Slashdot Mirror
Doom 3 Hardware Guide Debuts
Nosf3ratu writes "Over at HardOCP, the boys have teamed up with id software again to publish the Official Doom 3 Hardware Guide. As the guide states: 'With the prospect of so many new people being brought into gaming by DOOM 3, there will likely be a lot of questions regarding the computer hardware needed to support it.'"
With Doom3 and HL2 comming out very soon, I am interested to see how this will affect sales in new CPU's and video cards. Will there be a great boost in sales so people can play these games? I for one have just bought a new computer to allow me to play these--although it is a laptop, and I need to get a faster HD for it.. heh
Boxing Equipment Reviews
"With the prospect of so many new people being brought into gaming by DOOM 3..."
Does anyone really see Doom 3 as some kind of crossover phenomenon that will make people start gaming and suddenly go buy top-notch computers to support their new addiction? I highly doubt it. This sounds like a huge event for the computer gaming crowd, but not much beyond that.
Sorry to poo-poo the hyperbole, but come on...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Is it too much to ask that we have some confirmation that Doom3 is actually a good game before /. spams us with 15 stories a day on it?
There's tons of games coming out all the time, many are better than the mediocre junk id foists on us in the name of selling graphics engines, why dont they get covered?
While I mostly agree with your statements about sites like HardOCP in general, did you RTFA? They keep stressing over and over again that Doom3 plays fine on remarkably low-end systems, and that there is no real need to upgrade from the several-years-old systems that many of us have.
Actually you'll find that a TNT2 has very good throughput, the lack of T&L will hurt in DOom3 tho.
No doubt this article will convince a bunch of clueless wannabe's that they MUST piss away $1000 in hardware over the next week else they won't be playing Doom 3.
Actually, they post framerates for the recommended low end system that seem perfectly respectable (i.e., hovering around the 20-30 range) for an ancient system. I'm running a athlon 2100+ with a GeForce4 TI card and I'm not about to upgrade cause of this game.
(now when HL2 comes out and I've got 2 pieces of eyecandy that are droolworthy, I might think about some sort of upgrade...)
I assume you were one of the beta testers based on your comments. What exactly were the problems with the gameplay?
I don't know if I'm the only person who noticed this, but these screenshot images are REALLY poorly compressed; doing a side-by-side comparison is pointless if all you see are JPEG Jaggies.
Most of the reasons you've listed for not wanting to switch from 98 to 2k/XP are pretty silly.
In the meantime, 98SE doesn't require me to "activate" it after I swap hard drives or motherboards.
Neither does XP. I've swapped/added many a hard drive to my XP computer, and it never asked me to re-activate. A motherboard is entirely a different matter, since the activation is closely tied to that. Even then it's a simple matter of saying "reactivate over the internet", and a few seconds later you're done.
98SE doesn't run services I don't need.
98 might not run "services", but it most certainly can be running anything in the background, not to mention the normal system things that are constantly running and pretty hard to disable.
And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button.
Huh? How is that a benefit? What if it was in the middle of doing a registry update and hard crashes? Next time you reboot, you're gonna get that nice Windows 98 message about the registry hive being corrupted, and to reinstall Windows. Joy!
98SE boxen (as long as you're not using M$'s crapware browser and mail client) can be plugged onto the evil Intarweb - straight out of the box - without even a firewall, and not get 0wn3d.
BS. I dare you to put a stock 98se install on an unprotected line. Time how long it takes for it to be owned. Probably under 30 minutes or so.
(This rant expired by the equivalent crashes on the same game played on a friend's XP rig - I observed that when a game in XP goes down hard, the OS keeps running. That's not a feature, that's a bug! No mouse, no GUI, just a frozen 3D rendering of the game, but the hard drive light just flickers happily as the remaining components of the OS busily "manage" the swap file. You sorta wait for the light to flicker out, and hope that you press the hard-reset button before it comes back up. WTF kind of crap is that?)
Your friend should try hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del to get back to the desktop, or even the "Windows key" gets me back there after a game freezes. ATi added a crash management program to their Catalyst drivers that helps you recover from GPU hangs, and it works pretty well. Besides, if your games/apps are crashing, you've got bigger problems than waiting for your hard drive light to stop flickering.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
OK, lets not jump the gun here...
The folks over at TomsHardware, HardOCP, whatever tech site you want to pick on are in a WHOLE DIFFERENT LEAGUE than the idiots that work or shop and CompUSA, Circuit City, whatever.
Those sites cater to folks that want specs on high end hardware. Everyone knows that there is a sweet spot in computer hardware somewhere between cutting edge and one generation old. Performance vs cost in computer hardware (as in cars, machinery, whatever) is exponential, and most people realize this. Those that have a lot of money, spend accordingly, probably knowing its not the best "deal".
That said, of all the articles I've read over at HardOCP, this one gives the most recognition to gamers who don't want to spend a boatload of money. I say:
Give HardOCP credit...they did a very comprehensive and useful review, even for the more casual gamer.
>mfh, are you serious? I can't tell the difference between the two ... what's different?
I'm not sure if it's a dither on the BFGTech Geforce or what, but I could see many of the cells towards the darker area of the image quite a bit more pronounced than on the image with the ATI card. Whenever the dark background is blended with the light, the ATI card seems to be hiding the cubism better than the BFGTech cardie. You see the little cubes all over? They are present in both cards, but the difference is more pronounced with the BFGTech, thus making it less believable. The ATI handles these imperfections in a quite stunning manner, IMHO.
There also seems to be better interpolation between the brown line in the light on the ATI card, as the line seems to be less jagged.
Maybe this was just a varriation from the position the screenshot was taken between the cards, but in that representation I think the ATI looks nicer.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The game itself might not have SMP support, but the fact that you have 2 CPUs will let the OS and other stuff run on one, and leave the other CPU for your game to peg out. I am not sure how much better/faster your game might be on a dual 3.0 XEON system vs a single 3.4ghz P4, but you game having it's own high-end CPU to peg out can't hurt.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
There's always loads of fuss over a new Doom/Quake release, like it's the greatest thing ever. And inevitably it isn't. Quake was rubbish, despite everyone being force-fed hype for ages before it was released, as was Quake2 and Quake3.
The engines were great, don't get me wrong, but the actual game was dull as mince. It's only when someone with imagination takes the ID engines and makes a nice game (MOHAA,RTCW Multiplayer, Alice etc.) that you get a decent experience. Yes ID make lovely graphics engines, but that's about it. All of their games are point, shoot, frag fests and always have been.
Take Half Life, great game, imaginative, immerses you in the story, all using the Quake2 engine. Whereas Quake2 was dull dull dull.
I will look forward to Half Life 2 and Battlefield 2 (looks more impressive as a game than Doom3 does, from what I've seen so far) but not Doom3. The more hype I hear about it the less I want to play it. There's more to a game than fancy graphics.
Believe me, I tried everything to get UT2003 to run well on this system. /me pukes and then faints.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???