$300 Gaming CPU’s: AMD 5000+ Versus Intel E6600

DOOM 3

ID Software: Doom 3

Science has unlocked the gates to the unknown, and now only one man stands between Hell and Earth. A sci-fi horror masterpiece, DOOM 3 is like nothing you have experienced. Dramatic storyline, pulse-pounding action, incredible graphics, and revolutionary technology combine to draw you into the most frightening and gripping first person gaming experience ever created. The Doom 3 engine is a computer game engine developed by id Software and first used in the PC game Doom 3. The engine was designed by John Carmack, who also created previous engines such as those for Doom and Quake. The DOOM 3 engine added several new features absent in the Quake III engine that preceded it. New features for DOOM 3 included bump mapping, normal mapping, and specular highlighting.

When gaming at a resolution of 1280×1024 and 4x Anti-aliasing and 16x Anisotropic filtering we found that the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6600 was roughly 3 frames per second faster than the AMD processor.

With the resolution cranked up to 1600×1200 and 4x Anti-aliasing and 16x Anisotropic filtering turned on we found that the game was GPU limited with both processors returning consistent 70FPS benchmark results. For the first time we see no advantage between having either processor as the GPU is slowing down the performance.