Dooming Testbed and Methods

Hopefully you made your own conclusion about the Doom III, as a game, now it’s time to see what hardware you will need to play it.

For our tests we utilized our typical system for benchmarking with the following configuration:

• AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CPU (2.20GHz, 1MB L1 cache);
• ASUS K8V Deluxe mainboard;
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB, CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Seagate 7200.7 HDD (SerialATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 audio card;
• Microsoft Windows XP SP2, DirectX 9.0c, NVIDIA ForceWare 61.77, ATI CATALYST 4.8 beta.

For the first part of our Doom III hardware coverage we used the following graphics cards with driver settings set to match each others’ quality:

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB (400MHz/1100);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256 MB (350/1000 MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 128 MB (325/700 MHz);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 256 MB (475/950 MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 XT 256 MB (520/1120 MHz);
• ATI RADEON X800 PRO 256 MB (475/900 MHz);
• ATI RADEON 9800 XT 256 MB (412/730 MHz);

Please note that the game is reported to have fps limiter at around 60-64 fps, while timedemos calculate average fps, which means that performance of the real game may be slightly different from the test. On the other hand, we have to report that fps limiter does not work in some cases, which may also have its impacts on the results.