Page 15 - Doom III Alpha

Doom III Alpha
A while ago something interesting happened. At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of DOOM III. Somehow that demo got leaked on to the internet. Virtually anyone with a good broadband connection was able to grab it. The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depend on two features; a realistic physics engine, and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware 'younger' than GeForce3 simply lack the flexibility and power to run Doom III with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

The fortunate fact is that this game is completely stressing any graphics card to date. The downside .. it is still an Alpha release. The game is not optimized very well in this Alpha build and produces very low scores even in a resolution of 800x600. Still it is very interesting to see how well new graphics cards behave with this software and therefore we decided to start using it. Please let me state though, the framerates and image quality you are seeing do not represent the end product that Doom III will become ! Here's a new performance concept you might need to get used to, 1600x1200 at 80fps ... you can forget it!

We haven't had much time with this software just yet as actually have started using this benchmark so forgive us for the lack of comparative material. We just wanted to show you how it's handling this upcoming game.

We recently discovered that Doom III is using specific driver paths for both GeForce (NV30) and Radeon based graphics cards. Therefore the results can not be compared objectively towards each other. So now and in the future you will not see any Radeon or GeForce results combined in here.

As mentioned in previous reviews, the results are already questionable with this Alpha release but to get you an impression where we are heading we included these results. Please, take them with a grain of salt though.