Page 5

Return to Castle WolfensteinPowered with a highly optimized Quake III engine, high detail settings and of course a heavy time-demo to get test results, we will now use this software.

Powered by the Quake III Arena engine, the Wolfenstein universe explodes with the kind of epic environments, A.I., firepower and cinematic effects that only a game created by true masters can deliver. The dark reich's closing in. The time to act is now. Evil prevails when good men do nothing.

a highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Office of Secret Actions (OSA) tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments. Himmler believes himself to be a reincarnation of a 10th century dark prince, Henry the Fowler, also known as Heinrich. Through genetic engineering and the harnessing of occult powers, Himmler hopes to raise an unstoppable army to level the Allies once and for all.

That being said, RTCW boasts very nice textures, impressive effects and fantastic character models.

RTCW is a very good test to show memory performance as the graphics card is not limited or bottlenecked in any way. The bottleneck is the PC itself and chages in FSB, CPU frequency or memory bandwidth will translate directly into performance differences.

Some explanation: the first results (DDR400 efault) is 400 MHz DDR performance at 2.8 GHz with typical memory. The second one is that same memory DDR400 memory maxed out at a 243 MHz FSB yet with memory running at a max of 386 MHz.

The last results of course is OCZ's PC4200 at that same FSB and CPU speeds, but with a different multiplier running at 483 MHz. Obviously the only thing difference here is the increased memory bandwidth. And it shows of a nice performance difference for sure. Remember that the system is 100% the same except memory ran very much faster. This is a pure 1:1 comparison of what the effect of higher memory bandwidth does with your PC.

But since the OCZ memory can handle a way faster FSB then the standard DDR400 memory we used previously let's move on and combine stuff in Doom 3 where we'll max everything out including the processor and monitor the overall results.

Doom 3
At 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.

• DDR400 (default) is your generic slice of DDR400, with an overclocked system towards 3.4 GHz (243 FSB).
• OCZ PC4200 @ 483 - The OCZ memory, same FSB as previous maxed out memory but with changed multiplier (BIOS) also on that 3.4 GHz CPU. Here you can nicely see the effect of pure memory bandwith.
• OCZ PC4200 @ 500 - Our system maxed out at a 250 MHz FSB, compared to the previous result the CPU speed increased here also.

... but the difference is obvious.