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?

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your TNT2 is no match for my Tseng Labs ET4000! Or my Western Digital 90C31! SUCK IT DOWN!!!!11!!!

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[zedmelon]

Informative.

Don't we have a mod for "+1, Efficiently Sidesteps Sarcasm?"

No WAY, man! My TNT card has never let me down yet! Wagons Ho! still looks as great as it did in '95!

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[foidulus]

I'm wondering how it will end up looking on LCDs whose native resolution is higher than the resolution that Doom suggests. If you don't run an LCD at it's native resolution, it tends to look very block and blurry, which could make the image even worse....
Looks like I'll have to buy a 6800 if I want to play this game

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Kenja]

So, those upside down metallica video reject flying skulls look "good" in low quality mode? Because they look like crap in every screen shot I've ever seen.

Doom3. Nice engine. Some day I hope to see a game made that uses it.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[AliasTheRoot]

Actually you'll find that a TNT2 has very good throughput, the lack of T&L will hurt in DOom3 tho.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[untermensch]

Don't we have a mod for "+1, Efficiently Sidesteps Sarcasm?"

sorry, but the things some people think...

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[incubusnb]

in all seriousness, i'm hoping my Radeon 7000 (64MB) card will do the job, i can't afford an upgrade and all my other specs are more than enough for Doom 3(after the Athlon 3200, 512MB/Ram, and everything else my budget was gone)

i've done more with less so i'm pretty sure it will

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you were one of the beta testers based on your comments. What exactly were the problems with the gameplay?

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[anon*127.0.0.1]

You hid the "But seriously" too well.

It shoulda been capped.
And bolded.
And italicized.
And in 32 point font.
A different color wouldn't hurt, either.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[zedmelon]

True. Very (sadly, painfuly) true.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[proj_2501]

I routinely play Starcraft and Unreal Tournament 2004 on my Powerbook G4 at non-native resolutions and they look fine to me.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[incubusnb]

and Morrowind Requires an 800, yet my old machine was a 450 and it ran it at 20-30FPS

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[multriha]

Don't know about Unreal, but starcraft can't be run at a non-native resolution. It runs at 640x480 I believe always. Powerbooks at just smart enough to scale it properly to fit the screen.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Usquebaugh]

FYI,

native resolution, as discussed here, is the LCDs native resolution not the games.

LCD have an optimal resolution, running at a lower res than this causes a degredation of the image.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[JBark]

I don't think the 7000 (VE) cards are supported in Doom3. The game only supports Radeon 8500 cards and higher.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Txiasaeia]

The lack of T will definitely hurt; I'm just trying to figure out what "L" is and how it relates to "A."

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Minna Kirai]

I routinely play Starcraft and Unreal Tournament 2004 on my Powerbook G4 at non-native resolutions and they look fine to me

If your laptop is a multiple of 640x480, like 1280x960, then the described blurriness wouldn't actually occur for you.

The effect is worst when you run a program a a resolution close to, but not identitical to, the fixed rez of the LCD. That produces some fairly painful scaling artifacts.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[incubusnb]

i mean comparatively, games with high requirements running on lower capability hardware.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Pluvius]

Original poster sarcastically said that the Low Quality setting at 640X480 would look great on his TNT2 video card, even though a TNT2 video card wouldn't even be close to good enough to run Doom 3. The original poster made it clear that he was being sarcastic by saying "But seriously" right after that. The great-grandparent still missed the sarcasm, though. The grandparent pointed out that it was sarcasm, and the parent excused himself by noting that some people really are dumb enough to think that Doom 3 will run on a TNT2 video card.

Understand now?

Rob

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Anonymous Coward]

The lack of T will definitely hurt; I'm just trying to figure out what "L" is and how it relates to "A."

The L stands for lighting. Depending on the quality of the T&A, you may or may not want L. If T&A is low quality, you definately don't want any L. If there is no T&A, the L is a moot point.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[KnarfO]

And blinking!

Sweeeeeet!

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[msh104]

Well, according to the dutch site tweakers.net site, ati plans to have better drivers before the doom 3 release date. the reason they give for losing in the brenchmarks is because they haven't done any coding at all. if I understood everything right, there is going to be a "Doom III opengl ATI driver"

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[msh104]

"because they haven't done any coding at all" I ment OpenGL coding here...

