With all the fuss going on today with the new graphics card monsters from ATI and Nvidia a website well known to us all has something for us that is indeed special. [H]ardOCP teamed up with id Software to bring you a brief outlook on what to expect from Doom III performancewise. Although the code is not final and no game content is revealed, it is interesting to take a sneak peak at what to expect. Although the original hardware mysteriously disappeared on which the tests where scheduled, [H] managed to put a rig together to show us some benchmarks.
We were allowed to test on whatever video cards we wished to with whatever drivers we wished to. As mentioned in the tagline, we used a GeForceFX 5900 Ultra and GeForceFX 5600 Ultra both supplied by NVIDIA. The 5600 Ultra you see here is the final specification of the NV31 GPU and has not yet been seen by the public. It will be announced soon. The ATI cards used included a sample 9800 Pro 256MB and a 9600 Pro sample supplied by ATI. We also included a 9500 Pro card from TYAN. Our test platform consisted of: Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz "C" - 800MHz FSB CPU, ASUS P4C800 mainboard (i875 Canterwood chipset), 1GB Corsair XMS 3200LL (Dual Channel configuration - 2x512MB), Koolance Exos water cooling system, Vantec 550w PSU, WindowsXP SP1, DirectX9A. NVIDIA DetonatorFX v44.03, ATI Catalyst v3.4 & v3.2. The Catalyst 3.4 drivers appear to be 'broken' with this special Doom III build and the replacement Catalyst 3.2 (official) only allowed utlization of 128MB on the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro - keep that in mind. Oh, and a little sidenote: An interesting tidbit of information to throw into the mix here is the fact that there is another R3XX card from ATI waiting in the wings. We are told that this VPU will show a significant performance increase over any chipsets on the market including NV35 as well as R350. Expect to see this new ATI card somewhere between mid to late summer if it stays on schedule. Doom III @ [H]ardOCP