DOOM 3 VIDEO PERFORMANCE

BENCHMARK SETTINGS

COMMENT - "The MSI GeForce 5900 XT puts in a great performance and is perfectly playable at all of the resolutions tested, to boost image quality it is recommended that you enable Specular Lighting which increases image quality at only a 4% performance cost. The Inno3D GeForce4 Ti4200 also does well but starts to struggle at 1024x768 but 43fps is still perfectly playable. The 3Dpower Ti500 offers almost GeForce4 Ti4200 performance but can't manage to get atleast 40fps at 1024x768 so is best used at 800x600 instead. The MSI GeForce4 MX 440 can also run Doom3 but really only at 640x480 and maybe at 800x600 if you don't mind some choppy gameplay."

BENCHMARK SETTINGS

COMMENT - "All of the video cards are starting to struggle badly when we turn on high quality settings like High Quality Special Effects, Shadows, Specular Lighting and Bump Mappings. This time only the MSI GeForce 5900 XT can deliver atleast 60fps which is does for 640x480 and almost at 800x600, at 1024x768 it's performance does suffer badly and it can only deliver 44fps which sometimes will result in choppy gameplay. The Inno3D GeForce4 Ti4200 is like the other older video cards struggles with the high quality settings and it only just reaches 40fps even at 640x480. The 3dpower Ti500 almost reaches 40fps but doesn't quite make it and the 36fps at 640x480 resulted in choppy gameplay. The MSI GeForce4 MX 440 was unplayable at all of the resolutions when used with advanced effects."

BENCHMARK SETTINGS

COMMENT - "The MSI GeForce 5900 XT does become video card limited at 1024x768 with the advanced options enabled but you will still get a 7% performance increase when upgrading from a 1.8GHZ to a 2.2GHZ processor. The cpu limited test is the 640x480 with advanced options disabled and the 2.2GHZ processor was 15% faster than the 1.8GHZ processor and an impressive 36% faster than a 1.4GHZ processor. With advanced options disabled Doom3 appears to be quite cpu limited but with the advanced options enabled it is video card limited as shown by the 1024x768 with advanced options enabled."

MSI GEFORCE 5900XT - As expected this video card delivered the best performance, it was able to deliver atleast 30fps even with advanced options enabled. 44fps at 1024x768 with advanced options enabled is very impressive however 58fps at 800x600 is much better for smooth gameplay.

INNO3D GEFORCE4 Ti4200 - Although this video card is showing it's age it was able to deliver atleast 30fps at all of the resolutions tested provided all of the advanced options are disabled. It was also able to deliver 30fps at 800x600 with the advanced options enabled.

3DPOWER Ti500 - Performed a bit slower than the Inno3D GeForce4 Ti4200 with advanced options disabled and was only able to deliver 36fps at 640x480.

MSI GEFORCE4 MX 440 - Performed as expected and couldn't deliver playable performance with advanced options enabled. However it did manage 30fps at 800x600 or a better 41fps at 640x480 with advanced options disabled which isn't bad for a video card using DX7.

If you are going to run Doom3 on anything less powerful than a MSI GeForce 5900 XT then lowering the resolution or disabling some of the advanced options will give you a big increase in speed. To make things easier for you here are the advanced options with the biggest performance hit:-

AS YOU CAN SEE JUST BY DISABLING SHADOWS YOU GAIN AN EXTRA 29% PERFORMANCE!