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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.

Yes I know ..  RTCW is a very old title yet 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. Increased memory bandwidth makes little difference though. But since your memory can scale with your CPU and we step away from the 3600 MHz processor clock frequency things become more apparent.

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 and memory 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 first test, that's pure DDR400 performance, the next runs at ~533 MHz and although the CPU frequency is the same you already will notice that FPS difference. That's pure from the increased memory bandwidth. That's how memory is. Once we raise the FSB towards 275 MHz the CPU of course will get faster and all things together will have a dramatic, in a positive way, effect on overall performance. Although it doesn't look like much in the charts above, the difference in 8x6 for example is 10% and at 10x7 actually 6%

...the difference is obvious.