DOOM 3 benchmarking/AA quality

If you’re familiar with Quake 3’s console commands, you’ll probably feel at home with DOOM 3, as lots of the commands are the same or similar. id continues to provide their timedemo mode for benchmarking, as well as the ability to play and record custom demos. Speaking of demos, the stock demo id provides out of the box, demo1, is quite intensive. It seems as if id went out of their way to make it as straining as possible on the graphics card, as during slower moments, they’ll whip out the flashlight to keep up the stress on the card. The level selected is also quite stressful, with tight corridors filled with lots of enemies and multiple light sources at times. We’re going to use demo1 for the first batch of articles, and switch to a more stressful custom demo we’ve made for our follow-on testing.

In order to benchmark with the game, drop the console by pressing the key combination of Ctrl+Alt+tilde. Then type “timedemo demo1” to run the stock demo for benchmarking.

id provides a ton of console settings, in order to see them all type “listcvars” at the console. If you also want to see descriptions of some of the settings, type “listcvars –help” You can then dump them all to a text file by typing condump [your name for the file].txt. Beyond3D is currently running a DOOM 3 FAQ and Tips thread that you may want to check out for more info.

Anti-aliasing

We also wanted to check out the AA quality of ATI and NVIDIA’s latest hardware in DOOM 3. The following are a few screenshots we took with ATI’s X800 PRO:

X800 PRO AA disabled

X800 PRO 2xAA

X800 PRO 4xAA

X800 PRO AA off

X800 PRO 2xAA

X800 PRO 4xAA

GeForce 6800 Ultra:

GeForce 6800U AA disabled

GeForce 6800 Ultra 2xAA

GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA

GeForce 6800 Ultra AA disabled

GeForce 6800 Ultra 2xAA

GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA

Notes

As we’ve said in the past, judging AA quality has become a much more difficult (and subjective) task than it has been previously. NVIDIA’s new rotated-grid AA closes the gap significantly. In the first batch of screens, taken on the map DM5 “Lights Out”, the staircase looks a little bit sharper on the X800 card than the GeForce 6800.

RADEON X800 PRO 4xAA




GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA


In the second shot, AA quality is just as difficult to judge, although we’d give a slight edge to NVIDIA:



RADEON X800 PRO 4xAA




GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA