id Software's Official DOOM3 Benchmarks

Much of the gaming and hardware community has been waiting with bated breath for DOOM 3 from id Software. That time is almost here, but before the game goes for sale on store shelves, id Software has been kind enough to do some things for the community so we can all hit the ground running and be ready for our DOOM3 experience from the moment we open the box.

Today we are sharing with you framerate data that was collected at the id Software offices in Mesquite, Texas. Both ATI and NVIDIA were present for the testing and brought their latest driver sets. While an extensive amount of data was taken, what we want to focus on is the high end video cards that are currently making their way to market. That means we will be showing you frames per second rates taken using the DOOM 3 timedemo "demo1" that will be included in your boxed copy of DOOM 3. The version of the game used to test is the same version you will be loading onto your own computer.

It should be noted that all of the modern cards play the game very well, and benchmark scores should not be the be-all-end-all decision maker. Scores will probably improve somewhat with future driver releases, and other factors like dual slots or dual power connectors can weigh against some of the high end cards.

The benchmarking was conducted on-site, and the hardware vendors did not have access to the demo before hand, so we are confident that there is no egregious cheating going on, but it should be noted that some of the ATI cards did show a performance drop when colored mip levels were enabled, implying some fudging of the texture filtering. This has been a chronic issue for years, and almost all vendors have been guilty of it at one time or another. I hate the idea of drivers analyzing texture data and changing parameters, but it doesn't visibly impact the quality of the game unless you know exactly what to look for on a specific texture. On the other hand, the Nvidia drivers have been tuned for Doom's primary light/surface interaction fragment program, and innocuous code changes can "fall off the fast path" and cause significant performance impacts, especially on NV30 class cards.

A note on overclocking: it is very likely that overclocked configurations that "play everything else perfectly" will start to show problems on D3 due to new usage patterns. Everyone is of course free to do whatever they want with their own hardware, but don't complain to us...