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Return to Castle WolfensteinPowered with a highly optimized Quake III engine, high detail settings and of course a heavy time-demo to get test results, we will now use this software.
Powered by the Quake III Arena engine, the Wolfenstein universe explodes with the kind of epic environments, A.I., firepower and cinematic effects that only a game created by true masters can deliver. The dark reich's closing in. The time to act is now. Evil prevails when good men do nothing.
a highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Office of Secret Actions (OSA) tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments. Himmler believes himself to be a reincarnation of a 10th century dark prince, Henry the Fowler, also known as Heinrich. Through genetic engineering and the harnessing of occult powers, Himmler hopes to raise an unstoppable army to level the Allies once and for all.
That being said, RTCW boasts very nice textures, impressive effects and fantastic character models.
Quite a difference, as opposed to Splinter Cell. RTCW is a very good test to show memory performance as the graphics card is not limited or bottlenecked in any way. The bottleneck is the PC itself and changes in FSB, CPU frequency and/or memory bandwidth will translate directly into performance differences.
Some explanation: the first results is 400 MHz DDR Patriot memory we reviewed last week at its default 2.5:3:3:8 timings. That memory can take a lower voltage yet is 50 bucks more expensive then this OCZ kit though.
All this is
measured at 2.8 GHz with with a quad pumped 200 MHz FSB. The second one is our OCZ DDR400 memory with the standard SPD 2.5:3.3.6 timings. Now remember PC Mark 04 where I said I'd like to show you something? The next (3rd) step is the memory at 2:2:2:5 timings. We immediately see a small change in performance. Agreed it's really small. But applications that are memory dependant will have a direct result in performance when timings differ. Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, which we'll show you in a short bit, definitely benefit from all this.For the 4th result we enable the mainboards PEM (basically we make the 865 chipset a 875 chipset) mode, the fast timings still run perfectly fine, yet another performance boost.
Now we will increase the FSB until we can go no further, pure overclocking of the system bus. We know that we are limited at 230 MHz as that's the maximum for the memory with our mainboards DDR voltage. Then the faster the timings can be the better the memory is. This faster CPU speed versus faster memory will result in way higher performance. The DDR at 460 (2x230 MHz) would not run with PEM enabled. Also we had to increase voltage to 2.95 Volts and 2.5:3:3:6 timings to remain stable. The need for high voltage is bugging me a little.
Let's move on and combine stuff in Doom 3 where we'll max everything out including the processor and monitor the overall results.
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 limited in the lower resolutions here. Therefore it is a nice choice to include it in our benchmark suite as memory bandwidth for sure will have an effect. Focus on the DDR400 performance with different timings in the 800x600 resolution. That's how important memory timings are. Once we raise the FSB the faster CPU of course will have a dramatic effect on overall performance.
Again... the difference is obvious.
