Slashdot Mirror
Doom 3 System Requirements Revealed
The Llama King writes "The Houston Chronicle's Computing column has got the Doom 3 minimum system requirements. Biggest eye-opener: 384 MB of memory. Lots of mainstream PCs have been sold with 256 MB of RAM, so upgrades will be in order. RAM chip manufacturers should be salivating about now. You'll also need a 1.5-GHz processor and a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 graphics card or better."
Although most (all?) new machines are going to meet these specs. There are a number of people out there (me for one) that will have to upgrade to meet the minimum specs. I have Duron 1.3 with 384MB RAM. Atleast I don't need to upgrade my video card - Radion 9600
I'm surprised it got an article on Slashdot in it's own right, given that the information was posted as a comment to the last Doom3 story here. I guess we're going to see lots more exciting Doom3 facts and figures here.
I won't spend $3000+ just to buy a new computer. You know id, some people have a life and don't spend their savings in a computer just for one game.
They are restricting their consumer base. Very smart, very smart.
How about top-of-the-line Pentium3 CPUs? 1.5GHz definitely means a P4 or a similar Celeron, but weren't the 1.x GHz P4 cpus actually slower than high end P3 CPUs?
So I'm wondering if DOOM3 would work on a high-end P3 system as I have a dual CPU P3 system with a GeForce FX 5200 card.
Banu
I'm betting that playing Doom 3 on the "minimum required" system will be the easiest way to force people to upgrade their hardware.
Hell, I have 1 GB RAM and a GF4600, and I'm fully expecting the performance to be bad enough to force an upgrade on my part...
In fact, I would have been majorly shocked if it wasn't some reasonable amount as 386MB. No useful modern PC should come with less than 512MB and should really have 1GB. If someone doesn't need 512MB of memory, then they don't need that pentium 1Gz+ either.
It will be worth it. When has Carmack ever done us wrong?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This should be considered a minimum for LOADING the game. I've played most of the first person shooters out there for the last few years. 256MB of RAM, or even 384MB is too little. Even with a nice graphics card your framerates will be very very low. I think if anyone wants to play and enjoy any of the games lately you'll need a minimum of 512, and even at that you'll need a gig to be comfortable. I think id is in a position where they can't raise the bar to 512 because they'd lose out on sales of people buying the game that had less. I think these people will purchase the game and realize they need more and go out and buy it.
When games announce the minimum requirements, they usually just mean a system that can just run the program but not they don't mean you can actually enjoy playing the game on such a machine. For example, Unreal Tournament 2004 minimum requirement is 256MB RAM but in practice, below 1GB you'll face paging that would slowdown the game every now and then. Now, 386MB for the minimum? That's in fact a huge requirement and I know of no other game with such a minimum requirements. If the guideline is 4 times the memory of the minimum system, that means you need something like 1.5GB RAM for a an acceptable gaming experience.
Doom does use OpenGL, but DirectX version compliance levels are a convenient way to separate generations of cards. It's easier than posting a list of OpenGL extensions that must be supported.
Wait for the Xbox version to come out. An Xbox plus Doom 3 will set you back $200, plus tax. If you don't have anything against Microsoft's console, it's obviously the best choice.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Linux binary, since my Linux box it appears to have sufficient specs. I do regret that binary-only drivers (for my ATI or NVIDIA card) will probably be required.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
1 gig ram, nVIDIA 5700LE, HDD gigs to spare, and a 2.5GHz AMD chip. So far, so good.
Linux support out of the box? No. That's what matters to me.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Upgrade for a game? Doesn't that increase the cost of the game? Games are expensive as it is, there's no reason they can't fit it in current common cases.
Games are made for people to play, not that people were made to play games. Games should fit current specifications, rather than demand more.
And then they wonder why sales are dismal.
Game consoles usually stay the same in each model, and games *must* work on them and cannot demand more. That's a good thing. It makes the developers do more with less. On PCs, people seem to do less with more. And that is a real problem.
Have you read my journal today?
One thing the article doesn't mention -- what these requirements mean. If I meet the minimum requirements, will I have to play it at 640x480 with all of the bells and whistles off, or are those the minimum requirements for a good, immersive, full-on Doom 3 experience?
I never do.
In all honesty it is almost never worth the trouble for the small amount of money one might save, the motherboard, RAM and CPU are typically a few generations behind and updating the graphics card alone would make the CPU too much of a bottleneck. All in all I always end up with the same conclusion, just going off and replacing the whole thing makes economic sense and is a lot less trouble.
The Mac users has it right, very few people actually care about upgradeability.
Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"? Wait 6 months. After the initial surge, everyone will be overstock, and prices for better hardware will fall.
If it did, everyone and his brother would be complaining that it's nothing more than a rehash of old games underpinned by a new engine. Today's focus is more on content than ever before, so id had to ante up. A simple rehash would kill them.
Now, if they included the old levels as a bonus, that'd be another story.
Awww, such is the life of the PC gamer! In the old days, people would complain about these things, but the truth is that I think PC gamers live for this! I mean, who here doesn't like having an excuse to go out and seriously upgrade your rig?
