Just a couple of days ago preliminary benchmarks for id’s Doom 3 were released onto the net, putting the Nvidia cards well ahead of ATi’s offerings. What’s most interesting about these benchmarks is that fact that neither Nvidia nor ATi had any access to the final Doom 3 code that’s in the shipping version. This means that these benchmarks are not factoring in any driver optimizations as we’ve seen with other games.
What’s most noteworthy is the fact that the Nvidia’s midrange GeForce 6800 GT easily keeps pace with ATi’s Radeon X800XT PE, which is ATi’s high-end graphics card. Apparantly the features Nvidia has been touting finally show their true potential with a next generation game such as Doom 3. We’ll have to see to what level ATi manages to up their performance, or whether they’ll be in the backseat from now on, with Nvidia crowned the king of 3D graphics once more.
On a related note, the FarCry version 1.2 patch that was just released has been pulled from Ubisoft’s website again, there were severe issues with ATi cards, with screen- and texture corruption as a result. Nvidia cards, especially the 6800 series, saw a healthy speed and image quality boost due to a NV40 code path now available. So it all looks to come together for Nvidia these days, Doom 3 runs best on Nvidia hardware, as does FarCry with the latest patch, the ball is firmly in ATi’s court now, let’s see what they counter with.
