Id Software, a well-known game developer, shared its benchmarks of the forthcoming Doom 3 title with [H]ard|OCP web-site on Thursday. The data showcases performance of various graphics cards in a “timedemo” of the game that will be released on the 3^rd of August, 2004.

Doom 3 is a remake of id’s classic first person shooter released in early nineties. The plot of the game is invasion of evil forces on a space-base and counter-attack of the game’s main character. The new incarnation of the title has been in design for over 5 years and is expected to bring stunning visual effects and immerse game-play. Gamers all over the world are impatient to see the new Doom. The release of the title is likely to impact PC hardware industry, as the game is reported to be very demanding.

“The folks at id Software have been kind enough to share with us benchmarks from the upcoming Doom 3. We look at NVIDIA’ and ATI’s finest in a head to head comparison,” says [H]ard|OCP’s report.

The article covers performance of PCI Express x16 and AGP 8x graphics cards from two leading makers of visual processing units on Dell’s systems based on Intel Pentium 4 3.60GHz and Intel Pentium 4 3.20GHz microprocessors.

“The benchmarking was conducted on-site, and the hardware vendors did not have access to the demo before hand, so we are confident that there is no egregious cheating going on, but it should be noted that some of the ATI cards did show a performance drop when colored mip-levels were enabled, implying some fudging of the texture filtering. This has been a chronic issue for years, and almost all vendors have been guilty of it at one time or another. I hate the idea of drivers analyzing texture data and changing parameters, but it doesn't visibly impact the quality of the game unless you know exactly what to look for on a specific texture. On the other hand, the NVIDIA drivers have been tuned for Doom's primary light/surface interaction fragment program, and innocuous code changes can "fall off the fast path" and cause significant performance impacts, especially on NV30 [GeForce FX] class cards,” John Carmack, the head programmer at id Software, is reported to have said.

The best performer in the Doom 3’s timedemo used for benchmarking by id Software appears to be NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra, who managed to outperform ATI’s RADEON X800 XT graphics card by 8% to 32%. Previous generation of graphics processors, dubbed GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and RADEON 9800 XT, demonstrated equal performance. Earlier this year id named the GeForce FX graphics processing units preferable for the Doom 3 as a part of the marketing campaign with NVIDIA Corp..

Performance benchmarks and analysis of the Doom 3 game by dedicated media is expected to be published starting from the 3^rd of August, 2004, after the title is released officially.