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...

[kannibal_klown]

"Do I really need all that for a gaming machine, though? I mean, are save-games so important that I really need RAID?"

Games hit the harddrive for 3 reasons:
1) Save-games (no big deal)
2) Loading maps (sometimes a pain in the ass)
3) Accessing the resources (it does it more if you have less ram).

RAID would only come in handy if the game you're playing has really long load-times, or if you're hitting a cache-file a lot.

For saved games, yeh, it's pretty useless.

But as far as price goes, RAID is pretty cheap. A lot of motherboards come with it now, particularly those with SATA ports.

At that point, you'd just need to buy 2 SATA drives (like, 2 80GB drives), and you'd have a fast RAID solution storing 160GB.

I'm considering going that route with my next PC. RAID 2 smallish SATA hard drives together for my main system, and back stuff up on a 3rd drive (probably a slow 5,200 RPM drive).

System Reqs

[Plake]

Well, for what it matters I've always found ID to make the best performing games for their minimum requirements. I had a 233mhz for running Quake 3 and that was even low for back when it was released, but it still ran and well I must say (30fps or so, with low res options).

Just think what Half-Life (3?), or any other major FPS's requirements will be at the time.

Re:System Reqs

[kannibal_klown]

Tell me about it.

I had a PII 233 when Quake 3 came out. But I had a VOODOO 3 card in there. That game ran like silk on my machine.

Meanwhile, my friends were bragging to me that their machines were faster (PII 300's with stock video cards). They nearly sh!t a brick when they saw it run on mine (their puny 8MB Rage cards sucked).

However, you're only siting one example. Quake (the original) really needed a Pentium to play well. At that time, 486's were still more common than the Pentiums, and Quake crawled on them.

DOOM 1 & 2 REQUIRED a 386 w/ 4MB Ram, but it ran pretty choppy. A 486 ran it like silk.

In the end, I don't know.

On one hand, we have previewers saying it runs well on low-end systems, and that the engine is very scalable.

On the other hand, the "benchmarks" were running HIGH end rigs (obscene amount of RAM, very fast CPU's), and the benchmarks were good, but not great.

I'm torn as to whether or not I should upgrade now. I have the funds put away for almost a whole new HIGH END system, but I don't know if it's worth it. While a high-end machine will handle DOOM3, can we say the same about the later games that will utilize the engine? They might not be as efficient with their maps and what-not, and you might need like a 4GHz rig to run them in all their glory.

I want to get a "PCI Express" capable motherboard now, so I can upgrade it later if needed, but it's hard to find them in retail.

I have a P4 2.4 w. 533 MHz FSB, 1GB Ram, and ATI 9800XT; I consider it a mid-range machine capable of handling mostly anything out there today. The closest system they had to mine in the "benchmarks" TROUNCED my specs, and yet 1024x768 at medium quality (with no AA or AF) ran at like 50FPS. That means mine will be lucky to get like 40FPS at low settings.

Re:Nope.

[Teancom]

Ridiculous power? Where I work, we are buying 3.4Ghz P4s with 4 Gigs of RAM for all of our engineers. Granted, I work at a memory manufacturer so the RAMs easy to come by, but we're only paying about $1K for the machines themselves. So I don't think its a stretch at *all* to say that in '07, a top-of-the-line machine from today will be the minimum reqs for a top-of-the-line game then. That's the "thing" about computers: today's overpowered monster is tomorrow's weakling.

Oh, and the speed of the machine has jack-all to do with making original games or not. If you can make an original game for a 1Mhz C64, or an Apple II, or a 286, then you can make one for any desktop machine in use today.

Graphics

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

What about graphical requirements? That's a big piece of the picture that's missing from these calculations.

Re:Graphics

[Frizzle Fry]

A simple linear model reveals that a minimum requirement for id's next game after doom 3 will be graphics card with 5d-acceleration.

Finally...

[hal2814]

...I'll have something to run on my Longhorn system.