We use the Doom 3 default time demo, "demo1," for each of our tests. We run the game at the high-quality setting for the first run with antialiasing (AA) disabled. Anisotropic filtering is set to 8x when the High Quality mode is enabled in Doom 3. Therefore, our first run is No AA and 8x AF. During our second set of tests we enable 4x AA.

Newer uses for the Doom 3 engine include Quake 4, which produces similar results to those of Doom 3. The hardware driver is set to Application controlled for AA and AF, Vertical Sync is disabled and the mipmap detail option is set to Quality.

The Nvidia cards do here what they normally do in Doom 3: They dominate. Here you can see the closest apples to apples comparison in real world applications, although the Nvidia cards can process twice as many stencils as the ATI hardware. Doom 3 makes extensive use of stencil shadows, and the GeForce 6 and subsequent GeForce 7 were designed to handle twice as many stencil shadows per pass as ATI's hardware. This generally accounts for the small gap between ATI and Nvidia benchmark results.