Before its eventual 2004 launch, id Software's Doom 3 was advertised as a game that would not only leverage the unique aspects of Nvidia's GeForce3 GPU but also run smoothly on them. That didn't necessarily turn out as promised by tech giants like Apple's Steve Jobs and id's own John Carmack. So what happened?

In this DF Clip slice of a larger, Nvidia-sponsored video, Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia explores the state of Doom 3 performance on era-appropriate hardware, including a GeForce3 GPU from 2001 with 64MB of VRAM, and discovers that a three-year-old GPU at the time couldn't approach a locked 30 fps, even with severe cutbacks to visual settings like resolution and anti-aliasing.

As Battaglia demonstrates, new advancements in real-time graphics technology, particularly per-pixel lighting and stencil shadow volumes, may have run smoothly in limited pre-launch demos on a circa-2001 GPU. But once Doom 3 became a full, retail product, with larger worlds and increased numbers of light-casting objects, older GPUs were pushed to their limits - which he tests with frame rate analysis tools and comparisons to other GPUs that launched in the following few years.

"Loading the game at 600p resolution might shock you," Battaglia says before revealing frame rate lurches into the mid-10 FPS range on a GeForce3-powered PC.

For more of Battaglia's look through the history of Doom series performance on PCs from the '90s, '00s, and beyond, check out our full-length, Nvidia-sponsored video, DF Retro EX: Doom 1993 To Doom The Dark Ages - Celebrating A Technological Icon.