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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.'"
"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?
Mom says my
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.........
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"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. :)
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".