Dooming Conclusion

So, Doom III is finally here. It makes positive impression, but those, who played the original Doom 10 years ago may just be too old for this kind of action, while the guys and gals who spent months played Counter Strike and FarCry pretty recently may just find the new Doom a little bit monotonous… Frankly speaking, the gameplay is pretty primitive: linear passing-through and very trivial solutions along with the amount of killings is definitely not something that today’s games deliver. Doom III would look excellent in, say, 2002. But not in 2004.

Anyway, in case you got it, you probably wonder which hardware is the best for it.

The answer is pretty simple: at this stage with current drivers and version of the game NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800-series is the best thing you can buy for Doom III. ATI’s RADEON X800-series also delivers nice performance and astonishing gameplay, but based on the benchmark numbers we have to say that it is much behind the rival. Older-generation hardware will hardly be a good choice for Doom III, however, keep in mind that we tested with “high quality” settings set, while “medium quality” may offer higher performance, but with a bit compromised image quality.

To tell you the truth, even on a rather mainstream machine you are going to experience the game in all its glory. For instance, we tried to run the Doom III on a machine powered by Intel Pentium 2 .40GHz processor, i875P-based mainboard, 1GB of dual-channel PC3200 memory, ATI RADEON X800 PRO graphics card and SB Live! audio card and the game performed astonishingly well with quality settings set to “high” and anisotropic filtering 16x activated from the drivers.

It is interesting to note that some of the graphics cards working at high (but still stock!) frequencies produced artifacts and even BSODs in Doom III. So far we have experienced only one such issue with a top-of-of-the-range contemporary graphics card from a manufacturer that we do not name at this time.

ATI’s new beta CATALYST 4.9 drivers did not bring the Doom III performance crown to ATI’s RADEON X800 XT hardware, even though it also did not degrade image quality. Now those, who already own, or, only plan to acquire, an ATI’s latest graphics card should probably either hope for totally re-done ATI’s OpenGL drivers, or pay attention to more sophisticated GeForce 6800-lineup. While we probably should not make any final conclusions based on results in beta drivers, the general picture can certainly be seen.

In short-term future X-bit labs will release more Doom III benchmarks with different quality settings and wider range of graphics cards.