id Software's Official DOOM3 Benchmarks

Ardrid said:
gpitpitan said:
hey guys, i work at Fry's electronics in Burbank, CA.
We got about 2-3boxes as of today, which translates into about 10 cards.
I just finished setting up a deal with aphex, hes building his new puter as we speak and wanted the

BFG 6800GT OC.

we have it for 399.99 + tax.
Worked it out with aphex and were talking about 450 shipped.
if anyones interested we do have a few more on hand.
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If you've got some more, consider me interested.
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The Fry's by me has the PNY 6800GT ($399), PNY 6800NU ($299) and BFG 6800GT ($399). I was pretty surprised yesterday when I saw it. Many boxes of each were on the shelf in Woodland Hills.

They also have spaces for the VisionTek x800 Pro, but have not received any yet. Fry's doesn't put up shelf tags unless something is coming in, so even those should finally come in soon.

:( I should have waited to sell my extra BFG 6800GT OC. I sold it for $349 I paid (cost me $299 ) to someone I knew. Oh well, my 6800GT only cost $249 net after my small profit.
 
theelviscerator said:
thats funny coming from a guy with mushkin ram and a shuttle mobo....
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there's nothing wrong with either one of those if you know what you're doing - yet once again, you come to a thread to tear other people down. not surprised. :eek:
 
pxc said:
The Fry's by me has the PNY 6800GT ($399), PNY 6800NU ($299) and BFG 6800GT ($399). I was pretty surprised yesterday when I saw it. Many boxes of each were on the shelf in Woodland Hills.

They also have spaces for the VisionTek x800 Pro, but have not received any yet. Fry's doesn't put up shelf tags unless something is coming in, so even those should finally come in soon.

:( I should have waited to sell my extra BFG 6800GT OC. I sold it for $349 I paid (cost me $299 ) to someone I knew. Oh well, my 6800GT only cost $249 net after my small profit.
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Yeah, the Fry's in Renton, WA had a whole bunch of BFG 6800GT OCs in stock, as well as a ton of PNY 6800GTs for the same price ($399). Of course, I don't know why anyone would buy the PNY while the BFGs are there for the same price...but, oh well. I was surprised that they had this many cards in stock, so I asked the manager (a miracle that I happened to find one) and he said that Fry's is able to transfer stock from store-to-store when they see one store go out of stock of an item, which is why they are able to keep these things in stock.

edit: And I didn't feel too bad about paying $399 for the card, since I'm selling my 9800 Pro to my friend for $100.
 
WHAT THE HELL has this thread turned into? Nvidia beats Ati in doom3 benchies. I dont see what else there is too it. The END.
 
Just because ATI is slower in one game does not make them crap lol.


HL2 is still coming, and I honestly would still not have an issue purchasing an X800, in fact I sitll want one :)
 
Dougieha said:
edit: And I didn't feel too bad about paying $399 for the card, since I'm selling my 9800 Pro to my friend for $100.
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Your friend got a good deal. Now if I can just find someone to buy my 5900(non-ultra - stock 400/850) for about $180 I'll be buying a 6800GT.
 
James Crivellone said:
Just because ATI is slower in one game does not make them crap lol.


HL2 is still coming, and I honestly would still not have an issue purchasing an X800, in fact I sitll want one :)
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I think the end result of this entire thread is that either card will run the game perfectly fine. In this one game, it appears that the 6800 is faster, but it could be entirely the reverse in a future game such as HL2. For that matter, I'm sure that both cards will also run HL2 perfectly fine, even if one is faster than another. There really is no point in everyone getting their panties up in a bunch. :)

The difference for me in choosing which card was the fact that I couldn't find the x800 in stock anywhere, while I found the 6800 in quantity. So, I'm currently running a 6800 GT, and I was running a 9800 Pro previously and a Geforce 2 Ultra before that. They were all good cards.
 
chrisf6969 said:
Your friend got a good deal. Now if I can just find someone to buy my 5900(non-ultra - stock 400/850) for about $180 I'll be buying a 6800GT.
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Yeah, I know...but I didn't feel like going through the ebay hassle, and the $100 in hand was hard to argue with. I figure that the card has been used for a year, so it's not like it is brand new.
 
