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Official Doom 3 Benchmarks Released
Rogerpq3 writes "Before the game goes on sale, id Software has been kind enough to release some benchmarks for DOOM 3 with the latest video cards on the market from NVIDIA & ATI. HardOCP has published the five page article which should help anyone trying to decide if they should upgrade their video card for DOOM 3. There's also an introductory note from John Carmack, mentioning: 'The benchmarking was conducted on-site, and the hardware vendors did not have access to the demo before hand, so we are confident that there is no egregious cheating going on.', and the HardOCP writers comment: 'As of this afternoon we were playing DOOM 3 on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card and having a surprisingly good gaming experience.'"
Didn't an ATI employee leak the demo for Doom III? If so then this could explain why the game runs so much better on Nvidia cards. If ATI wants to stay in the market for cards aimed at running Doom III then they need to start releases new drivers soon.
1st: Shaddap, no one likes to be distracted by the intricacies of the medium used for discussion. We're here to discuss the topic at hand.
2nd:
"For those of you that have not yet pre-purchased your copy of DOOM 3 because you thought your system would not be up to par and are not planning a system upgrade, you can now rest easy. I can now say with confidence, if you are playing any of the newer 3D games that have come out this year, the odds are that your system will provide a great DOOM 3 gaming experience in terms of IQ and video performance."
("Now" is used too much in the article's final paragraph.)
Doesn't this smell like commie bs to anyone else?
As I'm reading the entire article I'm thinking about how ATI is in Canada and IDSoftware & Nvidia are in the U.S. and it seems like ATI just didn't realize that Carmack was STILL the shiznit with next-generation graphics in games among other seemingly frivilous details that you guessed would happen and did. He's kept going when everyone else just stood there and made all their games off the same engine -- or a variation of an engine that produces the same results from any other engine of what we've seen lately.
Oh well, doesn't really matter 'cause Half-Life 2 is going to come out soon (if they did their jobs) and it's "barely-better-than-last-generation" engine isn't really going to weaken Valve/ATI's position because HL2 may be the trump card. What if it's like Halo. A game that when one played it co-op on the Xbox, one must have the system it is played on. The graphics will still be a step up -- but not like they looked last year (;_:) Point is, ATI's benchmarks are going to be better for Half-Life 2 than Nvidia's and that's something to consider AND HL2 may just be the next Halo. So thousands end up buying the new Nvidia card only to feel screwed later when HL2 shows their card gives less FPS.
Still, Doom3 is going to be awesome either way and I expect it to do well even if HL2 ends up being the perfect game albeit's lesser graphics engine.
I'm just saying to take the situation in perspective -- just because an article says "hardware upgrade" or a variation thereof 3 times per page doesn't mean you have to preoccupy yourself with it. You might want to wait until HL2 comes out. Base it on your economic situation rather than timeline.
If the low spec gear runs the game well why not have these framerates next to the others? Why not list the colour depth and screen resolution that that this lower spec gear was running at? To me it just seems like a real neat way to get people with underspec hardware to commit to a game that won't run well on their system. After all the article has a great link at the end to where you can go and preorder the game.
For those of you that have not yet pre-purchased your copy of DOOM 3 because you thought your system would not be up to par and are not planning a system upgrade, you can now rest easy
Or we can wait until some more independant reports on how the game runs on low spec gear before we commit to it. Not crap like "it gives a good experience".
Cinematography is displayed in theatres at 24 fps. I strongly suspect you'd get that, even with 'crappy' old hardware.
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