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Doom 3 Minimum Specs Revealed
Thanks to The Phobos Lab, a Doom fansite, for their info, directly from John Carmack, that the minimum specs for Doom 3 will be "1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card." There's no word yet on recommended specs to get the best fidelity, but sites such as NewDoom.com and The Phobos Lab are keeping a close eye on the situation, including an interesting but very unconfirmed rumor that "a Doom 3 demo [will be available] for public playing at this year's QuakeCon" - probably wishful thinking, although Carmack is scheduled to speak there, and it's possible at least some new Doom details will be revealed.
Is that Intel or AMD speeds?
I get to re-upgrade my computer! I just spent $2k on parts, and now I need another precessor AND another video cards. Seems like just last year I forked over $150 for a new 7500, and now I need something bigger to get over 13fps. Great.
Unfortunatly I was happy with my new system. This is about time to go buy a G5, or just give up and go for an Xbox, so sick of upgrading, must have spend $3000 in the last 3 years, seems a wastte, no?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
There 's a nice article on Tom's hardware.
You need at least a R9600/FX5600 to play at a descent frame rate.
This just might be the killer app that forces everyone who hasn't already, to upgrade their computer. I'm sure the hardcore gamer will already exceed this requirement by a lot, but the casual gamer, he probably doesn't spend so much money on his computer just for playing Games. My desktop's video card barely meets the requirements.
DOOM running smoothly on my 486/DX with 4MB of RAM.
I got really upset when the next big game [heretic] required a minimum of 8MB. I had to pay $180 for that...
If I remember correct, Carmack is no big fan of Direct3D. He uses OpenGL so the chances are big [quake 3 was developed for linux first, remember?]
there will be a demo before it hits and we can all test it out on our machines ourselfs to see how crappy or decent it runs.
Seriously... while some people will gladly upgrade to be able to play, I wonder if this is the sort of thing that drives people to console systems. At least I know that when I buy a Playstation 2 game, it won't have to replace a section of it to be able to use it to its full potential.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
Descent is a completely different game series, completely different engine, completely different characteristics.
But at least Loki ported Descent 3 to Linux.
Enough stupid snotty anal spelling jokes.
I'm just glad to see that for a change, I have a better-than-minimum system, though I'll have to buy more memory. (K7 2.1+, R8500LE, 128MB)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
DecafJedi
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
Doom what ??
A top of the line (performance wise) PC can be had for $1000 if you no what you're doing:
newegg
"Minimum requirements for playing the game after you install it: Pentium 4 2.0GHz or equivalent, GeForce4 Titanium 4200 or better"
Doom III looks shiny enough, but I doubt it'll revolutionize anything. I'm really waiting for Half-Life 2, which should run on slower computers no problem thanks to the engine's massive scalability; they have textures so large no video card can handle them at decent speeds, and they say they're going to release those well after the actual game, once the hardware exists.
Also, for people who complain about spending a lot, don't buy at the high end and make small upgrades regularly. There's a best buy in every generation. Right now the best buy is the Athlon XP 2500+ at $85, and until recently for video cards it was the Radeon 9500 Pro, which ATi stopped making because it was too fast. (The 9600 Pro is slower.) I've spent maybe $1200 over the last three years, a number I'm happy enough with, and my system is powerful enough.
Some of us look at this as a good reason to buy some spiffy new hardware. I was looking for a good excuse, now I have it. Thanks Carmack!
On a related note, slashdotters are mad that they have to buy a ferrari to go 180mph in a car. Come on folks, these games are asking computers for some hefty calculations. Do you really think you can ask your computer to do five times as many polygons without better hardware?
Do you think carmack/id are releasing crappy code? Those guys are fanatics.
... And it more than slams those minimum specs.
And for the price I paid you could put together 2 desktop PCs that have better specs than the laptop I bought. There's no reason for him to upgrade.
Isn't John Carmack a big NeXT and Apple OS X fan? I seem to remember that the first demo of Doom 3 was on Apple hardware.
If thats true, and going off of previous games requirements I would imagine the specs for an OS X version would be very similar to the PC version.
I doubt very much if it will ever see the light of day on MacOS 9 though :)
My GForce 2 Ultra card easily comes in faster than the GF1 minimum, but I've only got a 900MHz Athlon. Presumably, this means its not going to do anything like run ok.
