Doom 3

Even with MSI/ATI's latest, we were limiting ourselves to High Quality settings, though we enabled all the special effects.

Map Enpro @ 1280x1024

	Min	Max	Ave
No AA/AF	30	62	56.51
4xAA/8xAF	12	62	47.92

Something the usual timedemos cannot tell you is how will the actual gameplay will be. While the average framerates are only 9fps apart, our chart tells a whole other story. Notice the severe dips compared to AA/AF turned off. While the game was certainly playable for the most part, it got very choppy and frustrating once the demons started attacking all at once. Truth be told, Doom 3 is so dark by default, the image quality isn't improved all that much with AA/AF at 1280x1024.

Map Enpro @ 1600x1200

	Min	Max	Ave
No AA/AF	21	62	52.35
4xAA/8xAF	11	62	40.76

In single player mode, 1600x1200 was playable when there wasn't much happening. Like 1280x1024 w/AA and AF, once the action started, there was a bit of stutter in the framerates. The situation was the same at 16x12 w/AA and AF, except worse. Again, don't let the average framerates fool you as the game is much more playable at 1280x1024 despite the small difference in average frames per second between the two resolutions.

Doom 3 Multiplayer

While Doom 3 is primarily a single player game, there is a multiplayer element to it. As with most multiplayer games, framerates are king, so we dropped the resolution to 1024x768 (though maintained high quality settings) and connected to a couple servers with a minimum of 3 players and a maximum ping of 50.

Multiplayer @ 1024x768 w/AA and AF disabled

	Min	Max	Ave
Delta	23	65	56.8
Frag Chamber	39	68	59.5

Despite the dips on the Delta map, the MSI RX800XT-VTD256E handled the multiplayer maps with aplomb. The Frag Chamber didn't create any problems, and the game was quite smooth.

Image Quality

While the game itself is merely average in my opinion, it is a beautiful game engine if you have the hardware to make the most of it. At 1280x1024 without AA/AF, the game looks absolutely amazing, and very playable.

Turning on AA/AF doesn't really do too much for image quality in our opinion, and for Doom 3 we don't think it's worth performance hit with it enabled.

Multiplayer looks nice, but I felt that the default HQ settings were a bit too dark for online gameplay. As you can see, 1024x768 looks pretty good, though aliasing is a bit more obvious.

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