Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. As we’ve done on other programs, we ran this game only at 1024x768. Since we were evaluating low-end video cards, we decided to not run our tests in higher resolutions, since rarely a user that buys a video card from this level will push resolutions above 1024x768 in 3D games.

This game allows several image quality levels and we’ve done our benchmarking on two levels: low and high. We run demo1 four times and wrote the obtained number of frames per second. The first result we discarded at once, since it is far inferior than the other results. This happens because at the first time we run the demo the game must load all textures to video memory, fact that doesn’t happen from the second time we run the demo on. From the three results left, we consider as our official result the middle result, i.e. we discard the highest and the lowest values. Curiously almost all times the values obtained at the second round on were the same.

A very important detail that we must mention is that Doom 3 has an internal FPS lock: it is only capable of generating 60 frames per second, even if your board is able to produce more frames per second than that. This is done in order to make the game to have the same “playability” sensation independently from the video card installed on the PC. This lock, however, is disabled in the game benchmarking mode.

For further details on how to measure 3D performance with Doom 3, read our tutorial on this subject.

Running this game in its low video quality mode, Leadtek GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 32-bit was 5.71% faster than Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 5.71% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), and 64.44% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI).

Leadtek GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 32-bit was beaten by GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia), which was 395.95% faster, GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), which was 277.70% faster, Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (ATI), which was 205.41% faster, GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), which was 191.89% faster and GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), which was 34.46% faster.

Enabling video quality enhancements, Leadtek GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 32-bit was 5.22% faster than Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 5.22% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), and 85.53% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI).