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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."
is it just me or is anyone else suprised?
even the desktops i order at work come with more than the minimum requirements (1gb ram, 2.4+ processor, geforce 4 (or equiv)).
but i suppose this is minimum requirements...recommended will be much more.
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.
Ooooh, you mean the Doom 3 interactive slide show? That sounds about right then.
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
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
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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...
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'll trade my little brother for a Radeon 9800XT before Doom3 hits the shelves! PLEASE!
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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.
------------------
Freedom or Evil: Freevil.net
G. W. Bush says, "You decide!"
486 processor operating at a minimum of 66MHz or any Pentium® /Athlon® processors
8 MB RAM
20 MB of uncompressed hard disk space
100MB of free hard drive space for the
Windows swap file (in addition to install space)
Seems like quite a jump for just one point.
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.
It will be worth it. When has Carmack ever done us wrong?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
That's completely unreasonable, because it would require someone to buy a 256 MB module, a 128 MB Module, and a 2 MB module. What the hell were they thinking?
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I'm using a Voodoo Banshee card from 1998, you insensitive clod!
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.
http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identi ferID=6737&action=flatview/
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?
till I find out what the min requirements for Duke Nukem Forever are.
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
Here's a good article on the technology behind Doom 3.
Essentially, it's geared towards a technology set that's already fairly well established. It relies heavily on normal mapping to produce seemingly high-polygon models when they're actually quite low-polygon. This is all done in OpenGL and not DirectX. Personally, I think it speaks highly of the ID developers that they can make an engine that looks so good on so many PCs.
To play Doom, I remember having to boot my 386 without loading the TSRs....
</old man voice>
*hits nearest young'un with cane*
-fragbait
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.
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
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
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
It's a shorthand way of saying "we expect pixel shaders v2.0". So my GF3Ti is right out.. (PS 1.1 == DX8 IIRC).
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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.
Come on guys, calm down. Doom II was also re-released for Windows 95 after it launched, which is probably where he got his stats.
I hope you're kidding. I mean, it freaking ships in a few weeks. Hundreds of people outside of id have seen it. It's been reviewed for Pete's sake...
My Systems
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.
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
O' my crisp 55 Dollars and my beautiful wife..
I bid thee both farewell, atleast for a while..
Now, to my 55 Dollars this is for ever..
To my lovely wife, this is a short respite..
My hard earned money, gotta let you go..
To fill the Coffers of Carmack and ID-eo
So that he maketh new game engines and new bump mapped creatures
And I, cowering in the dark, salivating at the games new features..
And to my dear wife, I will see you soon
But first I have to kiss my double barrel shotgun and my precious ammo
Before I can warm the sheets next to you
For here cometh the Cyberdemon and I gotta runnoo..
Rapid Nirvana
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
The extra memory might be used to store:
* More combinations of black, silver, and brown. Using primary colors would unfortunately require another 512MB.
* More darkness.
* An electrical simulation that emulates poor electrical conditions. This will be used to flicker lights on and off randomly.
* More wasted bullets.
* More random metal plating on the letters of the Doom logo.
* A somersault animation. When the Doomguy jumps, he'll backflip now.
* Crates. Lots of crates. With UAC logos on them for variety.
* Shiny metal pipes. Lots of them. At least one will explode as you walk by it; another will have steam coming out of it for a volumetric effect.
* At least one level will have you walking down a hallway only to hear a.) a human scream, b.) demonic growling, or c.) eerie whistling wind coming from an unseen source.
* A hidden TC of Barney Doom, for old time's sake. Destroy Barney in true 3D now.
* Did I mention black, gray, brown, and darkness?
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.
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
Yeah thjey should just have said 256mb of dual channel DDR. That ought do it!!
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.
Not to mention the ubiquitous yet entirely inadequate Intel "Extreme Graphics" found in nearly all big-name desktops. Even "high-end" systems ship with the barely adequate FX5200. Video card upgrades will be required of almost all stock brand name desktops.
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.
I want an awesome game. I want awesome grapics, with awesome rendering, great lighting, 3d shadows, incredible monsters made of a gabillion triangles. And I want the game to have no "jaggies" so it's smooth as glass at 1280x1024 with 60fps. Oh, and 5.1 surround sound with real time effects and echos and reverb.
/sarcasm
What? I can't enjoy this on my $299 Walmart PC? FUCK YOU iD SOFTWARE! WTF? YOU GUYS CAN"T CODE.
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...
OK. Just want to really quickly disspell some inaccuracies in your post, probably the result of believing Slashdot anti-Microsoft FUD.
try again - longhorn won't be out until at least 2007, and many are saying 2008 or later
Many on Slashdot are saying this -- many who have absolutely no frame of reference and no idea what they're talking about. Microsoft has always said Longhorn would be out in 2006. As far as I know, they're still saying 2006 and they're right on track for 2006, based on the work they've been showing. Expecting a machine to run two years from now is NOT absurd.
the "suggested" specs for a longhorn machine,
What you're talking about...the absurd specs of 4 GHz, terabyte of hard drive, etc...were disspelled as soon as Slashdot "reported" them. Right now, the recommended specs for a development build of Longhorn -- DEVELOPMENT, mind you, not "just running it" but actively writing, debugging and profiling software -- are 1.6GHz and 1GB of RAM, and suggested DirectX 9 support with 64MB of VRAM. Nearly identical speed to the Doom 3 requirements with a nice ram boost.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Now I'll be able to run Doom 3 and Longhorn on the same system!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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?
Here, listen: http://www.dissention.net/media/music/toolRip.mp3L isten
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.