ZenOps said:
Honestly though, up until this release there has been about zero need for OpenGL 2.0 support, most CAD/CAE software still use the older stuff, along with I think KOTOR.

ATi never has been strong with OpenGL, its true. Last I heard, they moved from a MCD to an ICD (that was like two years ago, the last big increase in speed in OGL for ATi) but never really got into a hand-optimized assembly version or anything. At the time it was looking like OpenGL might die just like Glide did, just like ATi's CIF did, and Nvidia's Cg pretty well did.

Just like could say Nvidia peeps and DX9.0c and SM3.0 have a lot of room for speed improvement, so too you could say ATi has room for speed improvement in OpenGL. Still, At the rate ATi is releasing drivers, they've got one shot of making a sped up OpenGl with the Doom 3 release (But I'm not optimistic it will happen right away, probably like CAT 5.1 before it catches up.)

I'm not so sure both are doing an ARB2 path? How is that even possible if Nvidia in hardware cannot do 24-bitFP? Even the 5950's capabilities are far different then the 6800, and I would not be surprised at all if they used different optimized rendering paths.
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Got a question for all you ati fans out there. How many computer compenents do any computations that are not to the power of 2 bytes without speed loss?

Why do you buy into that ATi is doing 24 bit FP, Are you sure they are doing 24 bit FP just becuase they say so?

In all my experience with computers which is very extensive btw I have never heard of any architecture that can do any type of math calculations that aren't to the power of 2.


Oh yes btw Ogl is not Dx, Dx 9 allows 24 bit in RGB channels (3x8 bit channels) Where did the alpha channel go, are you sure ati is still doing 24 bit? Ogl doesn't support 24 bit precision my friends it doesn't allow it.

This argument is abosuletly false if you think ATi can do a driver update they have to do a architecture update just like nV did after thier fx fiasco.
 
Dougieha said:
I think the end result of this entire thread is that either card will run the game perfectly fine. In this one game, it appears that the 6800 is faster, but it could be entirely the reverse in a future game such as HL2. For that matter, I'm sure that both cards will also run HL2 perfectly fine, even if one is faster than another. There really is no point in everyone getting their panties up in a bunch.
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the end result of the thread? i think this thread still has a good 30-40 pages left. let's get posting! but yes you are right, people should settle down and not kick themselves for buying ATi instead of nVidia. both cards will be great - and nVidia people should not be gloating. this is the first of the next gen games - we have a while to go until we decide which card of this generation is the "winner" if there is one.
 
I lost my place in this thread. I can't even found where I posted previously. Anyway lets keep it going even more!
 
denaps said:
the end result of the thread? i think this thread still has a good 30-40 pages left. let's get posting! but yes you are right, people should settle down and not kick themselves for buying ATi instead of nVidia. both cards will be great - and nVidia people should not be gloating. this is the first of the next gen games - we have a while to go until we decide which card of this generation is the "winner" if there is one.
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:p Yeah, I'm sure this thread is far from over...there's lots more rehashing to be done.
 
Actually I have no idea how OpenGL works, I gave up on it a long time ago. All that is known for sure is that ATi's native implementation is 24-bitFP (96) and Nvidias is 16 or 32-bitFP (128) You can dither to the accuracy you want, but there will be a performance hit. Its not like integers IE: 8-8-8-8, its more like 24-24-24-24 (the alpha component is still there, and its not really using 24-bits per channel... Really kinda hard to visualize as its floating point)

Its not quite like 24-bit colour for the desktop, which Microsoft seems to have gotten rid of for performance reasons. Back then, most videocards ran on a 16 or 32-bit bus (unlike the 128 or 256 bit bus of today) which means a lot of times you got the exact same speed whether you used 24 or 32-bit colour, so why not just use 32-bit.
 
