ATI reacts to Doom III benchmarks

Graphics card manufacturer ATI has responded to recent Doom III benchmarks, which painted a slightly brighter picture of products from its largest competitor NVIDIA, telling followers at Team Radeon that it's "a non issue".

Last week, hardware enthusiasts HardOCP published an interesting report into Doom III performance on various graphics hardware, having conducted tests during a visit to id Software's offices in Texas.

The piece certainly came down harder on ATI than NVIDIA at times, noting, "it is painfully obvious that ATI is going to have to make some changes in their product line to stay competitive," and concluding, "the [NVIDIA] GeForce 6800GT looks to very much be the sweet spot when it comes to playing Doom III with all the eye candy turned on at high resolutions."

Speaking on Team Radeon, ATI's Chris Hook urged caution amongst ATI fans. "Doom III isn't even available yet, and we all know that some of our competitors use partial precision where possible," he noted, implying that not all benchmarks are created equal. "We expect to have updated drivers available in the coming weeks," he added.

Later on, Hook went on to point out that the ATI results weren't bad anyway. "Let's not lose sight of the fact that ATI performance isn't relatively poor at all," he said. "I think Kyle [Bennett, of HardOCP] himself said that even the X800pro delivered 'great' performance, and [id Software's John] Carmack said in the HardOCP article that there's more to consider than just frame rate."

More indeed. And to read more of ATI's comments on the situation, investigate Team Radeon. Or, with Doom III set to ship in Europe on August 13th, you could always wait and make sure before splashing out on a monstrous upgrade...