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Naikrovek]

just don't stretch it to full screen. 1280x1024 stretched on a 1600x1200 lcd looks shitty, but 1280x1024 unstretched on a 1600x1200 lcd looks fine.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Quo_R]

Nvidia released the TNT in 1998.. back when they were still cool. Riva 128 owned Voodoo if you ask me.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Rob Simpson]

Or run it at half-resolution, ie: 800x600. That way, each dot on the screen is a square of 4 pixels, rather than some blurry approximation.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[anon*127.0.0.1]

No, blinking text is obnoxious.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[rock_climbing_guy]

I must say, thank goodness. Maybe I'll get to play this game after all. I spent $600 upgrading my computer over a year ago and UT2003 still plays so choppy I can't stand it. It still gives me ulcers just thinking about it. Hopefully, if this is right, I'll be able to play DOOM 3 on my AMD 2600+ with 128 MB video RAM.

Believe me, I tried everything to get UT2003 to run well on this system. /me pukes and then faints.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[zedmelon]

Heh. yeah. I actually still have my Riva in my 4th generation "trickle down" machine.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[karnal]

Here's my specs:

Nforce2 board
one stick 512mb (dual sometime, but just not worth the cost right now)
2800xp barton
evga ti4200 geforce

With this configuration, at 800x600 in ut2k4, it flies. I can crank up the quality, but I usually leave it at "low" so I don't have ANY slowdown at all. I can also run at 1024, but the slightly higher framerate at 800 just feels snappier.

You never mentioned what video card you chose...

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[PierceLabs]

I always find these types of comments odd by ATI. Its not like they are new to ATI. ATI has an OpenGL group, they deliver cards to platforms (like OSX) that only support OpenGL, the release tutorials and demos that run exclusively in OpenGL, and its not like Doom3 is the only game that runs OpenGL.

If what they are saying is true, they are the most bassakwards company in the space.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Draknor]

It should be clear, you start with "L" and work your way up to the "A" :)

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[Rosonowski]

Using the drivers that came on the CD? Those suck.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[KDR_11k]

Do 1280x960 LCDs even exist? All the 1280 ones I have seen used 1024 as the vertical res (what idiot decided to do THAT, anyway?).

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[mirko]

Reminds me of THIS.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

There's two mod points wasted, out of the system forever. Anybody want to try for three?

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[matlhDam]

Fine, then a MARQUEE tag will have to suffice.

Re:Sweeeeeet.

[AliasTheRoot]

actually it's transform and lighting ;)

for polygon throughput the tnt2 absolutely kicked the shit out of the geforce1/2 - it wasn't until T&L was commonly used that the geforces edged it out.

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.........

Re:Systems

[CyberKnet]

Please bear in mind they are using a BFGTech card. I have personal experience with both PNY cards, and BFGTech cards... My PNY FX5200Ultra passed on, and to replace it, I got a BFGTech 5600Ultra.

I am here to tell you today that in terms of FPS, the BFGTech is better. As it should be, it's a 5600 ultra, and the PNY card was a 5200 ultra. However, in terms of image quality, the BFGTech is far, FAR, FAR below the PNY card. Using the exact same drivers.

BFGTech cards are inferior. I would never recommend anyone buy one, and I would certainly call into question any comparison which used a BFGTech as the baseline image for the nvidia line. The image is simply too far degraded below what the same chip from a quality manufacturer such as PNY would put out.

Yes, this is subjective, I have no screen shots to back it up, but I've been meaning to share my experience for a while, so there it is.

Re:Systems

[DeltaSigma]

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

I couldn't find any real discernable difference between the ATI and nVidia side-by-side images, but I thought there must be at some microscopic level.

So when you pointed this one out I decided to test it.

I pulled the image into photoshop and copied the nVidia screen ontop of the ATI screen. I got them as best aligned as I could and then changed the nVidia layer's blending to "Difference." The thing is completely black (except for the gun, which occupies a different position and the text which was placed arbitrarily). Essentially this means there is almost no discernable difference in rendering quality.

What might make one look better than the other is probably a combination of a couple factors. 1: We're looking at a very hazy image. There's apparantly an additive transparent plane being cast from the light or gun or something. In the interest of making things look organic, the texture/shader on this haze probably moves or morphs in some manner, just to keep it from looking too static. 2: jpeg compression, combined with the minor differences between the two images has likely enhanced certain colors/shades to varying degrees.

