Specs For id's Next Game After Doom 3 Calculated

jvm writes "Since my current PC is beefy enough to play Doom 3, I began planning for id Software's next game, the one that will come out _after_ Doom 3, so I've worked out the release date and minimum system requirements. It looks like a 3GHz processor and 1.5Gb of RAM just won't cut it in 2007, although the hard disk requirement doesn't hurt too much. Where's this information coming from? From id Software's past game requirements, a couple of exponential and linear models, and some pretty graphs. Start saving for that upgrade now! (Slashdot recently covered the Doom 3 system requirements.)"

Comments

Start saving nothing...

[skermit]

I paid over $3000 for a P-90w/64mb of ram back when it was the top of the line... now you can get a top of the line computer for roughly half that. The bleeding edge price of computer hardware has been dropping steadily, so by the time we need all that computing power, it'll cheap enough to own.

Re:Start saving nothing...

[Paladin128]

Do I really need all that for a gaming machine, though? I mean, are save-games so important that I really need RAID?
I'm assuming the parent is refering to RAID-0 striping, which would buy you performance rather than redundancy. And seeing as iD recommends defragging before installing Doom 3 (because it has 2 GB of content, and hard disk speeds have not improved at the same rate as CPU and RAM speeds), a 4-way RAID-0 virtual disk using 10K RPM SATA drives would be damn useful. Think about it: 2 GB of game data. A single scene uses 80+ MB of textures. That's a LOT of reading.

Man, 80MB of textures, about 15 MB for a 1600x1200 frame buffer (upwards of 4-16 times that if FSAA is used...), insane amounts of geometry data, complex shader code... it actually justifies graphics cards with 256MB VRAM on board.

Nope.

[fr0dicus]

What were the Xbox 2 specs supposed to be again? Seriously, how long can this sustain itself, can't we reach a level where we decide the hardware is good enough, and allow it to trickle down so enough people have it and it starts to become viable to make original games again?

PC gaming died when GL code was added to Quake, it's a one-trick pony. Now consoles are eating its lunch (you can see it in the sales). Expect further fragmentation if Linux continues to make inroads. Is there a killer app on the horizon that will come into its own when this kind of power becomes available? I can't even see Longhorn needing this kind of ridiculous power.

Re:Nope.

[Have Blue]

Is there a killer app on the horizon that will come into its own when this kind of power becomes available

There was for every other major leap forward in computer power (and every time someone declared the evolution of technology was over, not just in computers). What makes you think the future will be any different?

Convincing..

[mZam]

But i think something that's being left out is the fact that all of these new releases are based on new engines each time.

Each set of ID games listed.. (D1-3 Q1-3 etc.) Are all based on entirely new engines created for the respecive games (except for doom2).

In recent interviews about the new ID game, they all said that their new game in the works would utilize an enhanced D3 engine, not an entirely new coded one (like RTCW uses an enhanced q3 engine). They also said that since they have the engine already, release time wont take remotely near as long as it did for D3.

This is the same for Quake4, which I would assume, uses the D3 engine as well.

Re:Last year's Macintosh should handle it.

[Anonymous Coward]

probably not a lot since you'll have to run it in a virtual machine.