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Doom 3

At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of DOOM 3. Days after that the world was shocked as somehow that demo got leaked onto the Internet. It's now 2004 and the game has finally been released! The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lack the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.

In a weird way it's almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say its well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you mayve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmacks own algorithm. Im sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. With a Geforce 6800 Ultra you can run the game at insane resolutions with huge amounts of detail (something I thoroughly enjoyed), but even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.

Here is a small overview with only the high-end CPU's in the chart. We had to let go of the Athlon 64 3800+ (sent back to AMD) before Doom 3 was released. Look at the difference.

Half-life 2

Gordon Freeman is back! Along with scientist Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. Its up to you to set things right.

The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision, streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.

For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.

The last chart shows Half-life performance, this time with a small selection of different graphics cards to see how well they behave in terms of relative performance on the Athlon 64 4000+ system.