ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition: One Card for All

Doom 3 Performance

The Mac version of Doom 3 was finally released, a lot later than expected, but it provides us with a truly modern game engine on which to test performance. 

Unlike the PC version, Mac Doom 3 is far less of a performer, even when paired with an X800 XT or GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL.  There's been much discussion as to why, but it looks like there are a number of factors that contribute to very poor performance of Doom 3 under OS X.  The fact of the matter is that while a GeForce 6800 Ultra would be more than capable of running Doom 3 smoothly at high frame rates on a PC, the same cannot be said even at the lowest resolutions on the Mac platform. 

We ran all tests at High Quality settings, using Doom 3's built-in demo1 timedemo. 

With our expectations appropriately set, let's look at the performance breakdown:

You can see that the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition isn't the best performer here. At 800 x 600, it can barely offer more than 20 fps.  The OEM 9600XT is about 6% faster than the 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition, completely as a result of its 11% increase in memory bandwidth. 

What's interesting is that even the 6800 Ultra DDL never peaks above 44 fps, even at 640 x 480.  NVIDIA also continues to hold the Doom 3 performance advantage here, much like they do in the PC world.