Dougieha said:
:p Yeah, I'm sure this thread is far from over...there's lots more rehashing to be done.
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Why doesn't anyone argue the FACT that RED is way cooler then green and D00m3 has all kinds of red in it so ATi = teh win? I think it's obvious.
 
Dougieha said:
I think the end result of this entire thread is that either card will run the game perfectly fine. In this one game, it appears that the 6800 is faster, but it could be entirely the reverse in a future game such as HL2. For that matter, I'm sure that both cards will also run HL2 perfectly fine, even if one is faster than another. There really is no point in everyone getting their panties up in a bunch. :)

The difference for me in choosing which card was the fact that I couldn't find the x800 in stock anywhere, while I found the 6800 in quantity. So, I'm currently running a 6800 GT, and I was running a 9800 Pro previously and a Geforce 2 Ultra before that. They were all good cards.
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I don't see the point in arguing either, I will always purchase ATI cards over nvidia anyway. so its not like a FPS Difference will make THAT Much of a difference, my computer is 2 gens ago anyway (2.8P4 845PE)
 
ATI has been owning for sooooo loooong now...you guys let the nVidiots have their day (-; Just messing guys...both cards are great and have been for some time now. Again I am waiting for the next gen...then going 939/64 + BEST VIDEO CARD DEAL!
 
James Crivellone said:
HL2 is still coming, and I honestly would still not have an issue purchasing an X800, in fact I sitll want one :)
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You don't get cards for free? :confused:
 
I'm actually glad to see Nvidia doing better now too.

Bring those X800pro/XT prices back down to earth, and start a price war so I can buy either one :)
 
ZenOps said:
Actually I have no idea how OpenGL works, I gave up on it a long time ago. All that is known for sure is that ATi's native implementation is 24-bitFP (96) and Nvidias is 16 or 32-bitFP (128) You can dither to the accuracy you want, but there will be a performance hit. Its not like integers IE: 8-8-8-8, its more like 24-24-24-24 (the alpha component is still there, and its not really using 24-bits per channel... Really kinda hard to visualize as its floating point)

Its not quite like 24-bit colour for the desktop, which Microsoft seems to have gotten rid of for performance reasons. Back then, most videocards ran on a 16 or 32-bit bus (unlike the 128 or 256 bit bus of today) which means a lot of times you got the exact same speed whether you used 24 or 32-bit colour, so why not just use 32-bit.
Click to expand...

Well with 32 bit there is a incease of bandwidth that is needed, I think it was ATi's CEO that said this thats why the Fx line got screwed, they had everything but the bandwidth necessary to do it. Thats why they haven't done it yet.
 
Ok... I think it's time to step in and clear up a huge misconception that everyone posting in this forum seems to have.

ATi's OpenGL drivers are NOT the reason Doom3 runs faster on nVidia hardware. People keep saying 'wait for ATi to optimize their OpenGL driver, blah blah'. Trust me, no amount of optimizations on ATi's part will get their performance anywhere close to nVidia's. Why? Because the reason nVidia is faster is built into the very hardware architecture, not the drivers.

Doom3's lighting model is completely dependant on heavy use of stencil buffer shadow volume calculations, as well as their unified shader model for all surfaces. nVidia designed their shadow culling hardware to accelerate this same shadow volume calculation from the start. Not only that, but nVidia's hardware can execute the Doom3 unified shader model in fewer passes that ATi's, period. I can't make it more clear, there are no driver optimizations that can affect either of these factors, and so ATi won't be able to do anything about it. nVidia's GeForce 6 line was designed with the way Carmack wrote Doom3's rendering engine, and that has been said from the very start. ATi is done on Doom3, and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Another thing, for all of you who insist that Doom3 was running optimized for nVidia's drivers, BOTH ATi and nVidia are rendering on the EXACT SAME ARB2 render path. This has been noted dozens of times. Both cards' drivers are getting exactly the same codepath. So all the ATi fanboys trying desperately to scrounge up something they can hold on to, sorry, just face the facts. Presented with exactly the same high quality settings, same renderpath with the same amount of knowledge about Doom3's render model, nVidia's hardware destroys ATi's. Again.. why is this? It's because NV40 is a redesigned architecture, completely for Doom3 and the next generation of games, whereas the X800 is simply a wider (pipeline-wise) 9800xt, with a couple extra's thrown in. ATi tried to play this off, saying they didn't need SM3.0 support, so they weren't going to redesign their 'winning' architecture. Oops. Now they are an architecture generation behind, and nVidia is sure as hell not going to let them play catch-up again.
 
eXzite said:
Ok... I think it's time to step in and clear up a huge misconception that everyone posting in this forum seems to have.

