Doom3 is still one of the most intense games I've ever played and the 7600GTs only made the entire experience smoother and prettier, if demons, monsters and all-things-evil can truly be "pretty." Anyway, touted as being one of the most demanding engines graphically, I couldn't wait to see how the XXX cards performed.
To test the cards in Doom3, the built-in time demo "demo1" was used. As with the CS:S Stress Test, all tests were run twice (first time to cache the demo and the second time for the actual result) in both 1280x1024 and 1024x768 with the "high" and "low" graphical settings.
Doom3 timedemo demo1 Results
Much like the Source engine, the Doom3 engine is quite bound by the CPU. However, the above results show that even a single 7600GT XXX Edition is able to perform just shy of twice as fast as the 6800GT at 1280x1024 high and isn't that far below the 6800GTs in SLI.
I wanted to run the time demo in SLI AA mode just like I did with the Source engine to see how the cards performed when they weren't being limited by the CPU, but problems were everywhere. I was able get to only run Doom3 once in SLI mode with transparency AA and SLI 8xAA on in 1280x1024 with all settings high. The result was an impressive 52.4 frames per second, but upon leaving the game I received a blue screen of death. After restarting and getting back into the game, the timedemo repeatedly locked up my machine while it was running or, if I was really unlucky, gave me another BSOD.
The drivers seemed to be at fault, but uninstalling and reinstalling did nothing to correct the problem. Perhaps it's just an issue with the 84.21 drivers and the 7600GTs in SLI mode. I hope it is, because that left me with a very nervous feeling. No other drivers were used for testing so as to not skew the results of the other benchmarks.
