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.'"

Might possibly upgrade...

the fact of the matter is that many of you will be just fine, although an upgrade may still be in your future

I'm not an expert on the Carmackian magic in Doom 3... but apparently the fact that the gaming engine works from the complex model downward and offers subsets to supported configurations is much more efficient in FPS terms than other engine architectures. However, as JC states, we should not all "live and die by the frame rate".

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.

Re:Of course...

Both the Nvidia 6800 and ATI X800 run on the same ARB2 rendering path. Older cards have their own paths.

Re:Of course...

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).

Re:Of course...

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.

Re:Of course...

This is from a pretty old .plan from John Carmack, but the second quote seems to still be valid today ... Basically, Nvidia screws up when it comes down to standard ARB2 code path, but it does so well with their own path that developers have to code it, and Nvidia gives them a lot of support. It looks like a fair deal to me.

However the NV30 path is gone. The Nvidia drivers now perform well enough that the standard ARB2 path performance is as good as the NV30 path performance.

Re:Of course...

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.

Re:Of course...

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.

Re:Of course...

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.