Heck, I'm not even planning to get Doom 3, and I get all jittery just thinking about upgrading my old box, which is way overdue. But I've learned to wait until the game comes out and real people play on real systems, before doing any upgrade. That way you can get the right hardware and avoid any unforeseen incompatibilities.
Awww, the life of a PC Gamer...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This is the "other story" that I was refering too.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Look, these days, there will be 2 main types of people that will buy this game.
1) Oldskool die-hard Doom lovers. These people have been around long enough that the concept of hardware upgrades is nothing new to them. Chances are they will currently have good enough hardware for Doom 3, or they will take it for granted that they will need an upgrade before they buy the game.
2) Newskool FPS gamer kids. They take their gaming pretty seriously, and having the latest hardware is pretty much a competitive issue to them. If you find any of these guys with less than 512mb of RAM or a 3D card older than a GeForce 3, chances are they don't have the money to buy Doom 3 anyway.
The hardware requirements stated are really light for a game of that genre, especially considering the target market. I think the poster is rather off-target by insinuating that this is a problem.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Don't forget that there's more to Direct X than Direct 3D. Doom 3 does use Direct X. (Well, I'm assuming it does as quake3 did require Direct X 7. I don't have a Doom 3 copy yet. :))
The requirement for Direct X 9 should be more for a easy way to figure if your graphics card supports the OpenGL extensions Doom 3 requires, as others have posted.
Re FX 5200, that graphics card *is* Direct X 9 compliant, but its performance sucks...
Actually, if you RTFA, you'll see that it says "1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 Processor or AMD Athlon 1500+". That covers it pretty well, I'd say.
My Systems
The Doom games were always a showcase for the engine's technology. It probably won't be for a year or two before developers that license the technology start hitting the full capabilities of the engine. When that happens, I look for the current minimum requirements to go up so plan accordingly for the games that will be built on the engine in the near future if you are going to upgrade your hardware. I think that the current recommended requirement will soon be the minimum when you see the next wave of games built on the technology that iD has created.
I mean come on. we've heard this line befor: "sure it'll run on an X, but you wont get the FULL experience". Yadda, yadda, yadda. And of course the fact that certain brand names are being thrown around means nothing, right? OPEN YA EYES, BOY!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"?
Not really. Some people don't upgrade as long as their computer is "Good Enough." When something comes along and proves their machine isn't "Good Enough" anymore, they upgrade. It's because the machine is old -- the game is just a catalyst. I had a buddy in college who upgraded his machine for Wing Commander Prophecy and again for Mechwarrier 4 -- compared to that, upgrading to Doom 3 (which will be undoubtedly a social success) doesn't seem like such a big deal.
(Incidentally, my upgrade cycle is based on how dirty my keyboard is. When the keyboard gets so dirty I don't want to touch it, I replace the whole thing. This usually takes about 2 years or so).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
There's no way in hell. Playing an FPS with a console-type controller instead of a keyboard is roughly equivalent to gouging out your own eyeballs, in terms of pain and frustration.
I remember the first time I tried Doom64 - UGH. Please. I'll stick to Mario, thanks.
Sure, there's bound to be a keyboard/mouse add-on for the XBox, but certainly not a cheap one. Factor in the karma burn for owning (nay, touching) an XBox and your effective cost has climbed far beyond that of a new CPU and some RAM.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
what the...
The days of DirectX-only cards are long behind us. ATI supports OpenGL just fine, thank you.
OpenGL just happens to expose the design choices made by ATI and nVidia more readily, because most of the advanced functionality is exposed through vendor specific extensions. Later, the OpenGL Architectural Review Board may adopt them as ARB extensions, which signals to rest of the vendors that they should really think about implementing them, if they haven't already...
Carmack has griped before about nVidia's inconsistent floating point behavior-- certain nVidia cards ran the ARB standard code path quite slowly, and thus required custom code paths to achieve decent performance.
But this gripe was 18 months ago, perhaps the pendulum has swung back.
People upgrading due to Doom3 requirements will cause no more than a tiny blip on the radar of memory manufacturers.
PC gamers represent a tiny fraction of machines (compared to businesses and normal consumers), and most hard-core gamers likely already have 384MB.
The only thing this requirement will cause is a lot of disappointed 13-year olds whose computer that Ma and Pa just bought him is not up to snuff.
What's with the "wait 6 months"? It's not as though hardware is ever doing anything but getting cheaper and faster. As long as you buy next-to-top-of-the-line, you'll get about the best bang for your buck. And next-to-top-of-the-line should run Doom3 admirably.
Secondly, if gaming is important to you, I don't think it really says "I need a life". Getting a new set of golf clubs costs more than a computer upgrade... do golfers also need a life?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
try again - longhorn won't be out until at least 2007, and many are saying 2008 or later. But even at its most optimistic, 2007-2004 = 3 years. :)
I think in 3 years, all current computers will be obsolete, with the possible exception of some 64 bit machines.
If anyone doubts that 64 bits aren't the wave of the near future, just look at all the digital cameras and DV camcorders being sold today. People will want to do digital things with that digital media, and 64 bits allows for that to happen faster (in some cases, just allows it to happen). 32 bits is dead, it just doesn't know it yet, much like the wasp body that doesn't know the head has been gone for hours.
