The next game engine to come onto the horizon was the Doom 3 engine, which will put cards through an ordeal with its complex lighting. We use the Doom 3 default time demo, "demo1," for each of our tests. First, the graphics card driver is set to "application controlled." Then, for the first run, we disable FSAA and the high-quality setting in the game. When set at high quality, anisotropic filtering is automatically enabled and set to eight-sample mode. For the second run, we turn FSAA to 4X to really tax the GPU.

We see similar results in Doom 3 as we did in Far Cry. The place winners are the same and those eight pixel pipelines continue to hinder the frames per second that the core can crank, out even with an additional 75 MHz over the other two cards.