Doom 3

Even the GeForce 6800 GT outperforms ATI’s new highest end $550 offering under Doom 3. The 7% performance lead the 6800 GT holds over the Radeon X850 XT PE is not insignificant. This OpenGL powered, shadow heavy, texture intensive game clearly favors NVIDIA’s architecture, even over all the brute strength ATI can pack into one of their ASICs.

Enabling 4xAA and 8xAF closes the gap between the X850 XT PE and the 6800 GT, as the more expensive card as more memory bandwidth to throw at the problem. It’s hard to keep framerates above a playable 30fps under Doom 3 with these settings, but many of the cards on this list can handle it.