GeForce 6600 GT Reference Review

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imageview.php?image=165Doom 3At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of 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 has finally 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 lack 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 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's 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 looks jawbreaking.

We haven't had much time with this software just yet, we actually have just started using this game as a benchmark so forgive us for the lack of comparative material. We just wanted to show you how this video card handles this awesome game.

Doom 3 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
5750PCX 35 24 16 11
x600 - High Quality 39 26 18 12
x600 - Medium Quality 46 30 19 13
x600 - Low Quality 70 49 30 21
6600GT Maximum Quality 64 39 39 26
6600GT High Quality 85 75 57 43
6600GT High Quality 550/1110 85 78 62 46
6600GT Medium Quality 86 77 60 44
4xAA 8xAF 56 40 22 0
4xAA 8xAF opt on 58 41 24 0
2xAA 77 60 44 30
4XAA 59 42 25 0
8XAA 35 32 10 0
4xAF 83 72 55 42
8xAF 83 71 55 41
16xAF 82 71 54 40

So guess what, yes .. Doom3 can actually be played brilliantly without any need to sacrifice on its image quality. As you can see on a few occasions in 1600x1200 you'll see a score of 0 FPS. Basically Doom3 crashed in these settings. This however is a known bug with this driver and there is work in progress. You likely won't be playing Doom3 with this mid-range card in 16x12 anyway. Small note, all AA and AF tests are done in combination with the game's high quality mode!

I did a multitude of tests for you as this benchmark is so new that we do not really have any comparative results from other cards. The benchmark was taken with Doom 3's High Quality setting in combination with several image quality settings in the form of Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering.

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