ATi's OpenGL drivers are NOT the reason Doom3 runs faster on nVidia hardware. People keep saying 'wait for ATi to optimize their OpenGL driver, blah blah'. Trust me, no amount of optimizations on ATi's part will get their performance anywhere close to nVidia's. Why? Because the reason nVidia is faster is built into the very hardware architecture, not the drivers.

Doom3's lighting model is completely dependant on heavy use of stencil buffer shadow volume calculations, as well as their unified shader model for all surfaces. nVidia designed their shadow culling hardware to accelerate this same shadow volume calculation from the start. Not only that, but nVidia's hardware can execute the Doom3 unified shader model in fewer passes that ATi's, period. I can't make it more clear, there are no driver optimizations that can affect either of these factors, and so ATi won't be able to do anything about it. nVidia's GeForce 6 line was designed with the way Carmack wrote Doom3's rendering engine, and that has been said from the very start. ATi is done on Doom3, and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

Another thing, for all of you who insist that Doom3 was running optimized for nVidia's drivers, BOTH ATi and nVidia are rendering on the EXACT SAME ARB2 render path. This has been noted dozens of times. Both cards' drivers are getting exactly the same codepath. So all the ATi fanboys trying desperately to scrounge up something they can hold on to, sorry, just face the facts. Presented with exactly the same high quality settings, same renderpath with the same amount of knowledge about Doom3's render model, nVidia's hardware destroys ATi's. Again.. why is this? It's because NV40 is a redesigned architecture, completely for Doom3 and the next generation of games, whereas the X800 is simply a wider (pipeline-wise) 9800xt, with a couple extra's thrown in. ATi tried to play this off, saying they didn't need SM3.0 support, so they weren't going to redesign their 'winning' architecture. Oops. Now they are an architecture generation behind, and nVidia is sure as hell not going to let them play catch-up again.
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Yep, Carmack has never optimized for any cards. In numerous interviews he stated that the 9800 will run faster then the fx 5900 too. So If people still think he optimized for the 6800, must be just thick skulled.
 
Just before you makee any foolish decisions. Just think of Mother Nature and your surroundings when your buying a Geforce 6800 (extrme Power consumption and incredible Noisy). Maybe give attention to your economy too (GF 6800 rig consumes 283 Watt under 3D games). Is 5 FPS more worth all this??? :rolleyes:
 
Xander2None said:
Just before you makee any foolish decisions. Just think of Mother Nature and your surroundings when your buying a Geforce 6800 (extrme Power consumption and incredible Noisy). Maybe give attention to your economy too (GF 6800 rig consumes 283 Watt under 3D games). Is 5 FPS more worth all this??? :rolleyes:
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how much does an ati x800 rig take, 245 watts? there isn't much of a difference. Oh wait how about the gt its alot less then the ultra that is what you were taking about with the 283 watts I presume. And it costs less too.
 
Is the following quote the most ignored statement in the entire article regarding these benchmarks or what?

John Carmack: "It should be noted that all of the modern cards play the game very well, and benchmark scores should not be the be-all-end-all decision maker."

I mean, three quarters of this thread is about how nVidia is owning ATi. For chrissakes, we're only talking about one game. Lets say the 6800GT/OC/etc runs 150fps to 64fps in D3. Well, suppose ATi solution runs every other game that comes out in the next six months to a year better. Then who lucked out? The operative word here is luck. nVidia made a point of betting the farm on their D3 performance ... but at what expense? What if ATi had still been the better performer? They couldn't have known for certain. The gamble paid off in this case, but will it down the road? Are we really ready to be happy about the performance of a $400-$500 video card in a single title? (Half Life 2 + 9800/X800 for instance). Such a trend seems dangerous to me.

