09 - Doom 3

A massive demonic invasion has overwhelmed the Union Aerospace Corporations’ (UAC) Mars Research Facility leaving only chaos and horror in its wake. As one of the 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 OpenGL 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 revision, since you will find reimagined versions of almost every monster from both Doom and Doom II.

To measure performance with the game we used the timedemo demo1 command from the console (Alt+Ctrl+~). Enabling the high quality setting and executing the timedemo demo1 command twice for each resolution, I witnessed the following:

First without the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings enabled we got the following results:

Even though we did all the necessary optimizations to keep the framerate as high as possible, it seems that wasn't enough. Unfortunately, the X300 can't handle Doom's new engine with all its settings set to high. Maybe some overclocking might do the job later on.

Let's try to enable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. You can already guess the results will be dramatic but nevertheless it's interesting to see how much it affects our framerates.

Once again our fps dropped to half of their previous values. This is not a good sign since most VGA cards exhibit a decrease of 20-30%. However we shouldn't forget that the card is targeted at the low-end VGA market and the low-end VGA market last time we checked, doesn't ever get to use AntiAliasing anyway.

Let's move on to Far Cry.