High End Tests: Tourney
In this section, we will be taking a look at Ultra Quality performance, as well as various high resolutions and antialiasing settings. These are the only cards that can handle 1600x1200 or antialiasing. Though jaggies aren't a big problem (the artists designed the game very well with many low contrast edges), eliminating these minor annoyances is a luxury afforded to those with these latest generation power houses.To clarify an issue we've noticed across the board, Ultra Quality runs perfectly fine on current generation high end hardware. Yes, the game recommends >500 MB of nice fast graphics RAM, as do we if one's intention is to play through the single player game. But, it is very important to note that all the multiplayer maps we've played on in the past few hours have been small enough to avoid the massive swapping that occurs when moving between parts of the world on the single player map.
This really means two things to us. When 512MB cards come around, we won't need any heavier artillery on the GPU side to tackle rendering the game. It also means that Deathmatch players can easily benefit from the Ultra Quality setting immediately.
Not all tests are without problems, and this time we experienced some issues with our 6800 Ultra Extreme part. We noticed visual artifacts as we were running our AA tests. These kept getting worse as time went on, and not even letting the card cool down would help fix the problem. Eventually, our system rebooted while we were testing and wouldn't get through another benchmark run. John Carmack has spoken of possible issues when overclocking a graphics card with Doom 3, and this may or may not have an impact on factory overclocked parts. We will absolutely keep our ears open and our test beds working to try to determine if this is just an isolated random GPU death, or if there is some other evil at work.
Another intersting observation we've made is that if your 6800 Ultra Extreme can handle the game, Ultra Quality at 1600x1200 with 4xAA is a playable reality. But enough talk; feast on the numbers.
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edge929 - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
I think I'll wait about a YEAR for prices to come down to reasonable levels, then I'll get a 6800 Ultra and play it the way it's suppose to be played.VortigernRed - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Derek,There is def something wrong with your figures here.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2146...
You have a Geforce 6800 ontperforming a X800XTPE by about 70% on the top graph "high quality med res" also theX800 Pro scores are identical to the R9800 Pro. Maybe you have left a higher quality setting on with the X800s (AA or something)
Gibhunter: Geforce4 MX is nothing like a GF3 TI 200. GF4 MX offers a similar featureset as the GF2 and pretty much the GF256 before it, however it has a better memory controller and so offers performance similar to the higher end Geforce2s ie Pro and Ultra. GF3 offers PS and VS.
Reflex: JC always said that Doom3 targeted the Gefore256s featureset. However that does not mean the Geforce256s performance of course.
Koing - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Thanks for report Derek.I probaly own't be playing it for ages as I'm notmuch of a pc gamer but that is that.
Koing
Reflex - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
#36: Huh? GF3 was always the minimum spec for it...unclebud - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
"John Carmack has spoken of possible issues when overclocking a graphics card with Doom 3,"sounds like Mr C is trying to excuse his code bloat (to me).
what happened to "voodoo 3 2000 will be able to run doom 3 fine"?
araczynski - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
reminds me a lot of Deus Ex 2, cept more atmospheric and more responsive.araczynski - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
on my system 2.4@3.3/1GB/5900(128) the game plays very nicely with everything maxed (AA off) at 1024x768. the game is very good, especially in terms of atmosphere and graphics, the sound isn't as good as i think it could've been, but still very nice. also some issue with it not seeing 7.1 setups as surround, have to downgrade in windows to 5.1.worth teh wait i think, at least singleplayer is, don't really care about the multiplayer from this type of genre so won't try it.
gibhunter - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
#27, GF4MX is more like GF3 Ti 200. GF2MX was more on par with the original Geforce video card.I am interested to see if the Radeon 9200 loses any frames per second on a slower CPU. My guess is that it doesn't take a very powerful cpu to max it out hence it should hover right around 20fps on even a P4 2GHz.
maverick81 - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
I have a laptop with a AMD mobile 64 3200 and a ATI mobility 9600 with 64 mb. I have been using it for ganes until my x800 gets here. Only been playing doom 3 for about 4 hours. It seems to run fine, not as good as a desktop but playable.thebluesgnr - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Derek,do you have a FX5200 or 5500 with a 64-bit memory interface to test?
also, I'd like to see the Radeon 9550 results.
Thanks,