I assume you meant Doom 3, right? :tongue:
Both games will be optimised to play on both rigs. The hardware limitations of the FX series in HL2 will not be that big a deal with the use of partial precision (some things my never look the same but they will be close). Expect an advantage of the ATI cards with HL2 because of their more generic DX9 structure which 'WAS' the basis for the game (the FX5700U wasn't part of the original equation though and the 3 vertex shaders may change 'some' things), the forceware optimizations we've seen of late may help them over earlier results, but we won't know IQ parity until the actual release. Expect the FX series to be faster and have SOME added TWIMTBP features for their path, but the Radeons should still rock using the standard ARB2 path and be faster than the FXs, not that people will chose that when they have their own custom FX path.
You can be assured of two things;
HL2 will run no matter what on ATI.
D]|[ will run on FXs no matter what.
Both are mfr sponsored and are almost guaranteed to work on their cards.
You can also be sure that both ID and Valve want these games to work 'well' on BOTH of these MFrs cards since they are now close to each other in market saturation and cutting off a whole segment of the population would likely cause THEM more grief than ATI or nV. If these cards play other games well but not these games then there's a problem with the GAME and their programers not the cards. Even Valve has now been given TONs of extra time to make the game play well on nV hardware.
If one card or the other card has a problem with either of these games my choice will be easy!
What do you mean by 'a problem'?
You will likely find that the nV cards can't use the same lighting effects as the ATI cards in HL2, and the ATI cards won't get the same shadow effects in D]|[ in which case what do you do? Both have their 'problems'. Will the lack of HDR on the FXs matter much to you? Like Glare? Will the lack of UltraShadows wiht the ATI cards (may be compensated for by some ATI tweaks in the R350 core) matter that much to you? I guess you will have to see the final results to make our decision. However if it is based only on these two games you may find you're blind to some other performance holes in games you play later.
Either way, I'm not concerned, these games will be tweaked, optimized, floptimized and disected to provide the best experience on both cards, and likely by their release date we'll have totally different architecture to worry about. If your current card doesn't play them as well as you expected who cares, hopefully you got some good gaming out of them between now and then, and if you bought these cards with the full knowledge that the games you're upgrading for are months away then you've ignored the best advice in this forum, which is: 'Don't buy a card until the game you are worried about it playing comes out, or until the games you play are to much for your current card'. And none of the ATI XTs or FX Ultra will be unable to play these games. You may just need to be humble about your settings, which would likely be the case with it's competitors' products as well.
- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red> GA to SK
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram