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"Doom 3 benchmarks"

I found it interesting reading.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDc0

I found it interesting reading.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDc0

This is very early Doom 3 code. There has been a much more recent showing and both the Radeon and FX are evenly matched. But look at Halflife 2 and its problems in running on the FX, maybe Doom 3 will have this problem too depending on how its program and whether its optimized for nVidia.

It quite clearly IS optimised for nVidia.

Besides, given the development teams pledge to have Doom 3 work on PIII systems, I fully expect that the game will work on pretty much anything, albeit with different grpahical quality.

lnsane Bartender wrote:
> It quite clearly IS optimised for nVidia.

Well yes and no. Both Doom 3 and Halflife have needed to be optimized to run on the nVidia FX series because it cant run the normal path like the Radeon or Geforce 4/3/2/1 can. The test there is still early code and I did see other benchmarks for Doom 3 that had closer results. Just look and read the link below to see what sort of things are happening with Halflife 2, it also mentions Doom 3.

http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php

I'm aware of the issues Half Life faces, but since I'm not going to go anywhere near it, I'm really not that interested. What I am interested in is the fact that the Doom development team have pledged to produce a highly compatible game able to run on most modern machines. Personally, I think it require far too much investment to expect "optimum performance" from either game anyway.

I'm stuck with a SParkle GeForce FX 5200 which, according to all sources, will run Doom 3. Beyond that, I don't care.

So, the question is, is it optimised for nVidia? Clearly, is the only plausible answer.

lnsane Bartender wrote:
> So, the question is, is it optimised for nVidia? Clearly, is the only
> plausible answer.

It is John Cormack has said it is. Why? Because the new nVidia cards cant run the game in the same way that the Radeons can. The game has been designed to run in a special mode just for the FX cards. The link in here is still refering to old versions of Doom with old drivers for the Radeon card. I have seen recent tests that show Doom 3 being pretty much the same on the FX and Radeon cards. The FX has to use its optimized settings in game where as the Radeon uses the standard settings. Halflife 2 is the same, FX has to run a mixed mode that Value have customised to improve performance yet the Radeon uses Direct X 9 and still out performs the FX5900 Ultra.

Halflife 2 and Doom 3 have had to have alot of work specifically done to make them run on the FX series. Both these games are probably 2 of the biggest PC releases for 2003/2004, with alot of money invested. What about companies that can't spend the money optimizing the game to actually be playable on the new FX cards. I think that the FX cards can run Direct X 8 ok but games that use Direct X 9 need to be optimized.

So in answer to your question yes Doom 3 has been optimized for the FX cards, so that they can actually play the game at a decent rate and not feel like there in a picture slide show.

I think people are overlooking one huge point - in these sort of things optomised drivers will always ultimately help. Benchmarking now on standard drivers is only of minor use as the titles are so huge that everyone and thier dog (both official and otherwise) will be cracking into work on a set of updated drivers as soon as they see the final code. If the game is optomised for nVida then that's simply doing it the other way round, give ATi a couple of weeks to get sufficient access to the game and I wholeheartedly expect their series of cards to be head and shoulders infront of their poor nVida cousins.