Devil decided to go on vacation to Mars, but he took his demonic minions with him. Humans currently established a colony on the red planet now have a conflict with the hellspawn because the beautiful beaches of Mars are overcrowed... Ok this is my edition of Doom 3's scenario. It is obvious that I need vacation ... Ok the real story follows:

Massive demonic invasion has overwhelmed the Union Aerospace Corporations’ (UAC) Mars Research Facility leaving only chaos and horror in its wake. As one of only a few survivors, you struggle with shock and fear as you fight your way to Hell and back, in an epic clash against pure evil.

Activision made it's miracle again with Doom 3 which is said to be the best-looking game ever, thanks to the brand-new 3D graphics engine used to generate its convincingly lifelike, densely atmospheric, and surprisingly expansive environments. If you are a fan of the previous Doom games then you will get many flashbacks with this 3rd revision, since you will find reimagined versions of almost every monster from both Doom and Doom II.

Of course I couldn't miss to add Doom 3 in our benchmark suite. So I grabbed fps in a variaty of resolutions to measure the rendering performance of the latest generation VGA cards.

Enabling the high quality setting and executing the timedemo demo1 command twice for each resolution, I witnessed the following:

Without the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings enabled the 2 cards performed similarly with only a 2-4 frames difference. Enabling the quality settings, 4x for AA and 8x for AF the situation changes a lot.

As you can see, the rumors are true. NVidia's chipsets are far better when rendering Doom 3's high-tech 3D engine. Unfortunately the 29 fps at the 1600x1200 resolution indicate ATI's weakness when rendering shader 3.0 based 3D engines.

-ATI 4.8 Doom 3 Hot Fix Catalyst

A few days ago ATI released new catalyst drivers made especially for improving the performance of it's VGA cards when rendering Doom 3's engine. After installing the special Doom 3 catalyst I grabbed some fps to compare the results with the 6800 Ultra. Let's see what the new Catalysts can do.

Not the performance hike I expected. Only 2 fps at the 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions. But the biggest performance drawback is evident with the AA and AF quality settings enabled. So let's see if there is any performance difference now with the special 4.8 Catalyst.

If you are left astonished you are not alone. When I first saw the above results I couldn't believe in my eyes. The special 4.8 Catalyst not only give a great performance hike to ATI's cards but it also made Asus' X800 XT card outperform the 6800 Ultra in 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions.

After seeing these incredible results in Doom 3, I imediately run some more games to see if there is be a performance boost and true there was a boost especialy in the latest games like Farcry. But there were many problems and bugs like missing and blinking textures.

It is obvious that this Catalyst it was made for boosting Doom 3's performance. That was ATI's primary goal. I only recommend installing this Catalyst if you are a Doom 3 fan. If you don't care about Doom 3 at all then you don't have to pass on this beta Catalyst. Soon a better version will be released.