Introduction

After four years of development, DOOM 3 is finally here! It goes without saying that gamers everywhere have been eagerly anticipating this title. We’re going to be taking a look at how it performs with today’s as well as yesterday’s hardware over a series of DOOM 3 performance articles, similar to what we’ve done with Far Cry and Call of Duty in the recent past. In today’s article we’re going to focus on DOOM 3’s performance with high-end DX9 hardware, follow-up articles will cover the mainstream cards as well as the high-end cards DX8 cards of yesteryear, the GeForce4 Ti series and RADEON 8500, while we’ll wrap things up with the value cards. Let’s cover the hardware first:

V9999 GE and Ultra Extreme Edition

The new NVIDIA cards

Obviously by now you’re probably pretty familiar with NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 lineup, you wouldn’t be reading this site if you didn’t. But we’re including a pair of GeForce 6800 cards that you may not be familiar with, so we wanted to take the time out to properly introduce them to you.

First up is ASUS’ V9999 Gamer Edition card. This is a GeForce 6800 card on some serious steroids. ASUS takes NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 chip and pairs it with high-end components. For starters is the PCB itself. ASUS swaps out the stock PCB for a 10-layer board, ensuring better signal integrity at higher clock speeds. This is important for the V9999 Gamer Edition, as ASUS has bumped the memory clock frequency to 1.0GHz, the same clock speed as GeForce 6800 GT. In fact, ASUS uses the same GDDR3 modules!

Blue LEDs on the V9999 Gamer Edition card

If you recall NVIDIA’s reference GeForce 6800 clocks, the spec only calls for 700MHz DDR1 memory, so ASUS’ card provides significantly more memory bandwidth, 22.4GB/sec in GeForce 6800 versus 32GB/sec in the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition, a 30% improvement. ASUS outfits their V9999 Gamer Edition with 256MB of the stuff.

But that’s not all. ASUS also bumps up the core clock to 350MHz, an increase of 25MHz over the GeForce 6800’s stock frequency of 325MHz. Since the GeForce 6800 core needs more power to run at higher clock speeds, ASUS also includes a second Molex connector on the V9999 Gamer Edition.

We specifically wanted to see how much DOOM 3 benefits from the extra memory, if at all, so we underclocked the Gamer Edition to the same 325/700MHz speeds of NVIDIA’s stock GeForce 6800.

The second card you may not be familiar with is eVGA’s e-GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, this is another card tailored towards enthusiasts.

eVGA card with reference 6800 Ultra

eVGA e-GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition

eVGA takes the stock GeForce 6800 Ultra and overclocks it for more performance. Whereas NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra core is clocked at 400MHz, the e-GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition’s core runs at 450MHz. Meanwhile, memory frequency goes from 500MHz (1.1GHz effective) on the stock Ultra to 600MHz (1.2GHz effective) on eVGA’s Extreme Edition card. We were curious to see how much of an improvement the higher clocks brings, as well as seeing how well a highly overclocked card ran in DOOM 3. John Carmack’s comments suggest that DOOM 3 responds a little differently to overclocking than other games currently out on the market.