Performance in First Person 3D Shooters

Doom III

As might have been expected, the 512 megabytes of graphics memory don’t show up in the “pure speed” mode, even though we tested the new RADEON X800 XL at the “Ultra High Quality” settings of the game.

We don’t see any performance benefits from more graphics memory in the “eye candy” mode (i.e. with enabled full-screen antialiasing 4x and anisotropic filtering 16x), either. The speeds of the two RADEONs X800 XL coincide to a tenth of fps.

Surprisingly there’s no performance gain even in the highest FSAA modes, but the speed has dropped below playable in 1024x768 already.

So, id Software’s claim that a graphics card with 512MB of graphics memory is necessary to play Doom 3 with the maximum image quality settings is not confirmed. The GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT are fast enough for the FSAA 8xS mode to be playable in 1024x768, but we can’t say the same about the ATI RADEON X800/X850 – even the topmost models cannot overcome the 40fps barrier using 6x antialiasing.

We didn’t observe any speed bonuses on the d3dm4 map in the “pure speed” mode.

Our turning on 4x FSAA and aniso-filtering didn’t change anything. The 512MB version of the RADEON X800 XL is just a single frame per second faster than the ordinary one in 1600x1200, but this lies in the measurement error range.

There are no bots on the d3dm4 map, and the speed of our demo is generally faster even with extreme antialiasing modes in use. The game is quite playable in 1024x768, but none of the cards can produce more than 40fps in higher resolutions.