Hands-On Report: DOOM 3 with New Patch v1.3--How Fast Is It?

When DOOM 3 came out as v1.1 for the Mac everyone remarked on its stiff hardware requirements. We reviewed DOOM 3 in March using our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with the upgraded top-of-the-line graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL, and a 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 and we also remarked on the need for heavy iron to play DOOM 3 at high quality and high resolutions. Our Power Mac G5 attained a mere 61 fps at 1024x768, high quality and shadows turned off.

In June, we posted a comparo between the best graphics cards for the Mac, the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL (now discontinued) and the ATI Radeon X800 XT. The ATI card was even less impressive than the Nvidia card at DOOM 3.

On Tuesday of this week we noted that Aspyr Media had released an update for DOOM 3, patch v1.3. The significant changes were to add Punkbuster anti-cheat support and Surround Sound 5.1 beta support. Were any speed tweaks added? We promised our Hands-On Report to find out. So how fast is it?

To test the new patch we ran Doom 3 v1.1 and v1.3 on our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5, with each graphics card, and on our new 20" 2GHz iMac G5. For the Power Mac G5 we used the settings listed in our SpeedFAQ (a resolution of 1024x768), the same used in our June card comparo. DOOM 3 ran too slowly with these settings on our iMac G5 (17 fps at 1024x768) so we ran the speed tests on it using the game-recommended resolution of 640x480, medium quality and shadows off. Here are the results:

Speed Comparison of DOOM 3 v1.1 vs 1.3 (frames per second)

Computer/Card	Doom 3 v1.1	Doom 3 v1.3	% Change
.
D2.5 GHz Power Mac G5-Nvidia	61	53	-13
D2.5 GHz Power Mac G5-ATI	53	46	-13
20" 2GHz iMac G5	35	31	-11

Unfortunately, DOOM 3 with the 1.3 patch runs more slowly, some 13 per cent or so. The same is true at the higher resolution of 1600x1200 where the Nvidia card lost 8 per cent and the ATI card lost 5 percent. The Nvidia card is still faster than the ATI card at 49 vs 37 fps. [Bill Fox]