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Doom 3 Vaporware no More
gilxa1226 writes "The waiting will soon be over... I was browsing Best Buy's website, and saw a preorder for Doom 3. It looks as though the release date is 4/1/2004. Doom 3.com also has info on presales."
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the prorder shelf boxes have been in best buy for over 2 weeks now here in the midwest.
but there is no promises as to when you are able to get your copy, so dont get your hopes up too much about it coming out very soon.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is completely meaningless. Stores put release dates out that are wrong quite often. Move on, move on.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Both stores linked from doom3.com state that:
Please note: id Software has NOT supplied a release date for this title. We will provide a date as soon as one is announced. Pricing listed is an estimate and is subject to change.
So anyone who has some specific date marked is just guessing.
What's the big deal anyway? It's just a game.
I haven't slept for more then 24 hours but I didn't see a link to the large format trailer on the site so here it is:
Slashdot Me
Of course, I already grabbed it myself.
The alpha was only optimized for certain hardware configurations - namely a Radeon 9700 pro. And it is an Alpha, which serves as a preview of the story but doesn't reflect the final product at all. They have at least 4 months to work on the game, during which time things could improve considerably. Finally, realize that with Doom, Id is not only writing the game nut also writing the engine that the game uses, unlike about 90% of the games out there. So some of the "poop" comes from the engine itself.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
The demos run on a 9700. And Carmack says the game will run well on considerably less than that. It's OpenGL, so you don't even need the latest version of DirectX (9.0b) to run it. A ti-4600 or an overclocked ti-4200 will serve, if that's what you already have. A Radeon 9600 Pro/XT will give you the best bang for buck. And a 9800 will put a large dent in your wallet. But avoid the new Nvidia cards unless you're not interested in being able to play Half-Life 2 when that comes out.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
you can pre-order it from any number of sites. EBgames has it coming out the end of March. However, anyone that pays any attention to these things, knows all the release dates are absolutely meaningless. Most high quality games (i.e., from high quality developers) have the "it's done when it's done" release date. When iD / Valve announces it's gone gold, then you can get it in 2 weeks. That's really the bottom line. This is a non-story.
But if you must pre-order, EBgames does have a cute figurine for Doom 3. (I preordered the harvest moon game for the gba, just to get a stuffed cow that's sitting on top of my computer, along with diablo and arthas...)
A Linux version will be available as well.
The nVidia render bug for HL2 was overblown, and fixed pretty much before it even went public.
The only real FUD going on is that ATI and Valve are cross-promoting eachother's products, and to that end, Valve is coming out saying "the way we wrote the game, it's going to perform better on ATI's current cards."
Amazon.com has had Doom 3 for pre-order for quite some time. They list the release date as March 1, 2004. Where did they get that date, you ask? They made it up!
id has a very specific policy regarding release dates: There are none. They will release the game when it is done, but until that point, any date you see is pure speculation.
At one point, Amazon was actually offering a discount if you bought Doom 3 together with Half-Life 2, which I thought was pretty amusing.
Erhmm... the ebgames page says it's ship date is 7/14/2004...
I, euh, kinda mixed up their names. It was actually HL2 instead of DNF. I got a math exam in 2 days, so I cannot be held responsible for such mistakes. If you want to blame some one, blame Rolle, Lagrange, Chauvy and L'Hopital
Half-Life 2 For Sale In Ukraine
Following the news yesterday, of several high profile games being leaked onto the Internet, it has transpired that copies of Half-Life 2 (and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero) are being sold on the black market in the Ukraine.
The boxed software is being sold as a full game, but contains only the leaked builds and source code that appeared on the Internet last autumn.
Carmack is a strong advocate of OSS and Linux and as such, Doom 3 will also be shipping with a linux binary. You can preorder the Linux the linux Binary Here
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
"People who prefer MM/DD/YYYY are also the sort of people that prefer the Imperial System to the Metric System."
Actually, we're just people who say "May 4th" instead of "The 4th of May". That's why that 'system' is commonly used. It's confusing to hear "May 4th" and then see "04-05".
