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3D Performance with DOOM 3: Part 2 High-End Cards (Cont'd) August 09, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: At the end of last week we checked out the performance of DOOM 3 with the latest 3D graphics cards, today we're evaluating performance with the high-end cards of yesteryear. Included in this article are 9800 PRO 128MB vs. 256MB benchmarks, as well as the RADEON 9700 PRO and RADEON 9800 XT. On the NVIDIA side we've included four cards ranging from the GeForce FX 5900 XT all the way up to the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. See how all the cards stack up at the various resolutions and eye candy settings right here!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 12 ) |
One of the beauties of John Carmack’s DOOM 3 engine is its scalability. With a little bit of work, DOOM 3 can be optimized to run with good framerates on older hardware with little perceptible loss in image quality. This is great news for those of you with RADEON 9700’s or GeForce FX 5900’s, which is the generation of cards we’ll be focusing on with today’s DOOM 3 performance article. These high-end cards of yesterday introduced the world to DX9 graphics, and thanks to their 256-bit memory interface, powerful graphics core and high-speed memory, opened up screen resolutions and image quality levels that were unheard of with previous graphics cards.
From the ATI camp, we’ve rounded up the RADEON 9700, RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB and 256MB, and RADEON 9800 XT. On the NVIDIA side, we’ve included the GeForce FX 5900 XT, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. We also threw in Leadtek’s WinFast A400 TDH GeForce 6800 card to show you the performance improvement this $300 upgrade brings. For those of you with RADEON 9800 (non-PRO) cards, keep a close eye on the RADEON 9700 PRO benchmarks, as both cards perform similarly, while GeForce FX 5900 128MB (non-Ultra) should keep a close eye on the GeForce FX 5900 XT benchmarks. Let’s get started by looking at AA quality:
Anti-aliasing
While it’s generally accepted that ATI won the AA quality battle among the previous generation of graphics cards, we wanted to take a look at AA image quality anyway. First up is the RADEON 9800 PRO:
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GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
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Notes
While both cards look good in their respective 4xAA modes, the RADEON 9800 PRO definitely does a better job of clearing up the jagged edges. There are a couple of key areas where you can really see this, but the most prominent from our DM5 demo are the top of the main stairs and the window on the right, just above them:
RADEON 9800 PRO 4xAA
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 4xAA
RADEON 9800 PRO 4xAA
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 4xAA
Anisotropic filtering
While NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 series took some heat around this time last year for their “brilinear” filtering optimizations, we’re happy to report that visuals are looking good in DOOM 3: (note that we left all optimizations enabled for both cards in these screenshots, as well as 4xAA)
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Notes
If we weren’t running with 4xAA in these screenshots, you’d probably have a hard time telling the difference between the NVIDIA card and the ATI card, both look that good.
| Test systems | Page:: ( 2 / 12 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939 nForce3 Ultra chipset
1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB
ATI RADEON 9800 XT
Driver version beta CATALYST 4.9 (b4.9 in the graphs)
Leadtek WinFast A400
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900 SE
ASUS V9950 GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Driver version 61.77
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
DOOM 3
Notes
We decided to rely solely on ATI’s beta CATATLYST 4.9 driver this time around. Stability of the driver seems to be up to production standards, and browing through Rage3D’s forums on the topic, we see few complaints.
| DOOM 3 Medium Quality | Page:: ( 3 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 Medium Quality 2xAA | Page:: ( 4 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 Medium Quality 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 Medium Quality 4xAA | Page:: ( 6 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 Medium Quality 4xAA/4xAF | Page:: ( 7 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 High Quality | Page:: ( 8 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 High Quality 4xAF | Page:: ( 9 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 High Quality 2xAA/4xAF | Page:: ( 10 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| DOOM 3 High Quality 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 11 / 12 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 12 / 12 ) |
There are quite a few thoughts you can take away from today’s performance numbers. First, the performance race between ATI and NVIDIA hardware is very close, much closer than it is in the current generation (although there are indications that X800 may have some nice performance improvements coming its way). We’d generally give the performance lead to GeForce FX, but ATI also wins its fair share of benchmarks.
The gap between the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO and its 128MB brother is subtle, with a slight performance nod going towards the 256MB card, but the performance difference is nowhere near the same level we’ve seen in Far Cry or Call of Duty in some situations. The RADEON 9800 PRO VPU is just too tapped out to really take advantage of the 256MB card’s larger frame buffer.
NVIDIA really played it safe with the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Our DOOM 3 benchmarks have both cards running pretty close to each other in all situations. 5950 Ultra’s have proven to be better overclockers, but considering how DOOM 3 stresses out cards, this may not be much of an advantage. In addition, the GeForce FX 5900 XT performs pretty well for a sub-$200 graphics card. Thanks to its 256-bit memory interface and 390MHz graphics core, the 5900 XT delivers 80% of the performance of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra at roughly half the price (when launched). Those of you with these cards should be very pleased with your purchase.
Another real surprise is how little of a performance hit 8xAF brings with this generation of cards. Thanks to filtering optimizations in drivers from both companies, these GeForce and RADEON cards are capable of delivering filtering quality just as good as today’s high-end GeForce 6800s and RADEON X800s, with a minimum impact on performance. While DOOM 3 defaults to the “medium” quality setting, the high quality mode is quite playable at lower resolutions. High quality introduces 8xAF by default, and removes normal map compression. Many of you will probably want to turn on AA as well.
We’ve said it before, but we must say it again. It’s really surprising to see how well DOOM 3 scales with older hardware. Sure, the GeForce 6800 ate the other cards lunch in this article, but the GeForce and RADEON cards still put up respectable numbers. Any of you with these cards may want to hold off on upgrading until Half-Life 2 is released, or NVIDIA and ATI’s product refresh cards ship. A lot more lingering questions will be answered by then, and today’s high-end cards will be cheaper. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if many of you held off on upgrading until more PCI Express platforms are available. Based on today’s numbers, we wouldn’t blame you.