Sapphire Radeon X800 XT - PCI Express

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, November 17, 2004, 10:00 PM EDT

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Doom 3 v1.1 - Single Player

Benchmarks &Comparisons With Doom 3 - Single Player

The Wait Is Over!.

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics. Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 were all instrumental in the success of 3D accelerators on the PC. Now, years later, with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with a 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the release of the visually stunning Doom 3. Doom 3 is an OpenGL game using extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows. We ran custom demo benchmarks with Doom 3 set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200 without AA enabled and then with 4X AA and 8X Aniso enabled.

From the moment Doom 3 was released, ATi has been tweaking their drivers and optimizing to get their performance up to a level more competitive with NVIDIA's. They have made up quite a lot of ground (and have made up a little more with the Catalyst 4.11 drivers that were released while working on this review), but ATi still has some work to do. When testing with our custom single player demo, the GeForce 6800 GT jumped way out in front of the Radeon X800 XTs in every configuration. But the margins of victory ranged from about 10% to about 19%, which are much smaller than the 50% margins we saw when Doom 3 was first introduced.