Doom 3: CPU Battlegrounds
 

We know by now that the GPU requirements of Doom 3 are quite high; the days of ultra high resolutions bringing us triple digit frame rates on mid range cards are gone with Doom 3, even cards like the Radeon 9800 Pro are best played at resolutions as low as 800x600. But is a fast GPU all you need to get the most out of Doom 3?

Remember that while your GPU will handle all of the rendering of the scenes in Doom 3, it is the CPU that handles all of the physics, artificial intelligence and 3D setup for sending vertex data to your GPU. So in order to get the most out of a fast GPU, you will also need to pair it up with a fast CPU - but how fast? The basic rule of thumb is this: the faster your GPU is, the faster your CPU will have to be to keep up with it.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2149


in my small & short D3 experience it seems the game prefers GPU over CPU power a lot

seems I was right, IF you have a previous gen. vidcard

Here we have a completely different graph, where not even at 800x600 is the card CPU bound. With a Radeon 9800 Pro, having a fast CPU doesn't help as much since you are mostly GPU limited, especially at higher resolutions. This doesn't mean that you can pair up a Radeon 9800 Pro with a 1.4GHz Celeron and be fine, but it does mean that a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is going to be overkill for your 9800 Pro.

ownage by the amd. Where the feck is my fx53!!

of course amd ownage...

hehe 103.4 and 60.5 with two 2.4ghz cpu's
(funny to see how low (and expensive !!!!) intel is when it's a fair compare...

First time i see the prescott performing better than his older northwood variant.

The 175,- A64 3000+ sure is a steal atm.

I just received word, my fx53 asus combo arrives tuesday

I hope I'll have time next weekend to set it up!