As John Carmack said of DOOM 3 in our introduction, "all of the modern cards play the game very well." The NVIDIA 6800Ultra and 6800GT video cards along with the Radeon X800XT-PE are going to be stellar DOOM 3 performers probably giving the gamer better Image Quality and framerate performance than we ever thought would be possible at the launch of DOOM 3. These three GPUs are simply going to deliver a level of visual gameplay immersion in DOOM 3 that will likely blow away even the most hardened game player or hardware enthusiast. That said, it looks as if ATI's decision to scale their current line of flagship video cards by crippling the Radeon X800Pro's graphics pipelines to 12 pipes, instead of the 16 pipes of the Radeon X800XT-PE might have been a bad move, at least in terms of satisfying DOOM 3 players. NVIDIA on the other hand chose to scale from their Ultra to GT models by only decreasing the clock speed of the GPUs. The NVIDIA 6800GT certainly stood out among the crowd as its DOOM 3 framerates continually outpaced the Radeon X800XT-PE that currently has a list price that is $100 more than the GeForce 6800GT. NVIDIA has told us more than once that the 6800 series was "designed to play DOOM 3," and the truth of that statement is now glaringly obvious.
The older GeForceFX 5950 and Radeon 9800XT cards have also shown that they are going to deliver great performance in DOOM 3. Having a last-generation video card and playing DOOM 3 is simply going to provide a great gaming experience with all features turned on that make DOOM 3 what it is. So hardly think that you are going to be left behind. In fact if you are playing on a bit older hardware, you might be the envy of your block as you are probably coming away with more money left over to spend on games than your neighbor. What good is a $500 video card if you don't have money left over to purchase DOOM 3?
For those of you that think you are not going to have the hardware that you need to play DOOM 3, the fact of the matter is that many of you will be just fine, although an upgrade may still be in your future. As of this afternoon we were playing DOOM 3 on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card and having a surprisingly good gaming experience. Even a subtle jump to an AMD 2500+ with a GeForce 3 video card that is two years old will deliver a solid gaming experience that will let you enjoy the game the way id Software designed it to be. That fact alone should let many of you know that you will not be left behind in experiencing DOOM 3.
