High Quality Special Effects: This setting enables all the heat flares and image warping in windows. If you're looking at a fire in the game, the area just above the flame will have the same heat-wave effect that can be seen in real life. Look at the numbers behind the flame and at the pillar to the right of the flame in the screenshots we've provided. Both appear to be distorted by the heat effect. The still images really don't do the effect justice, because they look more impressive while in motion.
Specular Lighting: This enables shiny surfaces in the game. The walls and doors give off a nice sheen with this option toggled on. Turning off specular lighting makes the game much uglier, since most of the surfaces in the game are metallic in nature.
Bump Mapping: Like it sounds... It makes bumps. Well, not exactly. It's more like imaginary bumps. These bumps are added to surfaces to demonstrate a height effect. As in real life, a flat concrete floor isn't completely flat. There are little cracks and crevices that give the floor a rough texture. Bump mapping allows the game to simulate these cracks and crevices with shadows.
Shadows: Shadows are the most noticeable effect in the game. Disabling this option will improve your frame rate, but doing so will take away from the game experience.
We went through to benchmark what kind of frame rate effect each of the advanced settings has on two system setups: an Intel P4 1.6GHz CPU with a GeForce4 Ti4600 and 512MB of memory and an Athlon 64 3000+ CPU with a Radeon 9800 Pro and 1GB of memory.
Doom 3 Video Tests
(Frames Per Second - Higher Is Better)
The performance gains on the low-end setup were rather small when we disabled the advanced effects. It's debatable whether you would even want to bother disabling the effects for such minor frame rate gains. The mid-range setup showed considerable gains with shadows disabled. The other effects took only a slight toll, nibbling a mere four frames per second.
Disabling shadows offers the largest gain in frame rate, but you might not want to disable the one feature that gives Doom 3 its unnerving atmosphere. All the other settings have almost no effect on performance, so you might as well leave them on to benefit from the extra eye candy.
Doom 3 Video 1: Advanced Settings Disabled
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