Lucky for us (that word again), both companies are producing amazingly powerful GPUs which should live longer than the hardware that has been released in the past. But if product cycles continue at 6 month intervals, good grief!--what's next? Do we really go out and buy a card that runs D3 a third faster than current cards six months from now? If so, I have my hand out looking for hand-me-downs. :)

Peace
 
rancor said:
Well with 32 bit there is a incease of bandwidth that is needed, I think it was ATi's CEO that said this thats why the Fx line got screwed, they had everything but the bandwidth necessary to do it. Thats why they haven't done it yet.
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I don't think that comment applied to the whole FX line when it was made, but was probably made in context to the 5800/5800U, 5600 and 5200. The NV30/31/34 all had 128-bit memory interfaces. The NV35/38 have 256-bit memory interfaces.

I still think the comment was off because even after getting more bandwidth with the NV35/38, the limitation was still shader speed. The NV36 (5700/5700U) had much improved performance over the NV31 (5600/5600U), even clock for clock, due to the improved and increased number of shader units even with a 128-bit memory interface. With color compression, FP32 isn't much worse for performance than FP24 on the respective cards due to bandwidth alone. However, relatively weak shaders in the NV3x line was more responsible for poor PS2.0 performance.
 
pxc said:
I don't think that comment applied to the whole FX line when it was made, but was probably made in context to the 5800/5800U, 5600 and 5200. The NV30/31/34 all had 128-bit memory interfaces. The NV35/38 have 256-bit memory interfaces.

I still think the comment was off because even after getting more bandwidth with the NV35/38, the limitation was still shader speed. The NV36 (5700/5700U) had much improved performance over the NV31 (5600/5600U), even clock for clock, due to the improved and increased number of shader units even with a 128-bit memory interface. With color compression, FP32 isn't much worse for performance than FP24 on the respective cards due to bandwidth alone. However, relatively weak shaders in the NV3x line was more responsible for poor PS2.0 performance.
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Its not just bandwidth though ATi's CEO damit it might have been the CFO don't remember now, also mentioned 32 bit vs 24 bit needed 33% increase in everything from transistors, to number of pixel and vertex shaders to bandwidth.

The fx line didn't have any of those increases compaired to the the 9800.
 
Folks don't forget we're only seeing nVidia tearing up ATI on this one single game on this first benchmark with the provided beta drivers at default settings. I will be more trusting when I see these test done in the hands of Kyle and Steve and their real world test.
 
Xander2None said:
Just before you makee any foolish decisions. Just think of Mother Nature and your surroundings when your buying a Geforce 6800 (extrme Power consumption and incredible Noisy). Maybe give attention to your economy too (GF 6800 rig consumes 283 Watt under 3D games). Is 5 FPS more worth all this??? :rolleyes:
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are you for real? this forum is about computers, technology, and performance - not bumblebees and flowers. i don't think anyone will base a decision on "mother nature" rather than the performance they are getting for their $400-$500. even so, the power differences and noise are NOT the big issue you are making them out to be. my 6800GT with fan set to always on is barely louder than my 9800XT was.
 
who gives a dam if you want to play doom3 then currently you should buy a nvidia, if not dont worry about it. everyone acts like you freakin own the companies just be glad the competion is ongoing. and im sure ati will within the year release a new gpu ... so whats it matter... what you buy today will be old news tomarrow. just get the best for what your interst is in and be glad tech is where its at. Heck if I didnt play games I wouldnt even buy ati nor nvidia i would purchase a matrox.
 
Sharpe said:
Too bad they didn't have an SLI setup. I would have liked to have seen that 4GB system running on a Tumwater-based server board (only dual PCI-X board that I know of) with dual GeForce 6800Ultras. Imagine... 4GB RAM, dual Xeons, dual GeForce 6800Ultras... *drool* ...Water cooling all around... *spooge*

Sorry if someone said this earlier. I got to about page 25 out of 30+ before I quit reading.
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PCI-X is NOT PCIe (or PCI-E). Learn your acronyms since both exist and they're very different.

