X-bit labs

ASUS AX800 XT/TVD Graphics Card Review (page 5)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 11/04/2004 | 11:05 AM ]

Doom III

Doom 3 definitely prefers graphics cards with NVIDIA’s architecture, so the ASUS AX800 XT cannot compete with the GeForce 6800 gang here.

The same goes for the eye candy mode with its enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. The new game engine from id Software has too a strong liking towards NVIDIA’s GPUs, while ATI’s OpenGL driver is rather outdated already. New versions of the Catalyst suite may bring a considerable speed boost to Doom 3 but until that ATI Technologies’ camp cannot boast high performance in this game.

Having only 128MB of onboard memory, the GeForce 6800 couldn’t turn FSAA and AF on in 1600x1200 resolution.

Everything we’ve said above about the Hellhole level is true for the d3dm4 map: graphics cards based on the R420 processor from ATI are hopelessly slower than devices on NVIDIA’s NV40 core. Once again, the problem is not only in the mutual suitability of Doom 3 and NVIDIA’s GPUs, but also in the obsolete and inefficient OpenGL driver from the ATI Catalyst suite.

There’s nothing extraordinary in the eye candy mode – the GeForce 6800 family cards remain on top.