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ATI Radeon 3870

Author:	Michael Lynch
Date:	2008.04.07
Topic:	Video
Provider:	ATI
Manufacturer:	ATI

ATI Radeon HD 3870

Doom 3

About Doom 3:

Very similar to previous versions of Doom, you play an anonymous marine who was sent to a base on mars for a routine mission. Scientists on the base were exploring a set of ruins where they made a discovery of a set of tablets. On these tablets were records that the martians once found a type of teleportion device that lead to hell. Finding this out too late, the development was invaded by demons, and you find yourself forced to fight your way to safety.

Benchmarking Doom 3:

Before we talk about how we are going to benchmark Doom 3, lets first define some programs and features we will be taking advantage of.

FRAPS: A benchmarking tool that records the FPS of your active window, namely Doom 3, and adds that information to a spreadsheet. Once finished recording it will tell you the minimum, maximum, and average frames per second of what it was recording.

Time Demo: A pre-recorded set of data recorded from true game play. The time demo will be replayed by the game engine as if you are playing it your self, it will then time how long it takes the render the entire record. At the conclusion of the test it will report the number of frames rendered, how long it took to render, and the average frames per seconds.

Since benchmarking our actual game play will produce a different result each time, we decided to use a timedemo. Using this timedemo will produce results that make the comparison between different products easy and accurate. Luckily, Doom 3 comes with a pre-recorded timedemo called "Demo1", in order to run this demo you must first open the command prompt by pressing and holding Ctrl, Alt, ~, once open type "timedemo <DemoName>". Thus said, we will be using both the built in benchmark and fraps to benchmark the timedemo to try and get an accurate reading.

Benchmark Results:

Doom 3
Ultra High Settings, with Anti-Aliasing 16x : 1600 x 1200
Min FPS	Max FPS	Avg. FPS	High Quality Special Effects: Yes Enable Shadows: Yes Enable Specular: Yes Enable Bump Maps: Yes Vertical Sync: Yes
42	65	58.637
Built-in Benchmark: Time Demo Results 2148 Frames rendered in 36.6 Seconds 58.7 FPS

Doom 3
Ultra High Settings, with Anti-Aliasing Off : 1600 x 1200
Min FPS	Max FPS	Avg. FPS	High Quality Special Effects: Yes Enable Shadows: Yes Enable Specular: Yes Enable Bump Maps: Yes Vertical Sync: Yes
50	65	59.653
Built-in Benchmark: Time Demo Results 2148 Frames rendered in 36.0 Seconds 59.7 FPS

As you can see with playing Doom 3 on the highest available settings and max resolution, the game runs extremely smooth. Running at a minimum of 42FPS and capping out at 65FPS, there is nothing that Doom 3 can generate that would remotely cause the ATI Radeon 3870 to lag. To verify that these results weren't scewed in anyway I decided to try it out myself, and from what I can tell, these readings are pretty much dead on. There wasn't even a split second where I encountered any lag or was able to tell the gameplay slowdown.

Comparing the ATI Radeon 3870 and the BFG 8800GT Overclocked, you can see that on both settings the ATI Radeon 3870 performed higher by 5-10 frames per second. Both had the same maximum of 65 frames per second becuase Doom 3 has a cap on thier available FPS and will not allow over 65FPS. Thus both cards were able to handle well over 65FPS maximum, but because of the limit we are unable to tell.

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