Page 7
Doom 3At 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.
3DMark 03
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.
This benchmark is not based on any game. Please remember this, never buy a graphics card based solely on the 3DMark score. I'm not bashing the 3D Mark suite here, it's good software but definitely not the sole basis for you to make an informed decision on to buy a graphics card. Especially after what happened in 2003.
For the sake of it I'm including a few scores. Well you have to admit, the importance of these results can be discussed in many way and varieties, yet according to one of our polls what you want to see are the scores and the scores are simply fantastic.
I wanted to show you the bandwidth effects with Synthetic gaming software in the form of the 3DMark series. The big advantage is that this software is not at all very CPU dependant. Thus the memory bandwidth increase will show very objective performance differences. Differences are very minimal, but they are there alright. Default is the standard 1024x768 reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default.
Let's have a look at our last little test, Half Life 2.
Half-Life 2
The moment the entire graphics industry was waiting for is here, after a delay or 200 one of the biggest titles in the history of PC games was released by Valve, Half-Life 2. Gameplay that should be extraordinary, sound that'll make you drool and a first time graphics experience that'll make the choice between doing the "thing" or playing this game a difficult one.
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.
Again in the lowest resolutions we see small FPS changes. Compare the first two results at 800x600 and just the fast timings gave a 4 FPS increase in performance. For those interested, you can read our own full HL2 review right here. Our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is
