Investigations into Socket 939 Athlon 64 Overclocking

Doom 3 Performance

More so than any other game that we tested, Doom 3 is going to be held up by the X800 Pro. With the engine being heavily optimized for NVIDIA's architecture - or simply being a better fit for OpenGL and shadows, if you prefer - performance scaling drops off rapidly with increasing resolutions. Whether future Doom 3 engine licensees will exhibit similar results is up for debate, Call of Duty and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, for example, don't correlate directly with Quake 3 performance. However, we expect NVIDIA to maintain some advantage over ATI in Quake 4 and Quake Wars.

At 640x480 without antialiasing, Doom 3 still manages to gain 43% more performance. That drops off quickly to 34% at 800x600 and 18% at 1024x768. Consider our 1024x768 4xAA results to be something of a reality check. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is if your bottleneck is somewhere else. The 1% increase between 1.8 GHz and 2.7 GHz performance is testament to this fact. Higher quality RAM, once again, buys about 5% more performance relative to budget RAM, though the 2T timing at 9x300 is 12% slower than performance RAM. It's also slower than the value RAM at 9x289, which is a trend seen in BF2 and several other tests.