But yes, SLI benchies would be fun to drool over. Of course, they'd also be hideously depressing too, but that's beside the point ;).
 
Chris_B said:
Was actually hollenstead that stated the game was capped to 60 FPS in an interview with gamespot, he said "no matter what you do its not going to run faster than that". Think the main reason was to stop the cheesy fps specific jumps of the old quake 3 engine. :eek:
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after reading some of your posts on this thread they seem pretty retarded like this one. even if the 60fps is capped if i could get 80fps on D3, i'd welcome it. the more the better since i could do more res and lower fps drops and yes even with 5fps more you would notice the difference.

any hardcore fps'er would know that.:rolleyes:

back to the subject the geforce GT looks mighty tempting even more now.
 
rancor said:
Its not just bandwidth though ATi's CEO damit it might have been the CFO don't remember now, also mentioned 32 bit vs 24 bit needed 33% increase in everything from transistors, to number of pixel and vertex shaders to bandwidth.

The fx line didn't have any of those increases compaired to the the 9800.
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Of course the pipelines have the necessary transistors to perform FP32 on the NV3x line. It's silly to say they don't. The number of pixel and vertex shaders don't rely on the width of the FP data. That's like saying an Athlon 64 needs twice as many executions units to run 64-bit software. LOL

I think the bandwidth comment was just to rub in the fact, at the time, that NV was being boneheaded about going to a 256-bit memory bus. I'll bet that when the comment was made the speaker had no idea the real problem was pixel shader 2.0 performance. The NV30 was actually pretty good in DX8.x and DX7 performance, but lagged the R300 badly in PS2.0 performance.
 
The funnies thing about this thread?


All the people who earned a vacation from the forums. :D


Something I don't think has been really touched on due to such a focus on the cards themselves.....this was just as much an opportunity for ID to demonstrate Doom 3 as ATI or nVidias to try out new drivers on their new cards. I'm sure they all left the proverbial table with "To-Do-List"s.
 
HighHardOne said:
Is the following quote the most ignored statement in the entire article regarding these benchmarks or what?

John Carmack: "It should be noted that all of the modern cards play the game very well, and benchmark scores should not be the be-all-end-all decision maker."

I mean, three quarters of this thread is about how nVidia is owning ATi. For chrissakes, we're only talking about one game. Lets say the 6800GT/OC/etc runs 150fps to 64fps in D3. Well, suppose ATi solution runs every other game that comes out in the next six months to a year better. Then who lucked out? The operative word here is luck. nVidia made a point of betting the farm on their D3 performance ... but at what expense? What if ATi had still been the better performer? They couldn't have known for certain. The gamble paid off in this case, but will it down the road? Are we really ready to be happy about the performance of a $400-$500 video card in a single title? (Half Life 2 + 9800/X800 for instance). Such a trend seems dangerous to me.

Lucky for us (that word again), both companies are producing amazingly powerful GPUs which should live longer than the hardware that has been released in the past. But if product cycles continue at 6 month intervals, good grief!--what's next? Do we really go out and buy a card that runs D3 a third faster than current cards six months from now? If so, I have my hand out looking for hand-me-downs. :)

Peace
Click to expand...

The problem is there's absolutely no basis for the argument that 'ATI might/will perform better in other games'. Look at the current DX9 performance. NVIDIA and ATI are neck and neck and NVIDIA keeps improving with every driver release. The argument simply doesn't hold any water.
 
Xander2None said:
Just before you makee any foolish decisions. Just think of Mother Nature and your surroundings when your buying a Geforce 6800 (extrme Power consumption and incredible Noisy). Maybe give attention to your economy too (GF 6800 rig consumes 283 Watt under 3D games). Is 5 FPS more worth all this??? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I think you're lost. :confused: The Democratic Underground is over thataway. :rolleyes:

<<<---------lll
 
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