Give it a try yourself though. I think you'll agree that there's very little difference between the rendering quality of these split screenshots.

Which isn't much of a surprise considering John Carmack's doing the programming.

Re:Systems

[Billly Gates]

For $5,500 listed for the ultimate doom system, I wonder how a cheaper SMP system would perform playing it?

I bet you guys did not know that doom3 supports smp in Windows.

Re:Systems

[MrHanky]

The two cards probably render the pictures identical, but their RAMDACs can have different quality. I don't doubt that the image quality is inferior on one card, but it's not likely to show up on a screenshot.

Re:Systems

[Marovingian]

Nice use of the difference filter. You should also compress the heck out of the histogram using the levels command and that will really exaggerate any differences (however minor they may be).

Re:Systems

[RMH101]

seeing as most of the overhead's in the graphics, i'd say, "not much". certainly not enough to warrant the extra expense of an MP box, compared to spending the same money on a single CPU box and a better graphics card.

Re:Systems

[CyberKnet]

Absolutely. The BFGTech card is ... as best I can put it ... blurry.

Perhaps nVidia just didnt detect a dud chip and it got sent to BFGTech... I know that in some games, the 3D structures do not look the same. there will be "gaps" between polys. Everything will be exceptionally blurred...

The difference physically between the two cards is even obvious. PNY put a heatsink on everything. And not small ones. HUGE. And they work, they dissipate the heat exceptionally well. The two heatsinks on the new card dont seem to do the job as well, but in all honesty, that could just be because the chip runs at a higher clock rate. I know it probably doesnt add too much to the price for the heatsinks, but it seems to help a lot. At this point in time, I believe that the RAMDACs on the PNY card were superior as well.

I will never again think of the higher price of PNY cards as a "brand" premium. PNY make solid, quality cards, and I would be thrilled to have one again.

Re:Systems

[MrHanky]

Alright. With gaps between polygons, the difference can't be explained by RAMDACs. But any difference that is caused by inferior RAMDACs won't show up in screenshots, so if the screenshots were identical, the cards could be quite different in real life anyway.

New Hardware

[Klar]

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

Re:New Hardware

[Donoho]

I am interested to see how this will affect sales in new CPU's and video cards.

I expect PriceWatch to feel the burn if it hasn't already. I used it as a starting point to build my last couple systems.

Aside from tweaking options, is custom built still cheaper/better than off the line?

Re:New Hardware

[stonedonkey]

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

It's been horrendous with video cards, especially the 6800GT OC, which is regarded as Doom 3's "sweet spot" for price-performance ratio. I lucked out, apparently, buying that card right after reading [H]'s review of it. I got one of the last few in stock at chumbo.com (a place I'd never heard of, despite my extensive online hardware shopping).

Now, I got the card for $399.99 and free shipping. Good luck finding it anywhere now, at any price. Even those who ran out of stock have pegged the card at at least $420, with $459 being the new baseline. Sales tax and/or shipping can and will push the total up to $500. I saw one place selling the BFG OC for $525. Best Buy, Chumbo and EVGA appear to be the only places on the Internet that still have the GT variant at $400. The 6800 Ultra is only slightly less impossible to get and is that much more expensive, with the Radeon X800 Pro trailing closely behind that.

It's ugly.

Re:New Hardware

[BrookHarty]

These benchmarks help alot, I bet I'll play HL2 more than doom3 due to CS Source. So after I see benchmarks on ATI vs Nvidia on HL2, I can use the combined scores from both game to pick the best all around GFX card. Nvidia might own in Doom3, but Nvidia always seems to be better on ID games only. ATI seems to be better on Unreal and HL.

Hurry up and weight. Myself I want to wait for a dual PCI Express board before I upgrade, and I dont see any out yet. So no hurry to upgrade *YET*.

Re:New Hardware

[Rolo Tomasi]

Dunno, but I think you'll see a sharp rise in street muggings by desperate geeks ...

Re:New Hardware

[zedmelon]

combining them obviously saved on the hassle of dealing with half a dozen different vendors.

Not to mention a million dollars wasted shipping them all separately

note to mods :
that was a hyperbole - exaggeration for humorous effect.
The real number is much closer to a billion dollars.

/me hits newegg instead of working...

