Doom 3 is Nvidia’s baby

Diego Diaz 26 Jul, 2004 at 1:12pm ET Article published in Tech

According to privleged press that have had their hands on Doom 3 it seems to us that ATI is doom3d. We saw the first numbers which clearly show that the NV40 marchitecture rocks in Doom 3.

Both Geforce 6800 Ultra and 6800 GT are significantly faster then Radeon X800XT Platinum or X800PRO.

Our USA friends at HardOCP showed us that at 16×12 High quality and 4X FSAA and 8X Anisotropic filtering 6800 Ultra gets almost two times faster then X800PRO and in all but one benchmark Nvidia dominates.

In 10×7 high quality no FSAA and AF ATI can keep up with Nvidia cards but that is the only time they can be as good as Nvidia or marginally slower.

This does not come as a surprise as NV30 can render 8×0 in Doom 3 if your rendering pass doesn’t require Z-buffer or Color information and in many case Doom 3 doesn’t need them or extraordinary 32×0 in Doom 3 with NV40 marchitecture.

Source: The inquirer

Comments

26 Jul 2004 ~ 1:27pm GHoosdum Am I reading that article wrong, or was that some VERY poor grammar?
26 Jul 2004 ~ 1:53pm Thrax The author is of a slavic background. He lives in Eastern Europe.
26 Jul 2004 ~ 4:20pm EMT What a turnaround...
26 Jul 2004 ~ 4:40pm Thrax nVidia, however, has been making their cards in preparation for Doom since.. Oh, early 2003.
26 Jul 2004 ~ 6:50pm Nomad ATI being doomed is a bit of an overstatement. They aren't going to let this slide by and get pounded.
26 Jul 2004 ~ 6:58pm Medlock

Nomad wrote:

ATI being doomed is a bit of an overstatement. They aren't going to let this slide by and get pounded.

I'd better hope not... Maybe their driver team can save them, like HardOCP said?
26 Jul 2004 ~ 7:36pm pseudonym No surprise after seeing early benchies. When things get cranking, the NVidia card is out ahead all the time. At lower settings though, the ATI matches it exactly. NVidia did their homework.
26 Jul 2004 ~ 7:54pm csimon I had a clue when I bought my pre-release or whatever it's called of doom 3 at best buy and it came with an $10 nvidia coupon ...it expired by the end of that month though. I thought nvidia had some type of foot-in-the-door at the time.
26 Jul 2004 ~ 8:11pm Sputnik everyone remember that last delay at then end of last year on doom 3? i rmember hearing a rumor that nVidia was the one pushing id to optimize to the nv40....
26 Jul 2004 ~ 8:26pm Jengo its kinda like the same way ATi Wants valve to optimize HL2 for ATi cards...
4 Aug 2004 ~ 2:11pm someguy ATI's answer to the NVIDIA hype. http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040804_054725.html
4 Aug 2004 ~ 2:48pm primesuspect How is that an answer to hype? All it says is "Download beta 4.9 for better performance in Doom 3"....
6 Aug 2004 ~ 2:12am Geeky1 Well, apparently the nV40 does indeed like Doom 3...

Get this:
1600x1200, maximum detail, 2x aa, 4x af, the game is capped at 60fps, and I'm averaging 60.5fps.

6800GT @ 350/500 (1000), 2.59GHz 2600m, 1GB PC3500
6 Aug 2004 ~ 8:48am MJO

primesuspect wrote:

How is that an answer to hype? All it says is "Download beta 4.9 for better performance in Doom 3"....

Remember that the beta 4.9 is called "Doom 3 Hotfix" or "The Doom 3 Driver".

But I think that it is bad that Doom 3 had to come out, before Ati would optimize the OpenGL performance.
13 Aug 2004 ~ 11:45am Gil Nvidia have a better card, why can't everyone just get over it? The 6800 chipset is simply blowing everything out of the water, and drivers can only take you so far, 95% of it is the silicon on the chip which will remain static no matter how many driver developers the card manufacturers use.

The ATI crowd remind me of the 3D-FX fan boys from the mid 90s - desperately trying to tell everyone how 2 x Voodoo2 cards ran faster than the Geforce, despite the fact that the Geforce was the better card.
15 Aug 2004 ~ 11:26am Mosa in my GeForce Fx 5200 128Mb with 61.77 diver and dx 9.0c in 256Mb DDR RAm Doom 3 is great at 800x600 at high settings and with all advance effects turned on. at around 20-30 fps. Is surely looks fine to me. i Should thank Nvidia if they did play any foul game witht the release of D3. i could not have played it with my Riva TNT 32 Mb card at 2001.
15 Aug 2004 ~ 12:56pm Geeky1

Nvidia have a better card, why can't everyone just get over it?

My understanding is that the current hierarchy is this:
X800XT > 6800 Ultra > 6800GT > X800 Pro > 6800

The X800XT should be faster than the 6800 Ultra; they're both 256-bit, 16-pipeline cards, and the X800XT has faster RAM and a higher GPU clock.

And although I'm an ATi person, I ended up going with the 6800GT this time... nVidia finally "fixed" their image quality so it's basically on par with ATi's, and the 6800GT is faster, I believe. I would've gone with the 6800GT even if it were a little bit slower though... I'm extremely unhappy with what ATi did with the X800 Pro, as I was with what they did with the 9600s. I don't appreciate them crippling my cards for me.