Performance in First Person 3D Shooters

Doom 3

We wouldn’t say the PowerColor X850 XT PE AGP suffers a catastrophic defeat against the GeForce 6800 cards in this game, but id Software’s game engine clearly prefers NVIDIA’s architectural solutions. At the default frequencies the PowerColor card can’t overtake the GeForce 6800 GT, a graphics card which belongs to a lower category.

The PowerColor looks better in the “eye candy” mode when we enable full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. When overclocked, it successfully competes with the GeForce 6800 GT. At the default frequencies it is no more than 10% slower than NVIDIA’s card. The GeForce 6800 Ultra is unrivalled in this test.

It’s worse for the PowerColor X850 XT PE AGP on the d3dm4 map where it is far behind the GeForce 6800 GT in the “pure speed” mode. In the “eye candy” mode, however, the PowerColor performs like the GeForce 6800 GT and – at the overclocked frequencies – like the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Anyway, Doom 3 and the rest of the games based on the same engine from id Software evidently run better on GeForce6 and GeForce7 series cards.