Looking Back Pt. 3: The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future

Doom 3

As our main OpenGL benchmark, Doom 3 is NVIDIA's chance to shine with their traditionally superior OpenGL performance. With its emphasis on darkness and a unified lighting system, Doom 3 presents a very different situation than most first-person shooters do, hopefully giving us a different take on performance in such a game.

While we have kept all the results for Doom 3, our problems with the 60.72 drivers once again reared their head here. As you can see below, there was a small rendering difference among a wall edge between the 60.72 drivers and the other ForceWare drivers, where the edge is a bit underexposed. While if it wasn't for this specific screenshot we wouldn't have noticed them, there is obviously a difference in rendering output and the performance with the 60.72 drivers should be taken with a grain of salt as a result.

ForceWare 60.72 versus 84.21
Mouse over for 84.21

As for the rest of the drivers, we finally see NVIDIA throw in a noticeable optimization, picking up over 15% in HQ mode between the 61.76 and 66.72 drivers. It's not a lot, but we'll take it. If we include the 60.72 results, the performance increase is 20% in standard mode and 46% in high-quality mode. As we've seen with some of ATI's results, the biggest change in performance is often achieved with the first couple driver updates.

ForceWare 61.76 versus 84.21
Mouse over for 84.21

Checking for the image quality within the game, other than the slight issue with the 60.72 drivers, there are no further changes.