Re:New Hardware

[aka-ed]

It can definitely be cheaper -- the system I'm on has an $80 WD 200GB hard drive, the case and motherboard (soyo K7VME) cost $20 (with a shitty keyboard and a shitty pair of speakers thrown in, those are in the closet in case I ever want to assemble a really bad system), an XP2800+ processor that I picked up for $90, 512 pc2700 memory that was about the same. DVD writer was $90 a while ago, equivalent sells for 50 now. It needs a better power supply, a video card (using on-board crap now), and better speakers, maybe a sound card. But it is doing everything I need it to do for very low outlay.

It's not "better," though...I wasn't going for top of the line.

You can spend more and match the high end systems without matching the price, and still not be happy. Depends on whether you would rather make your own mistakes or have an OEM do that for you.

Re:New Hardware

[ostiguy]

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

Dear Gateway Valued Customer,

This e-mail is sent to you to informyou of a change with your Estimated Arrival Date which was 07/28/04. Theorder number in question is xxxxxxx for the Radeon X800XT Card. Dueto a delay at our manufacturing facility, your order has a new DelayedArrival Date of 08/27/04. As with all dates provided by Gateway, this isnot a guaranteed date of arrival but only an estimate. Because of thisdelay, you do have the right to cancel this order if this date does not meetyour needs. Please note that your order has been placed into priority toarrive to you as soon as possible.

You can check the status of your orderat anytime by dialing the following number;

ostiguy bangs head repeatedly against desk

Re:New Hardware

[Total_Wimp]

There's a symbiotic relationship between hardware vendors and software vendors that make resource-intensive software.

id makes software that makes people go out to buy new geForce card >> nVidia makes lots of money.

nVidia tells everyone that Doom 3 is the greatest game to ever be seen on this planet >> id makes lots of money.

The software maker actually has an incentive to make a product that is percieved as a resource hog because of this positive feedback loop. It's kind an informal paid endorsement or kickback. The software vendor has to push the envelope just enough that people desire the hardware upgrade, but not enough that they alienate owners of slightly older equipment. id has done this perfectly in this case.

MS and Intel have been doing this for years. It's the reason why Intel doesn't throw it's weight fully behind Linux and why Microsoft is quite late with their AMD-64 OS. In theory neither MS or Intel should really care that much, but since AMD and the Linux community aren't really working members of the positive feedback loop, they're only given token praise. The Wintel feedback loop is even worse than usual because almost everyone buys an MS OS with their new computer so pushing hardware actually generates sales, not just endorsements, for Microsoft.

TW

Re:New Hardware

[stonedonkey]

Or, I'll go out and buy a 5500 for $76.00 [newegg.com], and play it in medium resolution. Or the best solution of all. I will wait until Christmas, when NVIDIA and ATI bring our their next card, and the 6800 256MB is old news, and can be purchased for $99-$20MIR=$79.

As it turns out, the 5500 is actually a weaker card than the GeForce 4 Ti line. Compare and contrast:

Geforce FX 5500 (the page is titled "5200" but features the 5500 specs)

--Memory bandwidth: 6.4 GB/s
--Fill rate: 1.1 billion texels per sec.
--Vertices per sec: 68 million

GeForce4 Ti:

(8x AGP GeForce4 Ti4200):

--Memory bandwidth: 8GB/s
--Fill rate: 4 billion AA samples/sec.
--Vertices per sec: 113 million

And come X-mas, nVidia and ATi will likely come out with 512MB versions of their cards, instead of higher model numbers. It was about a five-month gap between the 128MB and 256MB 9800 Pro.

You'll also likely never see the 6800 GT or Ultra anywhere near $100--not until they're certifiably ancient. 256MB of GDDR3 is expensive, no matter how you slice it. DDR2 currently costs about twice that of DDR1, per megabyte. The price of the card just won't come down that fast. I expect more than a few jaws to drop when the MSRPs for the 512MB cards are revealed.

Re:New Hardware

[glsunder]

Sims2 might force a bit more of an upgrade. Id games tend to be very well written, while the first sims was a buggy mess of a game. Simcity isn't much better. So I'm guessing that the sims2 will probably require a fair bit more horsepower than doom3 will. The sims2 will probably outsell both HL2 and doom3 combined, so I'm sure the vid card companies will be thanking pre-teen girls this time around.

Re:New Hardware

[superpulpsicle]

Hell No. The market for graphics card is so diluted with high-performance but low quality cards that overheat in a couple years. Every other joe will wait till the price is affordable.

