Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH Motherboard Review

3D Performance: Doom 3

Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. We run this game at 1024x768x32 resolution at high quality. We run demo1 four times and wrote the obtained number of frames per second. The first result we discarded at once, since it is far inferior than the other results. This happens because at the first time we run the demo the game must load all textures to video memory, fact that doesn’t happen from the second time we run the demo on. From the three results left, we consider as our official result the middle result, i.e., we discard the highest and the lowest values. Curiously almost all times the values obtained at the second round on were the same.

A very important detail that we must mention is that Doom 3 has an internal FPS lock: it is only capable of generating 60 frames per second, even if your PC is able to produce more frames per second than that. This is done in order to make the game to have the same “playability” sensation independently from the video card installed on the PC. This lock, however, is disabled in the game benchmarking mode.

For further details on how to measure 3D performance with Doom 3, read our tutorial on this subject.

Below you will find the results.

Like happened on 3DMark05, from all motherboards with on-board video we included in our tests only Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH (Intel 945G – GMA 950) and ASUS P5RD1-V (ATI Xpress 200) were capable of running Doom 3, even then achieving very low results. The on-board video from the reviewed motherboard from Gigabyte was 3% faster than the on-board video from ASUS motherboard included in our comparison.

A GeForce 6200 with 128 MB and 128-bit memory interface was 286.41% faster on Doom 3 than the on-board video from Gigabyte GA-8I945GMH-RH. A GeForce 6200 TurboCache with 64 MB and 64-bit interface was 74.76% faster than the on-board video from the reviewed motherboard.