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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."
When the first DOOM was released I had a few friends who said that needing a 486 PC just for a game was insane.
They upgraded after playing the game on someone else's PC.
Is the Geforce 4 MX supported? I know that origionally Carmak wanted to require programable shaders, is that still the case, or did he relent and support the fixed function pipline that the Geforce 4 MX line inherited from the Geforce 2?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
How does this equate to an AMD64 chip? I know they can run 32bit apps, but how fast would a 2Ghz AMD64 chip run Doom3 vs a new Pentium 3.2Ghz?
;)) performance.
I still have a 1.2Gig AMD box at home with 512Megs RAM, and I want to know which upgrade path will give me better gaming (and email checking
TIA
CGB
free ipod and free gmail!
... should be fast enough! :-D
I just put together a gaming PC with an Athlon 2800, GeForce4 FX5500, 1G DDR3200 RAM, and an 80G 7200RPM hard drive. I mostly wanted to be able to play BF1942 with all my family, but once Doom3 comes out, I'll be able to handle it!. I just hope that it runs HL2 as well...
If you're upgrading, look for at least 128 MB of video memory in a card with Direct X 9.0 capability that installs into an AGP slot. Cards in the $150 to $200 range -- such as a GeForce 5900XT or a Radeon 9600XT -- will be a sweet spot
I thought doom 3 used OpenGL, not Direct X
Question time: I know the mac requirements will be different, but I just bought a dual 1.8 Ghz with an FX 5200, how badly does that vid. card suck? I have no clue when it comes to these video card models...
I feel that the world will be an overall happier place if more people have more RAM.
Frankly, even if people may not realize it, they'll be *much* better off having more than 256 MB RAM. Dell etc. are definitely not benefitting their consumers by including only 256 mb ram in these behemoth computers people buy, especially if people are looking into doing serious photo editing, and DV. And if you are running XP, how can you expect to survive with 256? This is so frustrating...
P.S. Half-life 2 requirements, Gabe Newell:
Ideally, one should have a 2.4 Ghz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a DirectX 9 enabled graphics card to fully partake in the title. Those with less powerful components shouldn't worry about upgrading unless their system specs fall below a 1.2 Ghz processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a DirectX 7 compatible graphics card.
Of course, when HL2 game was due to be publish 25 years ago, these requirements were insane.
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If you can find a bucket for your saliva due to excessive drool, wait a few months to buy the game/upgrades. Or just buy the game and deal with turning down graphics and slightly slower gameplay. It will always save a bunch of money.
384MB is so low. Lots of current games are already unplayable with high details on at 512MB. Planetside, SWG, DAOC and numerous others (tho mostly online games) are total lagfests without 1GB RAM already.
If you had asked my guess on reqs, it would've been something like 512MB, 2Ghz, GF4/Radeon9500. I'm surprised how low they actually are.
You have geforce 4 cards in your work desktops? What are folk doing in your office that they need 3D accellaration? Most office desktops I see have Intel 810 chipsets or similar, and why the heck not... these are for running Excel, not playing Doom III. A quick trip over to Dell.com shows their Office desktops - the Optiplex range all come with ether Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (GMA900) or Embedded Intel Extreme Graphics 2. I suspect neither of those would be up to running Doom III
Now there are 2^1413123 FPS games, and it's old hat; is Doom 3 really worth it?
P.S. I don't think the system requirements are that steep; I've been able to meet them for over a year, and haven't upgraded much recently. (Just got a athlon 2400+ because the 2200+ was too hot)
Just how good would these minimum requirements be? I've seen some software that will "run" in minimum situations, but it is really not worth a thing.
But how many people buy PCs now with only 256MB Ram? XP will run horrible on just that much. I recently bought a new PC. I got 512MB and an AMD3000+ for around $500. I could've gone with 256MB for a little less, but anything more than the cheapest PCs seem to come with more RAM now.
Does anyone have an older PC that they plan to play games on? Just how powerful will the recommended PC need to be? I personally doubt many people will be upgrading older PCs for game play. It is simpler to just buy a newer one now, as even the cheaper new ones are a siginificant jump.
