DOOM 3 Benchmarks :
The GeForceFX 5900 Ultra, 5600 Ultra, Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB, 9600 Pro, and 9500 Pro step up to the plate to show you what they have in what will likely be the deal breaker when it comes to buying a new graphics card.
Finally, on to the reason you are here, and that is to see how ATI and NVIDIA stack up against each other at this point in the game.
Given our testing did not go as planned, we did not get to test at all resolutions we wanted to. Seeing as we had an upper end system platform to test with, it made sense to test the upper resolutions. Of course, we look forward to testing with a slower CPU on the mainstream video cards. Still, we had time to add our 5600 Ultra, 9500 Pro, and 9600 Pro, so we did. Starting with 1024x768...
I am sure what most of you will notice is the over 23% performance lead the GFFX 5900 Ultra is showing off at 0XAA/0XAF. This trend continues across our 2XAA/8XAF and 4XAA/8XAF sampling but growing somewhat until at 4XAA we see the 5900 lead by over 50%.
On the mainstream cards we are seeing a much tighter clustering, but the frames are still certainly favoring the GeForceFX 5600 Ultra.
What I found to be very comforting is the fact that even our sub-$200 video cards were able to produce frame rates that would be associated with great playability.
Moving up a notch to 1280x1024, we see scaling very reminiscent of what we witnessed above at 1024x768. Almost the exact scaling for the 5900 Ultra and 9800 Pro-256 are shown.
Our mainstream cards show a bit different curve, but the 9600 Pro is still bringing up the back of the pack.
Playable framerates are still attainable on the mainstream cards, although it is getting to be a bit of a squeaker. Our flagship video cards are still showing performance that I have to say we quite honestly did not expect at these resolutions. So how about we turn it up one more notch and see who really has the power and who does not.
We were thrilled to see these scores at 1600x1200. I truly did not think this sort of frame rate at such a high resolution would even be within any system's grasp. At this crushing resolution we see the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra stay ahead of the 9800 Pro from 25% to 70% in frame rate.
We did include the mainstream cards in the mix, more or less to show that our scaling continues on as we have seen in the previous two graphs.
Conclusions & Delusions
As hardware geeks go, this will be one of those experiences in my life that I will look back on and cherish. There are a million things I would like to tell you about what we have seen, but we are bound otherwise. We will say that all of our comments would be positive.
While we can't be specfic on content, we can share with you some things about the hardware aspects that we encountered. Throughout our entire testing, we did not encounter one visual anomoly. Our DOOM 3 "test2" benchmark ran flawless on all cards tested, including a GeForceFX 5200 series card. This is something that I can't say for some mature benchmarks we run. During our entire testing we did not experience one crash across the entire line of cards tested. This type of hardware and driver stabilty can do nothing but shine a good light on both ATI and NVIDIA. Interestingly enough, even the Catalyst 3.4 drivers produced no visual problems or crashes. They too were rock solid, albeit very slow.
Obviously, the performance above is surprising...in two ways. We were not expecting such high frame rates from our NVIDIA hardware. It looks as though we are not going to be where we were when Unreal first came out and if you broke 25FPS at 640x480 resolution, you were doing good. Of course, we have to keep in mind that we were not exactly using bargain hardware, but considering a 2.4C may be in your near future, our frame rates may not be out of your grasp at all.
The other thing that is surprising about our frame rates is the obvious gap between the 5900 Ultra and the 9800 Pro-256. You have to wonder if this is due to a simple driver issue at this point in the game. It is very possible that ATI simply did not have their public Catalyst 3.2 tweaked to deliver for DOOM 3. On the other hand, the folks at NVIDIA will tell you flat out, "The NV35 was built to play DOOM." From the looks of things, that is something that we can point to as fact.
DOOM 3 is likely to have more impact on the gaming and hardware industries overall than any other game to come in the next decade, as it is surely one of those quantum leaps in technology that are becoming so rare. NVIDIA is obviously aware of this and doing everything they can to be the DOOM 3 video card. It is far too early to count ATI out of the race, and I would not consider the comparison shown here to be final or anything close to it.
An interesting tidbit of information to throw into the mix here is the fact that there is another R3XX card from ATI waiting in the wings. We are told that this VPU will show a significant performance increase over any chipsets on the market including NV35 as well as R350. Expect to see this new ATI card somewhere between mid to late summer if it stays on schedule.
Bottom line is this; whoever has the fatest video card with image quality to match when DOOM 3 hits retail shelves "wins".
In closing, we would like to thank id and NVIDIA again for sharing this opportunity.
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