Re:New Hardware

[TyrranzzX]

I like that "you do not have the right to cancel this order if the date does not meet your needs" part. Meaning, if you don't like it tough luck. Then the "we also can push that back as far as we want to", which means they can decide never to deliver. I'd cancel the order, and when they ask why, you say "well, because you didn't deliver it on the date you said it would, and proceeded to tell me that you can push it back to an "Estemated" date which can be pushed back to anther estemated date."

Re:New Hardware

[hyperion454]

Ummm...you might want to try reading that again.

Re:New Hardware

[tehcyder]

Is any laptop capable of being classed as a top of the line gaming system now?

If so, I won't be buying a desktop again.

Re:New Hardware

[Klar]

Well, I wouldn't say top of the line gaming.. but my laptop has fairly good specs and plays games nice. My laptop(Acer Ferrari 3200) has a AMD64 2800, with a 128mb ATI9800--only problem is that the HD how low RPM, and it is gunna stay that way until 7200rpm laptop hd's go down in price, hehe

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?

Re:OSX version Needed

[untermensch]

Actually, does anyone know if ID is planning an OSX release like they did with Quake 3?
Yes, but not for a while yet. They said the linux release would be "soon", but OSX was still a ways down the road.

Re:OSX version Needed

[Nosf3ratu]

Yes, they are.
Todd Hollenshead, acting CEO of id said in an email shortly after the announcement of the release date, of OSX and Linux:

"Mac and Linux: Unfortunately I don't have dates for either of these. However, Linux binaries will be
available very soon after the PC game hits store shelves. There are no plans for boxed Linux games.
More remains to be done for the OSX version of DOOM 3 and that will take some time. We won't release
the OSX version until it's just as polished as the PC version. The date for OSX DOOM 3 remains "when it's
done", but I can confirm that it's definitely coming. "

Re:OSX version Needed

[MoOsEb0y]

Hey, I'm sure that photoshop game looks great :)

Re:OSX version Needed

[Doogie5526]

That sorta sucks... I got the linux version of Quake 3 for like $15 not too long after the game was released. (and i can just use the window's binaries to play on there).

I guess that's sorta the reason though.

Re:OSX version Needed

[Nosf3ratu]

I haven't seen any official announcements from id, but from Todd's email, I take it as that there will be one version of Doom 3 to buy (much like UT2K4) and the Linux binaries will be probably be available as free downloads on the internet, much as they did for RtCW and Quake3. The boxed versions of Quake3 were not id products; they were Loki products, iirc.

Re:OSX version Needed

[ImTwoSlick]

I want to know if the OSX release will be a free binary to use with the PC release CD. I just don't want to have to buy this thing twice.

Re:OSX version Needed

[Trogre]

I wonder if this is the result of iDs 2003 meeting with Microsoft, when it was declared that an XBox port would be done.

"Oh, and if you just wait a few months before releasing it on a Mac, and don't include Linux binaries in the box." That way the only way you can play Doom 3 when it first comes out is to play it on a Microsoft platform. ugh.

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...

[nkntr]

I am so happy to hear that. Windows 98 needs to go away.

Re:And on the software front...

[Neophytus]

Isn't that a sign that it might be time to move away from '98 then?

Re:And on the software front...

[Ford Prefect]

Isn't that a sign that it might be time to move away from '98 then?

Quite probably. I'll be building a new PC pretty soon, and it'll probably have something 'hip' and 'modern' like Windows 2000 for games...

Stuff like the Halo Editing Kit and the version of Softimage XSI for Half-Life 2 needs an NT-based operating system anyway, so I really should upgrade. :-)

Anyone know where I can get Win2000 cheaply in the UK? Suprnova need not apply...

Re:And on the software front...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thief 3 wasn't supported on Win9x/ME either. Turns out it the biggest problem was the inclusion of the executable icon using an ordinal OOB on Win9x!

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".

Re:And on the software front...

[KDR_11k]

"not supported" as in "won't run" or as in "we haven't tested it and we're not gonna help you if you have problems with that"?

Re:And on the software front...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Computer Exchange (CEX) on Tottenham Court Road in London. They always have old copies of Windowses lying around, or they did when I lived in Britain.

Re:And on the software front...

[robogun]

Isn't that a sign that it might be time to move away from '98 then?

