Doom 3 & Overclocking
Doom 3
Vendor: id/Activision - (Website)API: OpenGL
Pixel Shader Version Supported: Unknown
I've purposely chosen to benchmark Doom 3 at the game's in-built Ultra setting. It can require in excess of 500MB texture data. Catalyst 4.9 drivers are used for X800 PRO testing. Doom 3 automatically applies 8x AF in Ultra Quality mode.
Two things spring to mind here. Firstly, NVIDIA's cards do better than their ATI counterparts. Secondly, having only 128MB of RAM doesn't appear to impede the Glacier 6800's performance a great deal. Benchmark results show that it's very close to the Catalyst 4.9-boosted X800 PRO's scores, a card that costs up to £100 more. I guess fancy technology, such as UltraShadow II, has significant real-world performance applications.
Overclocking
A high-performance cooler and impressive DDR1 RAM provided a good base for overclocking.
Temperatures barely rose above 45C in 2D mode, and rarely above 60C in full-blown gaming. Compare this with a reference GeForce 6800 128MB's 2D temperature of ~55C and 3D load of 75C.
From 350/700 to 435/865 with excellent stability. Not bad, eh?. That's around a 25% core and memory overclock. I chose to re-run Doom 3 at 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF with the overclocked card.
Still an average of 15FPS behind a GeForce 6800 GT 256MB clocked in at 350/1000. NVIDIA's ensured that basic 6800 cards can't pose a real performance danger to its more illustrious GT and Ultra variants.