Not that it's that big of deal, people can get used to any format. Just saying that it's not some strange development that people spontaneously decided to choose. Go to other languages such as Spanish, and they actually do say "4th of May". So it's not so surprising that they would write 04-05. Now think about the various languages used in Europe and how it would have grown that way.
Lighten up, we're not all crazy. Just from different environments.
"Derp de derp."
I saw some mis-information in a couple places. Rather than responding to all of them I'm just going to start a new thread.
5 440 0/9600/9700/9800
e tty much standard OpenGL to be compatible with everything. Most DX7 level cards will use this. No specular highlights, no vertex programs so this'll put more work on the CPU.
.plan file saying Doom3 may support the OpenGL high level shading language which would mean there is a sixth path;
;) I bet bad drivers prevent it from running, and even if it did run it would actually walk, or crawl. :) */rumour*
. html?i=1821 &p=21
:)
"GeForce 3 isn't capable of running the shaders that Doom 3 needs. You would need to have a GeForce 4 at the very least"
nVidia has five generations of cards worth talking about;
nv0x-TNT series
nv1x-GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce4MX, nForce, nForce2, etc
nv2x-GeForce3, GeForce4Ti, Xbox
nv3x-GeForceFX series
nv4x-next generation unannounced cards
A GeForce3 is tweaked GeForce4 and will run Doom3 well. For ATI's cards we have this chart:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1
r1x0-Radeon, Radeon 7000/7200/7500
r2x0-8500/9000/9100/9200
r3x0-95
Doom3 is going to have at least five methods of rendering according to a year old post by John Carmack:
http://www.webdog.org/plans/1/
ARB1-pr
NV1x-five passes, renders all features
NV2x-two or three rendering passes, renders all features
R200-usually single pass, renders all features
NV3x-single pass, renders all features
ARB2-advanced standard OpenGL, single pass, renders all features. This will be used by all DX9 and better cards other than the GeForceFX which has a special optimized rendering path.
The ATI Radeon and Intel Extreme Integrated Graphics will use the ARB1 path. The Matrox Parhelia will probably fall back to the standard DX7 path and not use its ability to do things like vertex programs. I'm not sure where the WildcatVP falls in, it supports nvidia's register combiner extensions so it could pretend to be a GeForce1/4MX, but I seem to remember a
ARB3-basically be the exact same as ARB2, but using vertex/fragment shaders instead of vertex/fragment programs (high level language instead of low level asm shading language). Currently only supported by WildcatVP, but presumably ATI and nvidia would support this soon too. And any other DX9 level cards.
The XGI Volari and S3 DeltaChrome would use the ARB2 path as would ATI's next generation card. Not sure about the NV4x... Users would probably have the option to choose any rendering path their hardware can do if they want.
*rumour*
The PowerVR Kyro is possibly not going to be able to run Doom3 because it can't do Cube Maps. If they allow Doom3 to run without CubeMaps then I guess the nvidia TNT, ATI Rage, Matrox G400, S3 Savage 2000, 3dfx cards, and Intel 815G integrated graphics, will be able to run it too. In theory
If Doom3 supports fragment/vertex shader it'll be the first on the market to do so. The only other advanced OpenGL game on the market for windows I know of is Homeworld2 which uses new extensions like fragment programs and vertex buffer objects.
Finally there have been Doom3 benchmarks released:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc
Medium Quality: 1024x768:
104fps - GeForceFX 5900 Ultra
95fps - GeForceFX 5800 Ultra
77fps - Radeon 9800 Pro
55fps - GeForceFX 5600 Ultra
40fps - Radeon 9600 Pro
47fps - GeForceFX 5200 Ultra
19fps - Radeon 9200
Those are from May 12th, 2003. Probably a full year before the game ships. But it gives you an idea of how well the GeForceFX can do when partial precision floating point is used via the NV3x fragment program extension (there standard OpenGL fragment program extension only allows you to hint fastest, don't care, or nicest for the entire program while AFAIK the nvidia extension allows you to specify per instruction if you want 16bit or 32bit precission) and how well the GeForceFX "ultra shadow" technology works.
I'm really looking forward to this game!