightly better performance and much more stability in most of the OpenGL apps I'm running.
Which brings up another question- how will the native linux version of Doom III compare to it's windows counterpart?
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!
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
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).
This turns out not to be the case. The 6800GT uses one Molex, one slot, is not loud, and runs just fine with a 300W PSU or thereabouts. The 6800 Ultra, however, does indeed fit your description, although I have heard no particular complaints about noise.
The reason Nvidia kicks ATI's ass in Doom3 is because Doom3 is HEAVY on the stencil buffer shadows. Nvidia's newer FX cards can render two-sided stencil buffer volumes in one pass, which is a huge speed win for stencil shadows. It also supports stencil shadow volume clipping, which speeds things up even further.
The long and short of it is, any game that uses a unified lighting model like Doom3's, using stencil-buffer based shadows, will run noticably faster on Nvidia hardware. There is no driver trickery or coder bias.
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
Hey just realized while typing this that JC's initals are JC, it all makes sense...
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.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
1000 posts a day on slashdot that look like they were created by an epileptic monkey, and you go psychotic on this guy over the difference betwen "its" and "it's"...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
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.
Umm I speak as someone who had just purchased two GeForce 6800 GTs (well I only got one, but my friend got one too, and I installed and played on both systems.) He has an AMD 64 FX-53 and I have a 3200+. The loudest part of my computer is the fan on my chip, second to that, my hard drive (my old 40 gig samsung, my new serial ata WD is pretty quiet, so is my older WD drive.) The video card takes up one slot, I only have a 450 watt PSU (was like $40, and I didn't buy it cause of the video card, I bought it because a while ago my 260 watt PSU died, and I figured why not get a 400 watt PSU in case I ever wanted to do water cooling and stuff like that.) My friend has a 500 watt PSU he bought, I figured he should get it just in case the card doesn't like his 300 watt PSU, it was only $50 (he could have gotten one for $30 that would supply more than enough power, but the 500 watt one looked really nice so we got it, and when you're buying a $400 video card a $200 motherboard and an $800 CPU a $50 PSU is so increadibly cheap.)
I don't really know what you're talking about, ATI is winning? They charge $100 more for a video card that performs worse in what will be the hottest new game this year, and they're winning? NVidia is going to have support for 2 video cards (2 insanely fast video cards) with PCI express, and ATI is winning? Maybe you were just upset with the NVidia FX series (I was upset too, it really killed me, I love NVidia mainly for their linux support and opengl performance, but the FX was just total CRAP, and when I saw the 6800 was gonna be a monster I was a little upset and even feared it was the end for NVidia but I was VERY surprised when I saw the final product, especially the benchmarks.) With the 6800, I see them as being back on top. You just sound like someone who has read one article a long time ago when NVidia first showed off the 6800, I think you should really check out the 6000 series, you'd be surprised at how well NVidia did this new series.
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.
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