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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.
Doom3 is CPU sensitive and most of all limited in almost any resolutions here and therefore a nice choice to include it in our benchmark suite. Especially with these kind of articles as the framerate will react to subtle changes almost immediately.
In the upper charts we see different CPU's being scaled, an undeniable performance win for the AMD64 4000+ nForce4 based system. The results have image quality settings at 0x AA and 8xAF.
Once we enable 4 levels of antialiasing and eight levels of anisotropic filtering and scale the Intel edition's CPU/FSB speeds we can see interesting behavior. All the way to your left is the platform at 3.6 GHz with a single GeForce 6800 GT followed by that same configuration in SLI mode. Look closely how important that CPU power is. In my previous articles I've been telling you guys that in today's PC's the processor is the biggest bottleneck for high-end enthusiast graphics cards. We take it up-to 4.12 GHz and as you can see even that 100 MHz different has an effect on the overall framerate.
All the way to your right you can see the system at work in SLI mode with the CPU at 4 GHz and Doom 3 locked at 8xS AA and 16 levels of Anisotropic filtering. We finally run onto a graphics card limitation at 1600x1200x32.
