Doom 3

Doom 3 is one of the biggest game releases of 2004 and needs little introduction. It is widely regarded as one of the most graphics-intensive games to date.

In addition, it was coded on the OpenGL path. This meant that ATI graphics cards were put at a disadvantage, compared to NVIDIA graphics cards, which are traditionally stronger at handling OpenGL games.

However, with each successive version of Catalyst driver, the performance of ATI Radeons in Doom 3 seemed to improve. The game was benchmarked using its built-in timedemo.

Catalyst 4.10 attained marginally better scores than the older Catalyst. Nothing to write home (or your favourite hardware site) about! But it still illustrates the importance of keeping your drivers up-to-date for optimal performance.

The Omega driver, however, achieved noticeably higher scores. It was generally about 5% faster than the Catalyst drivers. This certainly indicates that the good folks over at ATI are still working hard at improving Doom 3 and general OpenGL performance.