Page 7 - Doom 3 Performance

Doom 3At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed off DOOM 3. Days after that the world was shocked as somehow that demo got leaked onto the internet. It's now 2004 and the game finally has been released! The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lacks the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The huge amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.

In a weird way it is almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say its well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you mayve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmacks own algorithm. Im sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. With a Geforce 6800 Ultra you can run the game at insane resolutions with huge amounts of detail (something I thoroughly enjoyed), but even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it still looks jawbreaking.

Doom 3 can be played absolutely fantasticly without any need to sacrifice its image quality at any setting and as it seems, any driver revision. Make note of the fact that this benchmark run was taken with Doom 3's High Quality settings.

In combination with several image quality settings in the form of Antialiasing and Ansisotropic filtering we start to notice some very interesting results as there seems to be quite a large difference. Again the 66.xx series work out the best, but by a small amount.