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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.
Doom3 is extremely CPU sensitive and most of all limited in almost any resolutions here and therefore a nice choice to include it in our benchmark suite as it shows even the smallest performance differences, and that relates to the overall framerate. Of course it's not entirely fair to compare to a 4000+ system. But for the sake of showing platform differences I decided to include it.
Look closely how important that CPU power is. In my previous articles I've been telling you guys that in today's PC's the processor is the biggest bottleneck for high-end enthusiast graphics cards. The scores for the AA8Xe are really good though but we can see that a similar nForce4 Intel SLI edition mainboard offers slightly better performance.
3DMark 03 Professional
3DMark 05 Business Edition
Last but not least the 3DMark benchmark series is built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.
This benchmark is not based on any game. Please remember this, never buy a graphics card based solely on the 3DMark score. I'm not bashing the 3D Mark suite here, it's good software but definitely not the sole basis for you to make an informed decision on to buy a graphics card. Especially after what happened in 2003.
For the sake of it I'm including a few scores. Well you have to admit, the importance of these results can be discussed in many way and varieties, yet according to one of our polls what you want to see are the scores and the scores are simply fantastic.
In yellow we see 3DMark 03 and in Kaki 3DMark 05. That's nice performance, it's the slowest of the batch, but really this 3.6 GHz system is competing with a Athlon 4000+ and a 4 GHz Pentium 4. The results here are 100% on par with what they should be. Default is the standard 1024x768 reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default.
