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."

Comments

UPDATED: System Specs

[johnthorensen]

Items appended are in ITALICS:

• A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500.
• 384 megabytes of memory.
• Two gigabytes of hard drive space.
• An nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.
• motherboard, hard drive, CD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, power supply, power cable, SVGA monitor, linux
• Depends(tm) undergarments (for the scarey parts!)
• Pepto Bismol (for the gross parts, duh!)
• BEER (cures all other ailments that may cause you to drag yourself away from Doom 3)
• Vaseline (in case you you get that feeling and are too busy playing Doom to go find your girlfriend/wife/cheap hooker)

Yawn

[Graabein]

Am I the only geek who just doesn't get it with FPS games?

Bo-ring.

Now give me a good arcade game any day of the week and I'm interested. If it's a good flight sim I'll be lost to this world for the next 48 hours. But pretending you're Rambo and shooting up the place? Yawn...

Cheapest way to play a crippled version

[littleghoti]

If you check out the screen shots on the doom3 website, the X-box graphics suck. Hard.

Of course I don't know if the maps will be the same and the gameplay, but when I play doom3, I want it to look pretty, and the X-box screen shots don't.

Mac Requirements:

[piecewise]

Mac Requirements:

A PC. D'oh!

Re:Oh....I also was "surprised". *yawn*

[MarsDefenseMinister]

I'm not sure why you're going off on me. Perhaps someone stole your dildo? I know that 256 + 128 + 2 = 386. That was the ENTIRE point of my joke. To quote the original person that I was replying to:

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.

See? He said 386MB and I was jabbing him a little on it. Now, don't you feel like an ignorant little fuckstick? You are my bitch. My little bitch asshole, filled with my hot cum.

Must be the new math...

[gillbates]

Okay, I was partially joking, so I can understand your points. Please try to understand mine: this game shouldn't require this much memory to run - unless, of course, they're using some fantastic new form of rendering.

Usually High Res texture are at least around 512x512 at 32 bits, so around 8 megs per tetxures, a bit higher than 16k.

Um, 512 x 512 = 262144 * 4 bytes/pixel = 1048576 ~ 1MB per texture.

Okay, so that's just off by a factor of 8. But then you say:

That's why videocards have 256/512mb ram now alone, mostly for the framebuffers and textures.

Which just contradicts your earlier point. If I've got 256MB on the video card, that's ~ 2 framebuffers and 200 textures on the card, not in main memory.

Having developed FPS games, I'm kind of skeptical of your 512x512 texture claim. Granted, you'd use these for large objects, but generally speaking, you want to minimize the size of tiles because of the problem with memory bandwidth: if you've only got 32MB per frame, that's 32 1MB textures you can render per frame.

There are different algorithms for rendering 3d scenes, and I've found that the difference in time and memory requirements between them can vary by an order of magnitude. The 384MB requirement makes it look as if they've chosen a less-optimized, more generalized approach for the sake of developing the game on time, rather than producing the most efficient rendering. (Insert Duke Nukem forever joke here...)