With the release of Doom 3 just around the corner, the pressure is on every gamer who knows his or her roots to upgrade at the least to a modern video card. The Doom 3 benchmark results over at HardOCP reveal that, for the time being at least, owners of Nvidia‘s top-of-the-line Geforce 6800 series video cards will be in gaming bliss.

This introduces a slight problem. It involves that other game; you know, the other most-anticipated game of all time, Half-Life 2. Clearly Valve and ATI have quite a relationship going on (anyone remember the thing at Alcatraz?), and they will no doubt claim that the Geforce X800 XT-PE will be the preferred card for excellent Half-Life 2 performance.

I can only speak for myself, but Nvidia clearly has the industry in its grasp right now. Doom 3 is gold and being manufactured as I write this, and Half-Life 2 is still, as far as anyone can tell, off the radar. Nvidia has three video cards to rule them all: the Geforce 6800 (good), Geforce 6800 GT (better), and Geforce 6800 Ultra (and they mean ultra). ATI’s X800 series is comparable in performance, but certainly not in price, which I think is why I think Nvidia will win this round.

Winner: Nvidia

Now I just have to get around to ordering one of those GTs for myself… 🙂