Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. We run this game at 1024x768x32 resolution at high quality. 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 PC 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.

You can check the results of our benchmarking below. All the listed video cards were installed on ECS RS482-M.

Doom 3 – Demo 1	Score	Difference
Foxconn WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS (nForce 4 Ultra) + GeForce 6600 GT	84.5	+849.44%
GeForce 6600 GT (128 MB, 128 bits)	80.3	+802.25%
GeForce 6200 (128 MB, 128 bits)	39.3	+341.57%
GeForce 6200 TurboCache (64 MB, 64 bits)	17.1	+92.13%
ECS RS482-M (Radeon Xpress 200 - RS482 + SB400) on-board	8.9
Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS (GeForce 6100 + nForce 410) on-board	8.7	-2.30%

As you can see, Radeon Xpress 200 achieved a performance similar to its main competitor, GeForce 6100.

All tested video cards beat Radeon Xpress 200 on-board video used by ECS RS482-M.

When we installed a GeForce 6600 GT, ECS RS482-M was 5% slower than Foxconn WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS, which is, as we mentioned earlier, a mainstream motherboard based on nForce 4 Ultra chipset