"We have been planning to put together a proper pre-release of Doom for benchmarking purposes, but we have just been too busy with actual game completion. The executable and data that is being shown was effectively lifted at a random point in the development process, and shows some obvious issues with playback, but we believe it to be a fair and unbiased data point. We would prefer to show something that carefully highlights the best visual aspects of our work, but we recognize the importance of providing a benchmark for comparison purposes at this time, so we are allowing it to be used for this particular set of tests. We were not happy with the demo that Nvidia prepared, so we recorded a new one while they were here today. This is an important point -- while I'm sure Nvidia did extensive testing, and knew that their card was going to come out comfortably ahead with the demo they prepared, right now, they don't actually know if the demo that we recorded for them puts them in the best light. Rather nervy of them, actually.
The Nvidia card will be fastest with "r_renderer nv30", while the ATI will be a tiny bit faster in the "r_renderer R200" mode instead of the "r_renderer ARB2" mode that it defaults to (which gives some minor quality improvements). The "gfxinfo" command will dump relevant information about the functioning renderer modes and optimizations. At some point, after we have documented all of the options and provided multiple datasets, Doom is going to be an excellent benchmarking tool, but for now you can still make some rough assessments with it."
