Hands-On Report: Aspyr Released Doom 3 Universal Binary--How Fast Is It?

2004–09February 21, 2006Bill FoxGames
Aspyr Media released Doom 3 v1.3revA Patch for the Mac and it is available for download via MacUpdate.com. It is a universal binary to be able to run Doom 3 on MacIntels and it provides a performance increase for ATI graphics cards, according to Aspyr. As we noted in previous tests of Doom 3, the then top Nvidia graphics card (a 6800 Ultra DDL) out-performed the top ATI graphics card (a Radeon X800) by better that 15% in frame rate. Perhaps this update will close the gap.

To check that, we ran versions 1.3 and 1.3revA on our Rev.B 20" 2GHz iMac G5 with ATI Radeon 9600 graphics and on our Power Mac G5 Quad with Nvidia GeForce 6600 graphics. Here are the results:

Speed of Doom 3 v1.3 vs 1.3revA (frames/sec)*
Doom 3 Version
Mac/Graphics
1.3
1.3revA
.
iMac G5 w/ATI Radeon 9600
31
38
PM G5 Quad w/Nvidia 6600
52
53
*Average of 3 runs. Red is much faster. Blue is much slower.

The performance of Doom 3 on a 2GHz iMac G5 with ATI Radeon graphics running at Medium Quality (640x480) increased significantly, by over 20%. The performance on the Quad with Nvidia graphics running at High Quality (1024x768) increased less than 2%. The performance of both increased with the universal binary patch, which is very good news, with the ATI graphics performance perhaps catching up to that of the Nvidia graphics. [Bill Fox]



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