..and Bill Gates sucks in several more $100 bills as ppl upgrade to xp as a result of your comment... seriously, I have several games that only run in dos, that are not made any more. Among these would be the Williams arcade games. And what about fallout, etc. that will run under 9x but not 2000 on.

Re:And on the software front...

[delus10n0]

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.

Re:And on the software front...

[mog007]

It's a sign of a revolution^W^Wthe Apocalpyse. Linux being perferred for games over Windows 98?! AAHHH!!!! RUN!!

Re:And on the software front...

[gnu-generation-one]

"2K/XP are for Microsoft boxen that do real work. "

XP isn't. You'll spend more time dealing with the operating system (trying to get it to work, fixing it, patching it, securing it, wondering why odd things misbehave, and stopping annoying things happening) and won't have as much time left as you hoped for real work.

Re:And on the software front...

[rutledjw]

Thief 3 should be banned

One part game combined with two parts cocaine...

Re:And on the software front...

[Tackhead]

> If you're running Win98SE without a firewall, I will bet you a brand new GeForce 6800 Ultra that http://housecall.trendmicro.com will identify at least one virus or worm you're already infected with.

Alas, the gaming rig's at home, not at work, or I'd take you up on that. (Even though under most circumstances, I'd take one look at "x-trendjavascan-plugin" and say "You don't get to run here, whatever you are!", but I trust trendmicro.com for some value of trust. :)

FWIW, the old McAfee standalone "stinger" scanner gives me a clean bill of health every month or so, as does AdAware.

> The rest came in through ICMP and other vectors that Win98 was very vulnerable to.

Source? Other than 98's winnuke (easily patched , and I should have been more specific that the box in question is 98SE, which wasn't subject to that bug), I don't recall ever hearing of a remote exploit for 98SE that didn't require at least some cooperation on the part of the victim.

The gaming rig runs a somewhat more secure setup than an OOBE 98SE (e.g. it never IIS "web services" installed on it, NetBIOS crap is unbound from TCP/IP before it goes on the 'net, it does no network sharing, and is basically as deliberately as standalone a box as I can make it. A real firewall eats most inbound traffic by default, and a software "firewall" on the box (that could admittedly be compromised a'la the BlackIce hole from last year) provides early warning of phone-home apps.

For what it's worth, I'd have taken your bet (even without the hardware firewall) and one of us would have owed the other a new video card.

So my box might not have been that fair of a bet. I'd be confident that I'd win with software-firewall-only, but just for kicks, I might try imaging the OS partition, throwing it onto an old 1.2G drive, and seeing if it also passes with neither hardware nor software firewall.

And finally, having seen a couple of "Joe Sixpack" 9x machines infested from people who think "Oooh, clicky! It's my Buddy!", I'm leaning towards XP + Firewall + deactivate-administrator-account + Force Auto-Updates-And-Auto-Installs-On for anyone who's not clinically paranoid.

Re:And on the software front...

[Tackhead]

> > 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!

You boot to DOS, copy a recent copy of the registry from C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP, extract the registry from the compressed CAB file, type ATTRIB a couple of times, and copy the good registry over the corrupted one.

How do you boot to DOS on XP? :)

> 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.

That's what he said. Surprised me too, because I'd never seen an XP or 2K box lock hard enough to require a reset. Isn't always the case. The fault there was with the poorly-coded app, not the OS. The behavior occurred only in the one game in question, and a driver upgrade fixed the problem, so it was clearly not a heat-related hardware fault.

One thing I will give XP props for - NTFS is harder to fix when it fails than FAT32, but it is hella more robust, reducing the probability that you'll ever need to fix it.

Re:And on the software front...

[slashrogue]

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.

The last time I did that it was more like 30 seconds. I didn't even have time to get to windowsupdate to download patches... ended up having to format that sucker again and take it in to work where it was on a nice, protected network.

Re:And on the software front...

[roystgnr]

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.

Wouldn't it be even faster for you to just provide him with a URL describing a Win98SE remote exploit? When I tried to find one, the only hit I found (besides IE/Outlook flaws) was for the UPNP service, which isn't on the stock install.

Re:And on the software front...

