Design by Collin Oguro
Doom 3 managed to scare PC gamers days, weeks, months, and even years before they finally got their hands on the installation CDs last week. Early reports that praised the new engine stoked excitement and anticipation for the game's release, but the increased interest also resulted in heightened anxiety levels for PC owners who were unsure as to whether their systems would be powerful enough to handle id's newest blockbuster.
Many of these PC owners, perhaps scarred by a missing battery incident from the Christmas of '83, vowed to always have an upgraded computer on hand to make sure that Doom 3 would be fully operational upon its release.
The rest of us decided to try playing the game on our current systems before seriously considering upgrade possibilities. If you're part of this group, you probably discovered that the game is indeed playable on PCs that meet the minimum 1.5GHz CPU and GeForce 3 graphics card system requirements, but you also probably discovered that an upgrade would be necessary to get a glimpse of frame rates above 30 frames per second at resolutions higher than 640x480.
The real trouble begins when it's time to figure out how to upgrade, since several system components have an effect on game performance--namely the graphics card, CPU, and system memory. Having a fast CPU will allow you to hit higher frame rates but only if your graphics card is fast enough to keep up. The opposite is also true. A powerful graphics card won't perform like one when it's paired with a slow CPU. However, don't forget about the system memory either, because not having enough can effectively hamstring game performance, no matter what type of CPU or graphics card you have.
The primary focus of this guide will be graphics cards and basic Doom 3 video settings, but we also examine CPU scaling and memory configurations to identify performance bottlenecks that can prevent a system from reaching its full potential.
We benchmarked Doom 3 across eight different video cards that ranged from a GeForce 4 Ti4600 and Radeon 9800 Pro all the way up to the GeForce 6800 Ultra. All frame rate results were obtained using the "timedemo demo1" console command.
Test Systems:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU, MSI K8T Neo Motherboard, 1GB (512MB x 2) Samsung PC3200 Memory, 250GB Maxtor Maxline III SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional.
Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 3.4GHz CPU, ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard, 1GB (512MB x 2) Samsung PC3200 Memory, 250GB Maxtor Maxline III SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional.
Graphics Cards: GeForce Ti4600 128MB, Radeon 9600XT 128MB, Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, GeForce 6800 128MB, Radeon X800 Pro 256MB, GeForce 6800 GT 256MB, Radeon X800 XT PE 256MB, GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB.
Graphics Drivers: Nvidia ForceWare 61.77, ATI Catalyst 4.9 Beta.
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