Carmack on video cards for DOOM3

http://www.gamespy.com/e32002/pc/carmack/

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.

Heh, interesting but I'm not even thinking about buying a video card until after Doom3 is out. Neither will most anybody else with a bit of common sense.

Uh. DOOM 3 is most likely to come out in 1½ year. Graphics cards will be twice as powerful then. I see no reason to buy one today if you're getting it with the intention to play DOOM 3 on it.

But if you have to buy a new Card to play all those other new GPU-killing games, it would not be wrong to buy at least the GForce4 Ti. Otherwise it might be necessary to buy a another new one when DooM comes out.
Sure, no one should by a Gcard now if he only wants to play DooM3 in one year....