3D Performance with DOOM 3: Part 2 High-End Cards (Cont'd)

Introduction

One of the beauties of John Carmack’s DOOM 3 engine is its scalability. With a little bit of work, DOOM 3 can be optimized to run with good framerates on older hardware with little perceptible loss in image quality. This is great news for those of you with RADEON 9700’s or GeForce FX 5900’s, which is the generation of cards we’ll be focusing on with today’s DOOM 3 performance article. These high-end cards of yesterday introduced the world to DX9 graphics, and thanks to their 256-bit memory interface, powerful graphics core and high-speed memory, opened up screen resolutions and image quality levels that were unheard of with previous graphics cards.

From the ATI camp, we’ve rounded up the RADEON 9700, RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB and 256MB, and RADEON 9800 XT. On the NVIDIA side, we’ve included the GeForce FX 5900 XT, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. We also threw in Leadtek’s WinFast A400 TDH GeForce 6800 card to show you the performance improvement this $300 upgrade brings. For those of you with RADEON 9800 (non-PRO) cards, keep a close eye on the RADEON 9700 PRO benchmarks, as both cards perform similarly, while GeForce FX 5900 128MB (non-Ultra) should keep a close eye on the GeForce FX 5900 XT benchmarks. Let’s get started by looking at AA quality:

Anti-aliasing

While it’s generally accepted that ATI won the AA quality battle among the previous generation of graphics cards, we wanted to take a look at AA image quality anyway. First up is the RADEON 9800 PRO:

9800 PRO AA disabled

9800 PRO 2xAA

RADEON 9800 PRO 4xAA

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra AA off

5900 Ultra 2xAA

5900 Ultra 4xAA

Notes

While both cards look good in their respective 4xAA modes, the RADEON 9800 PRO definitely does a better job of clearing up the jagged edges. There are a couple of key areas where you can really see this, but the most prominent from our DM5 demo are the top of the main stairs and the window on the right, just above them:

RADEON 9800 PRO 4xAA

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 4xAA

RADEON 9800 PRO 4xAA

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 4xAA

Anisotropic filtering

While NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 series took some heat around this time last year for their “brilinear” filtering optimizations, we’re happy to report that visuals are looking good in DOOM 3: (note that we left all optimizations enabled for both cards in these screenshots, as well as 4xAA)

9800 PRO AF disabled

9800 PRO AF disabled second scene

9800 PRO AF disabled third scene

5900 Ultra AF disabled

5900 Ultra AF disabled second scene

5900 Ultra AF disabled third scene

9800 PRO 4xAF

9800 PRO 4xAF second scene

9800 PRO 4xAF third scene

5900 Ultra 4xAF

5900 Ultra 4xAF second scene

5900 Ultra 4xAF third scene

9800 PRO 8xAF

9800 PRO 8xAF second scene

9800 PRO 8xAF third scene

5900 Ultra 8xAF

5900 Ultra 8xAF second scene

Notes

If we weren’t running with 4xAA in these screenshots, you’d probably have a hard time telling the difference between the NVIDIA card and the ATI card, both look that good.