[rsmith-mac]

Realisticly speaking, you won't be able to run Doom 3 on a Win9x system anyhow due to a couple of reasons. First and foremost, ATI stopped driver development for Win9x after the Catalyst 4.3 drivers, so if there are any bugs in those drivers in D3, you're stuck with them, along with the lower performance than whatever their forthcomming "Doom 3" drivers offer. You also have to deal with the 512MB RAM "limitation" which keeps you below what HardOCP thought was the comfortable place as far as a high-performance system went.

Re:And on the software front...

[UserChrisCanter4]

Just had to offer my two cents here.

How do you boot to DOS on XP? :)

a) you press F8 at boot and boot to the safe mode w/ command line, assuming your OS isn't so thoroughly trashed that you can't get there. If it is, you
b) boot from an XP or 2K CD, and go to the recovery console, which will generally allow you to get almost anything done, provided your file system isn't shot. If it is, you'd be in the same boat booting to DOS, anyway.

Re:And on the software front...

[Ford Prefect]

Halo? What's your opinion of it? I downloaded a cracked pre-release copy of it from suprnova and it didn't seem very good so I reasonably concluded that the official release would also be bad.

Pretty decent. Runs fine on my prehistoric PC, and is good fun - except the map design can get very, very monotonous in places. The good bits are brilliant, the bad bits are plain bad. The Covenant AI's excellent to play against, however. The, um, other AI, less so.

Similarly, I won't be buying Doom 3 because the demo version they released a couple of years ago was very poor IMO.

Hardly a demo version - it was a leaked alpha which ATI had for testing purposes. Not for the general public at all.

I'm waiting for a real demo to be released before deciding if I should buy Doom 3 or not - I keep clear of leaked stuff as if it was the plague...

Re:And on the software front...

[ryanvm]

Considering that to even run Doom 3 you'll have to had purchased a computer within the last two years why would you expect them to support a 6 year old OS?

Re:And on the software front...

[cornjones]

he fault there was with the poorly-coded app, not the OS.

Nope, sorry. I don't care how hard an app crashes, if it brings down the OS, it is the OS's fault.

Re:And on the software front...

[drinkypoo]

It doesn't make sense to pick windows 2000 for a gaming system. The compatibility modes in windows XP are far superior to those in win2k (which require a separate tool rather than just setting some stuff on the shortcut, and which don't work worth a crap anyway) so if you're going to be playing any old games on win2k, you're going to get stuck running them in a virtual machine. You can turn off a lot of the services on XP and if you set it to classic appearance it looks and behaves just like 2k as well as not needing the themes service which can be disabled to save still more memory.

Re:And on the software front...

[poofyhairguy82]

Damn you made me just miss a DOS-Based OS again!

Re:And on the software front...

[karnal]

" It doesn't make sense to pick windows 2000 for a gaming system."

Now that sounds like a flame if I ever heard one.

I know that some people have issues with older games. Fine, I'll give you that one. However, I don't play older games; other than the occasional emulator. I probably would invest in XP Pro, if it was closer to 50$ than 200$ for a "non-upgrade".

Any game I've owned since my k6-2 450 works on my XP2800+, however. So, to each his own.

Re:And on the software front...

[drinkypoo]

Rather than being a flame, it's the voice of experience running everything from dos games to the latest and greatest. Well, on 2k, it was more like trying to run things. I've heard some people say they were able to get good results by juggling driver versions and such, which is just way too much of a pain in the ass for me. XP is a superior gaming system, although I can understand not wanting to pay for it. Know any students? They can at least get it cheaper :)

Re:And on the software front...

[karnal]

Yea, that's the sad thing. I wouldn't mind actually buying a copy of Windows XP - I don't personally want to deal with not having support, or having to get "patched" versions of Service Packs to keep it updated.....

I would be a paying customer for the OS if it were even closer to 100$. But, for now, I'll stick to 2k :)

Re:And on the software front...

[kannibal_klown]

Really?

I've had XP since before it was released in retail (OEM version was released a few months earlier).

Since that time (Fall of 2001), I've had one hard-crash; and that's because I was experimenting in overclocking my CPU. Beyond that, Opera has crashes on my a couple times a month, but I just start the app again and keep going (XP doesn't get taken down by a rogue app).

XP has been ROCK SOLID for me. No weird bugs, no hiccups, no problems. Runs moy software for work as well as games pretty without a single problem.

2000 was pretty solid for me as well, but XP has been more so. I woudn't have upgraded though had I not gotten a good deal.

