There have been many questions about this so it's time for some answers...

I was doing more reading around about Doom III, filling the void until it's release and stumbled onto this Gamespy interview with John Carmack, the lead programmer for ID software, who has designed the Doom III Engine. In this particular question he speaks on the ideal cards and their performance with Doom 3. I hope this helps in answering eveyones questions and headaches in ragards to what hardware they will need or already have in order to play such monsterously amazing games.


Q - GameSpy: The world of video cards seems to change on a daily basis. What do you think of the current crop of cards on the market, and where do you see things heading? Are there any new cards that interest you? Where would you like to see things go?

A - John Carmack: There are interesting things to be said about the upcoming cards, but NDAs will force me to just discuss the available cards.

In order from best to worst for Doom:

I still think that overall, the GeForce 4 Ti is the best card you can buy. It has high speed and excellent driver quality.

Based on the feature set, the Radeon 8500 should be a faster card for Doom than the GF4, because it can do the seven texture accesses that I need in a single pass, while it takes two or three passes (depending on details) on the GF4. However, in practice, the GF4 consistently runs faster due to a highly efficient implementation. For programmers, the 8500 has a much nicer fragment path than the GF4, with more general features and increased precision, but the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's, so I would be a little hesitant to use it as a primary research platform.

The GF4-MX is a very fast card for existing games, but it is less well suited to Doom, due to the lower texture unit count and the lack of vertex shaders.

On a slow CPU with all features enabled, the GF3 will be faster than the GF4-MX, because it offloads some work. On systems with CPU power to burn, the GF4 may still be faster.

The 128 bit DDR GF2 systems will be faster than the Radeon-7500 systems, again due to low level implementation details overshadowing the extra texture unit.

The slowest cards will be the 64 bit and SDR ram GF and Radeon cards, which will really not be fast enough to play the game properly unless you run at 320x240 or so.


...

Well there you have it. Basically speaking, in reagards to the NEWEST cards like your ATI Radeon 9800 XT's or nVidia GeForce FX-5950's, the fact that Carmack was content that the performance was adequate on the GF4 Ti's means that ANY of these newer babies will chew some serious frames regardless so there is no need to stress about what next generation cards will work properly with D3... they all will! Moreso the OpenGL optimised ones such as the GF-FX range.


-Cub.