Lastly, after seeing the "suggested" specs for a longhorn machine, nothing out there will run it yet. So, all machines will be replaced in 3 years anyways, provided anyone upgrades. (Heck, according to Infoworld, there's still a large contingent of win95/98 machines out in the corporate world. I personally know of 1 50K+ employee company where that is a true statement.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I hope this was a joke...
64x64 texture?? 1996 called, they want their textures back. Usually High Res texture are at least around 512x512 at 32 bits, so around 8 megs per tetxures, a bit higher than 16k.
Most of the memory used nowadays are for textures. That's why videocards have 256/512mb ram now alone, mostly for the framebuffers and textures.
I won't even respond to the rest of your post =) You've obviously never written a multimedia/game application.
Yes but id will know exactly what the system specs. are and will tweak the game engine to fit that particular hardware. Not to mention the resolution will be set to something like 640x400. This is what make consoles great for games. New game comes out, I don't have to worry about upgrading or installing the lastest drivers.
Yes.
Kharma? You have to be kidding. That's a something, but not a Karma.
I'm sorry, but you are spreading misinformation. Hear me out, before you decide to rant back, because this is from my long experience and should be pretty close to reality.
XP requires alot more than 128 MB RAM even if it can run along with that configuration. The problem will be that all RAM will be used up, so you will have to swap alot more.
For those who have enough RAM (roughly >=512 MB today), swapping to harddrive is a thing of the past. Heck, you can even turn off the paging file. With 1GB it's pretty safe, and it will prevent the stupid OS to swap out anything (yes, Windows will page out pages even if you have 2GB free RAM, REALLY stupid..)
For some optimizations in XP to work, you really need enough RAM. There's alot of tricks going on in the startup / hibernate startup and prefetching, which requires over 256MB RAM. So without enough RAM, XP can actually be slower than 2000 in some respects.
Removing spyware is an excellent suggestion.
Turning off anti-virus is a horrible idea. Every Windows computer connected to the internet today requires: firewall, antivirus, adaware/spybot s&d and some other webbrowser/email than IE and OE. You're playing russian roulette if you skip ANY of these steps..
You are right about P2P, though you seem unaware that is's a completely different issue. If you run a P2P application, it will eventually swap out your entire RAM no matter how much RAM you have. It's a limitation of the OS that it's so braindead. It's because there's no limit to how much an application can cache files, so it will eventually cache everything you share and receieve. This is good for a server setup, but not for a desktop PC. So if you're running P2P or similar apps, they should be on a dedicated server or run inside something like VMWare or Bochs.
RAM is cheap nowadays, and you'll get alot more out of your computer if you buy enough of it. The harddrive can really bring any computer down to its knees, if it's constantly swapping.
You will not increase the FPS in gaming, as you correctly state. However, you will not be subject to swapping in the middle of a game either. Swapping will usually happen in the most intense scenes of a game, so it's really a good thing to get more RAM.
As for other applications. If you're a developer, you always have 10-20 programs open. There's really no point in making things more difficult for yourself by closing an application you will have a need for 10 minutes later. RAM is cheap.
To upgrade your GHZ will make a good overall performance. Upgrading RAM will ensure that performance doesn't drop under heavy stress.
You see, it's important to define what performance you really mean. You're right in much of what you say, but I will also stress that memory shouldn't be skipped either. Too many computers today are sold with way too little RAM, and then the owners think they need a faster system, just because it kneels under heavy stress. They just need more RAM.
It's kind of like how people buy a new PC to get faster Internet. Of course, your internet will not become any faster. If you're on a modem, then you need broadband. So the right observation and understanding is important.
Better yet, the hardware industry (Intel, AMD, ATI, NVidia) should come up with a rating system like "Game:A", "Game:B" and so on.
Then game vendors could just say "Game:C class PC required, Game:D or better recommended".
Right now, they've dug themselves into a hole by making it difficult for regular users to buy games. I know when SimCity 4 came out, there were a lot of confused people saying "I just bought a fancy new Dell and this game won't run!" because they had Intel video.
(And I was thinking of OS/2 v2. Also Win3.1 could run on a 286, but it wasn't really useful unless you had a faster 386 at least.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Ummm, anyone else bothered by the fact that there is a joke about shooting our President in this thread. Political issues aside the man is still the President and jokes or comments about shooting him are not funny.
Maybe that's why I like racing games so much, the point has come where they look fantastic and the visual clues you get are actually useful.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the difference between a GF2 GTS and the GF3 was very superficial.
Umm....wrong...
GF2GTS is a NV1x card, with no programmable shaders. DX7 class gear. Hardware T&L was the extent of the "high end graphics" capability of this chip. Later nVidia confusingly renamed these Geforce4MX, as compared to the real GF4Ti, which was a tweaked GF3.
GF3 was an entirely new generation of chip, the NV2x (using x as a variable, not to be confused with NV2X which is the GF3/nForce hybrid used in the Xbox)
NV2x was the first generation of DX8 hardware with programmable shaders.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.