Introduction

There has been a flood of DOOM 3 benchmarks on the web, almost all of which are focusing on the high end of the market with benchmarks from Athlon FXs, P4EEs, 6800 Ultras, X800 XT PEs and all of this high end equipment that most people do not own. This is all fine and good if you have about a grand to drop on a new DOOM rig but I suspect that most people do not. There are some real steals for hardware right now and this includes the Athlon 2500+ Mobile, 9600XTs, and 9800Pros. The Mobile is all of 80$, 9800Pros are easily under 200$ and the 9600XTs run in the 120$ range. There are also a lot of 9700Pro owners out there so this is also aimed at them. With the Sempron coming out in a few days, the venerable Athlon XP and its many cores are still relevant today and the big question is how does last generation's hardware play DOOM 3?

Testbed

We cheat a little bit. The processor is a Barton based 2500+. It has an unlocked multiplier so we vary the bus and multiplier speeds to get to the same megahertz rating as the 1800+, a regular 2500+, a 3200+ and just for the heck of it, 2400 Mhz. This means our "1800+" may be slightly faster than a real 1800+ based on the Thoroughbred. This guide is only meant to serve to guage processor and video performance and not do a direct comparison between a real 1800+ and a underclocked 2500+.

Mobile 2500+ @ 133x11.5,166x11,200x11,200x12
512MB Corsair PC3200
Powercolor 9550 256MB
ATI 9600XT
ATI 9700Pro
ATI 9800Pro
Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA V HD
DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B

WinXP SP1
ATi's Catalyst 4.9 Beta
Forceware 4.27

Testing Methodology

We did not test at every single resolution with every possible IQ setting. The tested results are shown in raw unprocessed format below. We are not interested in how well the 9550 can play at 1600x1200 because in reality no one is playing DOOM 3 at 1600x1200 with the 9550. We are also not interested in the 9550 with a Barton at 2400 Mhz as we see that it is fill rate limited even with slower processors. In the borderline playable cases we generally only tested at the questionable resolution with the Barton at 12x200 since the videocard is fillrate limited at that point. We can extrapolate from the data and establish a framerate ceiling for the same resolution with a slower processor. The raw unformatted data in table form is provided below so the reader can take a look at where we do extrapolation as we graph the data on the following pages and draw some conclusions.

All advanced settings in DOOM are set to On with the exception of Vsync. The different quality levels affect the amount of texture compression. To quote from id's Robert Duffy directly -

In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic :-) and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically.

High quality uses compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse and no compression for normal maps. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss. This is the quality that for instance the PC Gamer review was played in.

Medium quality uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps. This still looks really really good but compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This level gets us comfortably onto 128MB video cards.

Low quality does everything medium quality does but it also downsizes textures over 512x512 and we downsize specular maps to 64x64 in this mode as well. This fits us onto a 64MB video card.

We test in all modes except for Ultra Quality as users with midrange cards are not likely to attempt to play at this setting.

Raw Unformatted Data

1800 (133 x 11.5)

2500+ (166x11)

3200 (200x11)

200x12