Video Card for Doom 3

12-31-2004, 10:12 PM

My GeForce 4 Ti doesn't seem to be holding up to the challenge of Doom 3. I was thinking about one of these:

GeForce FX5900

Thoughts? I am using an Asus A7N8X Mobo, and am thinking about adding some RAM and upgrading the processor. System would be a Barton core Athlon XP 3000+, 1.5GB RAM, and the above video card.

Chris · 12-31-2004, 11:43 PM

Here's the Doom3 Performance guides:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2149&p=7

(CPU)

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2146&p=4

(graphics)

Ian-Fl · 01-01-2005, 10:27 AM

It's interesting that the Athlon XP is at the bottom of the list with the Celeron.
In addition,you'll probably have to upgrade the motherboard to get what you want and that would mean reformatting your hard drive.
Software developers must be working with next generation PC's and have revenue sharing agreements with hardware developers similar to what Blockbuster does with film studios.

WayneO · 01-01-2005, 12:32 PM

I would stay away form the 5x00 series of cards, since they are aging quick. I also think 1GB of RAM is enough for almost any home PC. Put a lot more money into the video card or go to a 64 system. A little story: My brother has an Athlon XP overclocked to 2.3ghz. This past week, he went from 512MB to 1GB of RAM and upgraded his video card from a ATi 9700 Pro to an nVidia 6600GT. I said the RAM wouldn't be a BAD idea, but.........he did both anyway. Now he is getting ablsolutely no better performance whatsoever. The game loads a little quicker with the RAM, that's about it, no better frame rates, even worse in some cases. Needless to say, he's a little bent for not listening to me. Choose wisely.

Mike Fassler · 01-01-2005, 06:01 PM

heh the 6600 gt isnt a drastic improvement over the 9700 pro,and more ram never affects framerates.

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01-01-2005, 07:00 PM

Ok, so it seems that any upgrade in my video card will boost Doom 3 performance. They don't even bother rating the GeForce 4.

Without going all the way to a mobo/RAM/cpu/video card upgrade, I could go with an Athlon XP 3000+, overclock it a tad, and pump some bucks into a GeForce 6800.

Vader · 07-13-2005, 04:39 PM

Quote:

heh the 6600 gt isnt a drastic improvement over the 9700 pro.....

Hmmm.... someone forgot to tell the gents over at Tom's Hardware about that one. The 6600GT clocks in at 81.9 FPS, while the ATI card "limps" in at 42.0 fps at High Quality 1024x768....

Gerald LaFrance · 07-13-2005, 05:30 PM

The Setup for Doom 3 would be a SLI setup (Dual Vid cards) which is PCI Express and Nvidia vid cards not sure if ATI has this setup yet ?? But would involve a MAJOR upgrade probally a whole new system!! I saw the FPS rates somewhere on the net almost double with a single card!!

EDIT It was the OLD "Screen Savers" show not sure if they still have that website up as I DONT watch the new one AOTS

Matt Wright · 07-13-2005, 08:35 PM

In my experience a larger framebuffer can sometimes affect framerate. DooM 3 with the settings at Ultra bring a system to its' knees unless you have 1GB of RAM and a 256MB video card, with a 512MB video card being recommended by the iD software folks.

Further quite often benchmarks don't always show the true user experience. I know that you can benchmark and it isn't very sensitive to the slight hitches you get when you are swapping texture data around, but from the users' perspective this directly affects the percieved smoothness.

In general there are diminishing returns to a larger frame buffer, this depends on the horsepower in the GPU to play a game at a high resolution in the first place. The GeForce 6600GT for example has just enough power to do 1600x1200 for most games but you wouldn't want to go higher or add-in high AA or AF settings no matter the frame buffer size. But with a beefier card that has the potential to drive higher resolutions with a decent frame rate the value for a larger buffer to help smooth out the performance at higher resolutions is greater.

But any way back on topic... A 6600GT is a great value, and as pointed out it does really well in Doom 3. NVIDIA tried very hard to optimize the GeForce 6-series for Doom 3, they even included acceleration for the method of shadow rendering D3 uses.

Buzz what kind of monitor are you using?

07-14-2005, 06:25 PM

Wow, hadn't thought about this thread in a while. The monitor is a Viewsonic E790B, 19" crt.

I never did upgrade the card. Too much other stuff going on. I did add an old 15" monitor for dual monitors.