But, the reason I've not bothered upgrading my CPU is because I play most of my games on my Xbox. Which only contains a 700MHz Celeron (or was it even slower? I can't remember).
So am I really waiting for Xbox release, because the significantly faster processor in the PC is actually not good enough? Weird.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I get a little sick of minimum, recommended, etc. settings. By definition, if it's *minimum* then it should be good enough.
I think game makers/distributors are sacrificing gameplay and quality in the effort to not lock out as many buyers and therefore increase sales.
Besides, everybody knows the minimum specs required to actually USE a piece of software are the "recommended" specs. The stated "minimum" specs are just the specs it takes to keep the EXE from CRAPPING OUT before or immediately after loading.
Phase1: Spend millions of dollars developing a game that will only run on 10% of computers.
Phase2: ???
Phase3: Profit!
Hey Kids! Do you have a rich white daddy that gives you a huge allowance every week to spend on upgrading your already tricked out computer? Then do we have a game for you!
----Booting up my PS2 which requires no upgrades
-Dipster
It will be coming out for all three (Win, OS X, Linux) platforms. Carmack's use of OpenGL makes the port pretty easy. Also, I personally think there's a bit of a chance of some more Linux ports now that Mac uses unixy coding systems (note how fast America's Army came out for the Mac after the Linux version. It's because of how much code was sharable between the two.) Of course, as Id always does, it'll make us pay a bundle to upgrade our computers cause we like the pretty things.
Hey, I liked Descent's frame rates. That was a great game and it came with my Creative ModemBlaster.
On a related note, I've played a D3 alpha and it runs VERY slowly on my GeForce4 TI4400. I mean like 13fps standing looking at a door with smoke and stuff in between. When you start shooting a big drunk alabamaman up close and personal who looks like he just got out of a bar fight after beating his wife, then it slows down to like 3 fps. But I can't even describe to you how good the drunk, beer-belly alabaman looks. In the polygon sense of course.
Chris
I wonder what are the odds now that this game will be able to run on the Xbox now after seeing these specs. Sure the vid card clearly meets the minimum requirement, but even thought you save quite a few clock cycles on the Xbox since you don't have the big fat OS sitting under your game (only a small windows 2000 variant), will the Xbox have enough power? Time will tell I guess.
The parent posts exemplify why I dislike these declarations of minimum specs for a game: it's a spec that is based upon a subjective opinion on what is minimally acceptable. Someone made a call based on a framerate that they figured people will tolerate. This criteria doesn't really mean that much to me: I want to be able to gauge whether *I* will be happy with the performance.
In my mind, the only way to do this is to give people some context. If someone said to me, "If you want to play at 640x480 at 30 fps with x/y/z features turned on, you will need the following specs...", that would be much more worthwhile. Even if my minimimum was better or worse than the scenario presented, I'd still be able to factor in my system performance and decide whether it was worth it.
Minimum Specifications are provided by Software Companies because they need to set the benchmark with supporting the product. Imagine the headache a Customer Support person would face if they receive constant calls from users who complain of poor performance or inability to play the game on a 500 MZ Celeron, 64 MB of RAM, and a Voodoo2. What would really help with today's Gamer and Hardware Geek is to create a label showing the recommended specifications for 3 quality settings in the game (Low, Medium and High). For now, we have to rely on game review website and magazines for this information. I know for me, it would help with any decisions I would make on future upgrades. If I have information that shows my current specifications will meet the Medium quality setting standard for the game, it might save me some cash.
I too had really crappy framerates with my ti500.
I wasn't very surprised to find out I didn't have
my renderer specified right in doomconfig.cfg.
Suddenly I had 65fps with no issues.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
"quake 3 was developed for linux first, remember?"
I don't think so, but I may be wrong.
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
Relatively speaking you can be gauranteed that any console game you buy will run exactly as fast as it is designed to.
I long ago fought the never ending battle to stay up to date with the latest PC gaming equipment. Now I spend money on raw processor power, hd space, and memory, because my computer is now used for research.
While it costs 50$ per game for the playstation 2 usually, it is much easier to budget for than the constantly increasing PC game system requirements.
By the way, Ace Combat 04 is awesome, i wish it had online play. With the ethernet adaptor I am enjoying the only other benifit that I missed from PC gaming; online play with ATV Offroad Fury 2 and Twisted Metal black.
