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.'"

Comments

Sweeeeeet.

[zedmelon]

From the hardware guide:
"What we noticed immediately is that DOOM 3 looks incredible even at 640x480! "
and
"Looking at the image, it's surprising just how good Low Quality looks."

My hopes weren't very high, but I'm relieved to see this. Now I know my TNT2 card will do just fine.

But seriously, their test on a minimal system yielded encouraging results:
"Our system was composed of a 1.5GHz Pentium 4, 512MB of Corsair RAM, and a GeForce 4 MX 440 video card"

fp?

Systems

[mfh]

FTA: "There are no major differences in image quality between NVIDIA and ATI video cards when playing DOOM 3 at the same settings."

From this shot, I would have to say, ATI looks nicer for quality of lighting. The blending seems more natural.

FTA: "There is no doubt that DOOM 3's minimum system specifications can easily deliver a good gaming experience."

If you don't mind frames dropping to this and their ultimate Doom 3 system.

FTA:"Without a doubt, our AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 system sporting the ABIT AV8 motherboard with 2GB of Corsair XMS RAM was the pinnacle of DOOM 3 performance in terms of image quality and speed when outfitted with the BFGTech GeForce 6800 Ultra OC."

And that is a nice system by any standards. I think I am very interested by the Alienware Doom system. The Aurora ALX looks sweet.

Xian has some cool quotes for the guys at Hard|OCP here. Most notably:

"I am proud to say that DOOM 3 is quite possibly the most aurally detailed and complex game ever made, on any platform."

Drooooool.........

OSX version Needed

[artlu]

Then, i can use my Dual 2.0 G5 with Apple's gorgeous new displays. Yes, i know LCD is bad for gaming, but the new apple monitors are just crazy. At least my "Stock Game" looks good on the monitors.

Actually, does anyone know if ID is planning an OSX release like they did with Quake 3?

And on the software front...

[Ford Prefect]

Interestingly, Windows 98 won't be supported.

I'll be in the weird situation of having a game that will run on my PC in Linux, but not on my games-only Windows installation.

Makes a change! :-)

Re:And on the software front...

[Tackhead]

> Interestingly, Windows 98 won't be supported.

"Won't be supported" or "Won't work"?

Those aren't necessarily the same things. My 9800XT "isn't supported" on my 98SE gaming rig either - but it works just fine.

(Why do I game on 9x? Because it's the same 9x license that came with the box six years ago. Because 9x doesn't run services that listen to ports. Because I can boot with a floppy and reimage -- even though, unlike my friends' 2K/XP boxen, I've never had to, because the box has never been 0wn3d. :)

/me glances at the log of RPC/DCOM worm attacks, every few seconds all bouncing against unopenable ports, from even goddamn dialup IP addresses, and laughs.

Yes, 98SE is a DOS shell. Yes, 98SE isn't a real OS. Yes, 98SE is a toy. Yes 98SE has no security model. And yes, for a single-user gaming rig, that's why it's better than a real OS.

In the meantime, 98SE doesn't require me to "activate" it after I swap hard drives or motherboards. 98SE doesn't phone home. 98SE doesn't run services I don't need. And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button. 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.

(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?)

2K/XP are for Microsoft boxen that do real work. For a gaming rig, they're overkill. Gimme a stripped-down DOS box any day.

Now that the rant's out of the way -- who cares if DOOM3 is "supported" on 98SE. I'm sure we'll find out within 72 hours whether or not it "works anyways".

SMP

[iamthemoog]

Nice article, though where's the multi-processor graphs? "Ultimate DOOM3 Systems" still only shows single CPU systems.

Any clues anyone? It seems the game is pretty much video card limited, but a 2nd CPU might flatten out the frame rates to a more even level instead of bouncing up and down from 17 to 60 FPS ...

Hardware on GNU/Linux

[sverrehu]

The interesting question is: What is the optimal hardware for running Doom 3 on a GNU/Linux system? I haven't played a game since RtCW, and I want to buy a new system to play Doom 3 on GNU/Linux. I know nothing about the current state of hardware support for various high-end graphics cards on GNU/Linux.

Quake?

[skiman1979]

Just curious, is there a reason this story is posted with a Quake 3 icon? Isn't there a games icon?

Re:Heh heh

[Lightwarrior]

Parent: -1, Troll.

He didn't read the article. He just makes blind suppositions about the content of the because it's from a hardware enthusiast site.

Part of the beauty of these sites is that we can get information about how the hardware you and I have in our computers perform compared to what's available. They clearly demonstrate what framerate and image quality you're likely to get, compared to what different hardware is capable of.

Consider my situation. My computer is pretty current, though my video card is about a gen and a half behind the bleeding edge. I'm curious what sort of frame rate and IQ I can expect when my Doom 3 preorder arrives. I know that I'm probably going to be runnining in 10x7 with MQ - maybe HQ (they didn't benchmark my *exact* system).

That's fine. Sure, I could blow $600 on a top of the line video card to improve my framerate, but I don't consider it worth it for a card that will outperform 99% of the games I own.

Assuming Doom 3 is the game it's hyped to be, a year or two down the road I'll be able to come back and play this game in all the glory I could have spent $600 now to see. It's a matter of personal preference.

Hell, I've been doing that with System Shock 2 and Deus Ex for years. Each new video card yields at least one more playthrough, with higher graphics settings, more AA/AF, or whatever.

In regards to your situation of screwing someone out of perfectly good hardware, did it ever cross your mind to inform the gentleman that his hardware was perfectly acceptable, and that the Best Buy salesperson was just trying to make a buck?

In less polite terms, I hope I'm never mugged when you're around.

-lw