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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.
There 's a nice article on Tom's hardware.
You need at least a R9600/FX5600 to play at a descent frame rate.
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 you just spent $2k on computer parts and don't have a top of the line pc at least double the minimum spec, you're shopping in the wrong place!
Or did you spend all that on case mods?
must have spend $3000 in the last 3 years, seems a wastte, no?
Sounds like you've definitely wasted a lot of money. I haven't spent a quarter of that but I'll be running D3 without any new upgrades.
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."
"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.
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 :)
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.
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 know this is a troll, but it's good bait...
Some of us gamers actually make our own money and decide that a spiffy new computer would be a good use of that money. Rather than wasting it all on perishable stuff like going to the movie theater and buying $10 popcorn, going to the bar and wasting money on alcohol or any of the million other ways to waste your money, we buy hardware. At least I have something to show for the $1000 I spent building my "tricked out computer". Meanwhile, all you have to show for the $50 you blew Friday night is a hang-over Saturday morning. Good choice.
Oh yeah, it'll look fine on the Xbox.
You don't have to do any anti-alaising due to how tv's work.
You only have to run at around 640x480 (actually less than that, but it's a good rough estimate)
only have to run at 30 fps, cause that's all a TV can handle
It's a set hardware standard. Carmack said if he has a set HW standard, he can sqeeze 50% more performance out of his engines by hard coding to that set HW spec.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
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.