-Jonathan S. Romero
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
I feel so stupid now. It's actually playable!
Selling games is a part of, but not all of, id's income. id gets a significant amount of revenue from licensing their game engines. Consequently, it's perfectly acceptable for them to release a game with extremely high system requirements. Games produced by 3rd party developers will come out much later than id's engine "demo" game (e.g. Doom 3, Quake 3, etc...), giving system specs time to catch up.
im pretty sure that the final beta was released on linux first.
I don't think you mean an original GeForce or GeForce 256 ...
Is GF1 shorthand for GeForce FX?
And here I thought my Ti 4200 was pretty good ... bah!
You have to be kidding, why did you think doom 3 got so delayed? when doom3 was shown it needed a $300 geforce 3, this days a geforce 4 and 2 costs around $30 -$50 bucks, the minimum is a geforce 1, which should be even cheaper (if you find one)
You still have less than 1 ghz? come on, there are 4 ghz computers around this days! "upgrading" your system to a minimum spec should cost about $140 (around $100 for a new motherboard and $40 for a geforce 2, and no Im not kidding) besides forget is for doom3, -having less than 1 ghz, geforce or ati hardware t&l class card, 256 ram means you already had to upgrade anyway.
And if you have to ask, an xbox runs on 720*480 32 bit color (they could cheat and use 16 bit or less memory in the stencil buffer)hardware antialiasing,hardware t&l and 1 pass rendering thanks to geforce 3 class technology (that alone costs $300) in console mode (meaning theres no extra cpu cycles being wasted) plus they had the chance to optimize the code for the hardware since they didnt have to worry on different configurations or drivers
I would pretty much say you could get around 60 maybe 80 fps depending on how much they optimize the code and the quality of the sound they will be using in the xbox version. (if the hardware requirements are like those on the PC version)
This just might be the killer app that forces everyone who hasn't already, to upgrade their computer.
/obvious
The way you say this it's like this is some sort of revelation... hardly. Every time a new id game comes out, it pushes the envelope, and a certain group of people upgrade their systems, while people who recently upgraded 'get by' on what they have, etc.
.. is the game really that good? or is it just programmed that poorly?
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
No, "GF1" means the original GEForce. My guess is that hardware vertex transforms are the key feature due to the number of polygons they're pushing. A GEForce 2 or 3 will probably run the game very well.
You can always cut down features - it doesn't take much power to run at 512x364 or 640x480 - something that's easy to forget in this day of 1600x1400 gaming.
The game has been in development for a while - id Sofware typically target whatever's bleeding edge when they start development. The logic being that it'll be mainstream by the time they're done.
They would sell approximately 100 copies if the requirement was a $500, barely available cutting-edge graphics card.
I think you're forgetting that the Xbox can run in High-Def.
Nope I didn't forget, I just thought it was irrelevant. Not many games support it and not many people have hi-def TV's. Until hi-def tv's come down to a reasonable price, not many people will buy them. I mean sure they're cool and all, but for $2500 I might as well just buy a spiffy keen new computer with a new 21 inch monitor and play the PC version of Doom III.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I am starting to get annoyed with people who say they got fed up with constantly upgrading their computers to play the latest game. Of course you have to upgrade the damn computer to play the best games. You also can't run ps2 games on a psx! You would have to actually buy the ps2 to run them.
No one wants to treat a PC like a console, and that's the bloody problem. There are still craploads of games that would run on much lesser hardware, but no one buys them because they feel entitled to have their computer last forever and still be awesome when it comes to new games. I've had my current computer for 2 years now, with no changes in the graphics card, RAM, or processor. Hell, not even the hard drive is changed. And I can play all the games that were designed for those specs perfectly, as well as games preceding it. I can still play any of a million new games, I just can't play the absolute, top-of-the-line brand new games for the highest quality hardware.
The same goes for my ps2. I can play all the games designed for it, but it's not going to run Halo or DOA3. I would have to PAY for an XBOX. But God forbid we think that consoles don't last forever, too. What would the world come to if that were to happen?
Millions of games are spawned for the computer. They come out at a rate that hugely outpaces consoles. So, naturally, they also develop faster. But people just decide to ignore the vast number of games that came out because they're "old news." Meanwhile, they may be missing out on the games because of this stupid-ass attitude.
Bah, screw it. I'm going to go play Diablo II on my computer, which runs it damn fine.