Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X

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.

The incremental Doom 3 performance improvements ATI has made to their Catalyst driver suite, seem to have really paid off.  NVIDIA's cards still perform markedly better than ATI's cards in this game, but the huge lead they had when Doom 3 was initially released has dwindled significantly. In our custom single-player test, the Radeon X850XT Platinum Editions, and the GeForce 6800s performed quite similarly at 1024x768, in both test configurations. Although the X800XL fell behind the pack. With the resolution turned up to 1600x1200, the GeForce cards were able to pull away from the Radeons a bit, besting the X850 XT Platinum Editions by margins ranging from approximately 13% - 15%.