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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
I've got the solution to your Doom 3 problems.
Even heard of chess by e-mail? My company has just opened a subscription-based service--Doom3ByEmail.com.
You allocate a frame subscription of your chosen duration with any major credit card, we send you a rendered frame from your own personalized Doom 3 game, you send us an XML file containing directional commands, and we send you the resulting frame...
Who said Doom 3 wouldn't run on your PDA?
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
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).
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.