Doom 3 - Delta Labs
We'll kick off our gaming benchmarks with Doom 3. Our first Doom 3 test uses a gameplay demo we recorded inside the Delta Labs complex, and it represents the sorts of graphics loads you'll find in most of the game's single-player levels. We've tested with Doom 3's High Quality mode, which turns on 8X anisotropic filtering by default.

Note that I've included scores for the Radeon X700 XT both with and without Catalyst A.I. enabled. The scores without Catalyst A.I. show how the card would perform without the benefit of any app-specific tweaks and without ATI's adaptive texture filtering routine.

NVIDIA still owns Doom 3, but with Catalyst A.I., the ATI cards save some face. Scores are up for the X600 XT and 9800 XT thanks to the new drivers, and the X700 XT manages to pull within 10 frames per second at the three higher resolutions with 4X antialiasing enabled.

Incidentally, some folks asked after our last review about the playability of DOOM 3 in the game's High Quality mode on a graphics card with only 128MB of memory. Even with good frame rate averages, some gamers have found that the game stutters too much, and id Software recommends 256MB of video memory for High Quality mode. I played through some of the game with the GeForce 6600 GT and Radeon X700 XT today at 1280x1024 in High Quality, and it confirmed my initial impressions. The GeForce 6600 GT was smooth as glass in DOOM 3's High Quality mode on our test system. The Radeon X700 XT slows down a little bit in some areas, but it's still smooth enough to be playable. Of course, this was on a fast system with PCI Express and a gig of RAM, so your mileage may vary.