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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.
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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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
The 2GHz Athlon 64 3200+ will perform at least as well as a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, and will burn less power doing so (especially compared to the new Prescott-core P4). The Athlon 64's go up to 3800+.
I'm hoping that id releases a 64-bit Linux build of Doom3 like Epic has done with UT2004. I've been having lots of fun playing UT on my Athlon 64 3200+ desktop with BFG GeForceFX 5900XTOC under 64-bit Fedora Core 2. Frame rate just isn't a problem at 1280x1024 res. nVidia has done an outstanding job with their latest Linux drivers. You can still play 32-bit games under 64-bit Linux (I tested Wolfenstein:ET), but you get that nice performence boost with true 64-bit binaries (due to having twice as many registers available in AMD64 mode as much as anything else).
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.