I know it's not a popular item for games, but does anyone know if Doom3 will support dual processors?
lets see. if you have a ddr system, (or god forbid a plane sdram) upgrading it would pretty much entail: new cpu, new mobo, new ram (ddr2). want that new graphics card? pci-express graphics card. ohh. got a new SATA motherboard now. guess i'll get one of those matching SATA drives (10k if you want to endulge). so you haven't upgraded.. power supply + case ($20 on newegg) and your cd rom drive-drives ($20-100 depending on if it's a burner, etc). so you save between $40 and $120 for a new machine if you're upgrading from a machine with reasonable quake3-ut 2003 specs. you'll probably pay $40 - $120 in LABOR for those sorts of upgrades, so really, buying a new machine depending on your old one's age isn't that bad of an idea anymore now is it?
- tristan
is that multiplayer gaming is limited out-of-the-box to 4 players...
Sure, they say modders can increase that number, but it seriously reduces the number of potential online opponents.
Only problem with that is you'll have to play a first person shooter at a lower resolution on a tv with a controller.
One thing I really admire about Carmack's work is just how much graphics he can deliver per unit of hardware.
This is not a fluke. The pattern for all his previous engines is that the most intensive parts are coded in optimized assembly. The rest is coded in C. He admits to using some object oriented practices in his code but he still uses C. Even custom scripting support is reasonably efficient.
Id also designs the games themselves to be reasonably efficient. (When was the last time you saw a true outdoor scene in an Id game? Outdoor scenes have so far been modeled as a special kind of interior.)
In contrast the heavier games some people have mentioned use liberal amounts of C++, (which makes sense from a project management perspective) their custom scripting languages slow things down yet more, and they render scenes which are inherently hardware intensive. They can also deliver high quality graphics, they simply need more hardware.
Now I just have to add my voice to those who wish that more thought was put into the content of the games themselves - so many people spending so much fantasy time focused on raw evil is not healthy.
What do you think the odds are of Id whipping up a standalone app for D3 benchmarking? Something like the benchmarking in UT2003, but self contained? ***output*** Your system will play Doom3 at 60FPS at 640x480 with all effects set to LOW. You will probably experience some lag if you don't upgrade to at least xxx megs of RAM. You are on a dial-up modem. Don't even think about online multiplayer kid. ************
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.
Hmm, that's me - I was playing Doom on my ultra-expensive 100MHz 486 laptop, underway on a submarine in 1995.
But I have a life (and wife and kids) now! I certainly am NOT on the upgrade treadmill anymore. I might have asked for this game for Christmas or something, but there's no way in hell I'm getting expensive hardware upgrades just to play a game I won't have much time for anyway.
So scratch #1 off your (and IDs) list, unless they're stuck in a time warp.
While you do make a very good point about the xbox and the money issue, you are still spreading BLASPHEMY!!!
Personally, I'm buying a new machine this week or next week. I might even buy 2 mice just because I'll probably brake one in the first week.
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
The funny part today is we still strive for that, but instead of DOS, its Linux.
What happens if you are both types of people? Then you are a FPS Doom gawd to make the oldskoolers drool and the newskoolers back into their diapers.
Remember, the rocker launcher is your friend :-)
LainTheWired = isgod( int Lain, int denial, float truth)
Although most (all?) new machines are going to meet these specs.
Yeah, but that leaves a lot of us in the dust. I'm still running a custom built PIII 733 w/512MB RAM, 80 gigs of disk, and a GeForce2 GTS from three years ago. I haven't bothered to upgrade, because the machine is still a strong contender against modern machines.
The real secret here is that I don't think Id is planning for everyone to run out and buy Doom III now. I think he's releasing it as a technology demo (as Quake III was) and then will market it to gaming companies as the ultimate way to create their games. Since the lead time on new games is at least a year, "common" computing should pretty much catch up in the interim.
It's too bad, because all those Quake III based games were still running fine on my little 'ol machine. I guess I'll eventually have to upgrade or miss out on all the upcoming Gaming Goodness(TM). Elite Force III would be awesome...
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ESDF is so much better than WASD. Try it, then assign A and Z to something useful (depending on the game). You'll never go back to WASD. :P
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Sure the RAM is high and probably not needed (especially if u have "the greatest fucking video card"... That said the video card requirement isn't that high. A Geforce 3 or ATI 8500? I picked up an ATI 9200 card a couple of months ago for $100 at retail.
The fact is these guys are giving specs that are *gasp* going to make their game look good. They aren't interested in seeing their several years of development work chug at 20fps. And none of their customers are either.
