NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX Review

Doom 3

Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. As we’ve done on other programs, we ran this game at three resolutions: 1024x768x32, 1280x1024x32 and 1600x1200x32. This game allows several image quality levels and we’ve done our benchmarking on two levels, low and high. We ran 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 board 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.

The results you check below. Keep in mind that models marked as “OC” are factory-overclocked. GeForce 7900 GT OC from XFX was running at 550 MHz with its memory being accessed at 1.63 GHz (815 MHz DDR) while the standard clock configuration for a GeForce 7900 GT is 450 MHz/1.32 GHz (660 MHz DDR). GeForce 7950 GX2 OC from XFX was running at 570 MHz with its memory being accessed at 1.55 GHz (775 MHz DDR) while the standard clock configuration for a GeForce 7950 GX2 is 500 MHz/1.2 GHz (600 MHz DDR).