Page 19
Doom 3
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 on 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. Even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.
Where ATI products where in favor of Half-life 2, NVIDIA's products seem to have that advantage in Doom 3. Doom 3 can be played absolutely fantastic without the need to sacrifice any image quality on any modern graphics card. Obviously we notice the real difference here when we run into the highest resolutions. The recommended resolution is still 1600x1200 or higher though for all cards.
Looking at 4x AA and 8x AF tests in combination with the game's high quality mode make things change rapidly and the graphics cards scale better performance wise. The 1600x1200 resolution is managed easily by the 7900 GT & GTX. But yeah .. 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF is still pushing 37 FPS on the 7600 GT and that's quite remarkable.