RAM is cheap, the video cards you need are cheap. I don't see the problem here...
Not quite. Particularly in an atmospheric (aka dark) game like Doom 3, I bet most of the levels will be designed for a certain level of graphics performance. Although the game may play ok at the minimum settings, it will be really hard to get through these sections because you won't be seeing what the level designer saw.
It's like trying to play a modern flight sim at 320x240. The framerate might be OK, but your instruments would be unuseable, and because the designers assumed the instruments would be useable, it may not be possible to play it.
Here's a good article on the technology behind Doom 3.
The author of that article must not have played Thief: Deadly Shadows, or he would not be so excited about some of the things mentioned. Like your character shadow being cast where it ought to be, based on the lighting in the room; along the floor and up the wall, stretching or shrinking as appropriate, etc. Enemies are also aware of your shadow, not just your character, and will respond if you are not paying proper attention to the lighting. And near the end of that article, a big hurrah for 'fan shadows' which also already work fine in Thief.
All that said, I'm still looking forward to Doom III, but I'll get it next year when the price is down.
I've found that WinXP is rather sluggish in a computer with 256MB of RAM. Dropping in another 256MB stick, the performance takes a very perceptable jump in all sorts of machines ranging from PIII500's to XP3200+'s in day to day computer use. I've also found that doubling it again to 1GB makes for no noticible difference in the same machines.
Agreed. WinXP's base boot configuration (once you load all of the device drivers and all of the patches and a few things like instant messaging and an MP3 player) is right around 200-256MB. Which doesn't leave much room for applications. It also gets worse over time as you add more doodads to the system.
512MB is the real useable minimum for a WinXP machine being used for anything other then Notepad. And 1GB is vastly better, especially if your users have two monitors or keep a dozen different applications open at the same time.
It's the same old story that it's been for the past 10 years. Whenever you buy a new machine, always double the RAM and go with the cheaper CPU. The cost difference between 256MB and 512MB is likely about the same as between a 2.8GHz CPU and a 3.2GHz CPU. But the performance improvements will be huge if you go with the memory upgrade.
And since PC performance has pretty much flat-lined over the past 5 years (it used to double every 18 months, now it only doubles every 30-36 months), an older machine with 512MB or 1GB of RAM is still a very useful machine for general computing.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I expected the bare minimum to be much higher. Given the trailers and screenshots, no way this bare system could produce that at 10fps.
But then again, the people at id can really produce optimized code. Remember the BSPs in quake2 or the basic system requirements of even doom?
Theres still no PC that can respectably run Giants, citizen Kabuto at full settings on, because they shipped the product before optimizations, but I'd expect ID to allow more fans to play this game. If the minimum CPU was 3.5GHz and minimum ram was 1GB for instance, their sales would be much lower.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Personally, I use Mouse2+ASD so I can run and gun while taking a sip of Coke, scratching an itch, or whatever, but I knew several guys who switched to ESDF back in the Action Q2 days. I thought they were crazy. Then I found out they used their index fingers to strafe right. I *knew* they were crazy. Your index finger is likely your most versatile digit, so why tie it up strafing when your pinky is quite capable of strafing? You should use a layout that maximizes the number of keys your index finger can reach. For me, since I have a split keyboard, that means my index finger rests on F. I can use it to hit 4, 5, 6, R, T, F, G, V, and B. Before I got a split keyboard, I made good use of Y, H, and N, too.
Without a split keyboard, I can imagine that ESDF might be better if you had enough control and reach with your pinky to hit Q, A, Z, Tab, Caps, and Shift, but I sure don't. I do use Tab, Caps, Shift, and Control in games that allow it (some annoy me by ignoring Caps Lock or permanently binding Tab to something).
I also put some handy functions on the keypad so my right hand can quickly hit them and grab the mouse again, but nothing critical. I wish more games would support the extra buttons on my mouse, too. Then maybe I could actually do everything without having to have "switch" keys that modify the bindings of other keys. Heck, I can't even do that with a lot of the new engines, unless someone here knows how to decipher the config files of games that use the Unreal engines.
I feel sorry for the poor game tester they made use a minimum spec machine to go through the entire game...
You know what would be funny? A website that posts minimum spec benchmarks on all the popular games. Would be interesting to see what game makers think "minimum" actually means.