Doom 3 Patch 1.3A DOES Make It Go Faster on PPC Macs--YES, IT DOES!

2004–09February 23, 2006Bill FoxGames
On our Tuesday edition, we reported our tests that clearly show that Doom 3 with the then just-released 1.3revA patch running on our 2 GHz iMac G5 (Rev.B) with ATI Radeon 9600 graphics, a Power PC Mac, runs over 20% faster. We used the default settings chosen by the game, a resolution of 640x480 and Medium Quality settings, for that particular Mac and reported that fact.

Yesterday, a web site well-known for excellent speed tests implied, at least, that web reports of the speed up on Power PC Macs with ATI graphics were not true unless some settings were changed between comparisons. They reported that they obtained the same frame rate on tests with many Macs with the patch installed as before and were backed by ATI on this assertion despite ATI's written information to the contrary.

Well, mistakes occasionally do happen so our scientific training led us to try to repeat our results. We re-ran the Doom 3 1.3revA tests and got the same result that we posted on our Tuesday edition--38 frames per second, over 20% faster than before the patch. But maybe something got inadvertantly changed along the line as originally suggested in the other web site's report so we reinstalled Doom 3 v1.1, the original release, and ran the demo speed test four times. Then we updated Doom 3 to v1.3 using the first patch released last July and ran it four more times. Finally, we applied the v1.3revA patch and ran the test a final four times.

Here are the results:

Speed of Doom 3 on 2 GHz iMac G5 (frames/sec)*
Doom 3 Version
Run Number
1.1
1.3
1.3revA
.
1
31
29
35
2
33
31
38
3
33
31
38
4
33
31
38
*Default settings. Red is much faster. Blue is much slower.

The results of our re-trial confirm those we previously reported on Tuesday (We reported an average of the last 3 runs because of incomplete pre-cacheing in run 1). The 1.3revA patch significantly increases the performance of Doom 3 on our iMac G5 at the game's default settings, just as we claimed originally.

To be fair, the web site disputing (at least indirectly) our results has largely withdrawn their original claim. It has been replaced with another comment attributed to ATI that there may be a performance increase at low resolutions and that the web site is re-running its tests. We have already demonstrated that, of course, but we look forward to independent confirmation. Such is science--critique leads to better-supported knowledge. [Bill Fox]



Saw something? Send a tip

The archive ran on reader tips. What did you see, where, and do you want the credit?

Read by the editor. Never published without your say.

More in Games · This month in the archive