A lot of it depends on hardware. If you have a bad revision of a motherboard or bad ram, you'll have more problems. But, my motherboard is revision 1.04 (4th revision), and all other parts are of high quality.

Now, before you start bashing me, I should tell you I have 3 computers: 1 Windows PC (gaming / work), 1 Linux PC (for experimenting with stuff), and 1 powerbook (use it for more general stuff).

Hate MS all you want for their business practices / idealogies / etc. But XP is pretty damn good.

The only sh!tty thing about XP is the activation feature.

Re:And on the software front...

[gnu-generation-one]

"XP has been ROCK SOLID for me. No weird bugs, no hiccups, no problems. Runs moy software for work as well as games pretty without a single problem."

Actually I should explain better. I wasn't talking about instability problems. (at least, I hope I wasn't). We were discussing whether having WindowsXP on a computer is good or bad, in terms of getting work done. My reply was that it wasn't, for reasons in several categories:

(a) Setup time - By default, XP is awful. (Default for me typically means "as supplied by Dell") Awful as in, the stupid start menu layout, the stupid control panel layout, the stupid default settings, having everything set to "most animated", having everything set up with stupid defaults, that sort of thing. I usually budget about 2 hours per machine, to get a pre-loaded WindowsXP machine into a usable state (where "usable" is pretty similar to Windows 2000 with a few tweaks)

(b) Annoyances - probably in the same class of problems really, but I'm thinking of things like animated dogs when you search for files, or "helpfully" clearing away the icons on your desktop after 30 days, or all the other things like that. You always get flamed by "power-users" saying oh, but you can turn that all off. You can, but it's all time that you're not doing real work.

(c) Annoyances - networking - WindowsXP networking is so awful, it's in a class of it's own. I'm trying to blank it from my mind, but the two examples that stick are (a) deleting all my settings when I changed "workgroup" to "domain" or something, and (b) when we (6 software engineers) spent about a day trying to figure out why WindowsXP wouldn't let us use it in a network (turns out it baulked at the blank admin password [on a lab network] and silently refused fileshare connections)

(d) Updates - It's standard policy amongst slashdotters that a WindowsXP machine needs to be updated at least weekly, to get the latest patches. And I'm not talking about minor patches that make your email download faster. I'm talking about the ones which if you don't download them, your computer gets used by a criminal gang to send spam and everyone laughs at you for not running Windows Update daily instead of weekly.

(e) Security, day-to-day - Same group as the problems above? Securing a WindowsXP machine can be time-consuming in the extreme, probably because you're never really sure whether you're finished, or if there's something running that you don't know about. Ask all the people who didn't disable LSASS or Windows Messaging... The standard answer is a hardware firewall and virus-checker which really needs to be included in estimates of the cost of Windows.

(f) Security, distasters - and of course, the major one. If all you want to do is "get work done" as the original discussion was about, how would you feel if you lost 3 days to clean-up a virus in your office? Howabout if that happened every few weeks? For some people, you can get away with running Windows and not get viruses (for those of you with firewalls, clued-up users, and no laptops) but there are plenty of people losing a lot of their working hours to Windows viruses.

So... that's 6 ideas why Windows might not be ideal for a computer to assist you in your work. And I don't think I've mentioned instability amongst any of those... they all assume that Windows is working as intended.

Ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Now I know my TNT2 card will do just fine.

BWHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!!!

Laptop Upgrade

[Drewser]

This means I have to upgrade my laptop now to be able to play in class.

Re:Laptop Upgrade

[phalse phace]

Just slap a couple of stickers on it, paint a racing strip across it, or ad one of 'em cathode lights to it. Should increase your frame rate ten fold.

My Question is...

[zip159]

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. ...are you sure my 500MHz Pentium II box won't be able to support Doom III?

Heh heh

[stratjakt]

These things always make me laugh. HardOCP, TomsHardware, all the "hardcore modder" sites.

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.

Which, of course, drives "obsolete" stuff, like the (now over 6 months old!) Radeon 9800 XT into the bargain bin for me!

Between these moron sites, and morons at Best Buy and CompUSA, it's a great time to be a tech bargain hunter.

Not too long ago, I overheard an employee at CompUSA telling some customer "Oh, you have DDR333? You really should get a new motherboard that supports dual-channel DDR 400, it'll make a huge difference in your frame rates".

I lurked about as the customer picked out a new mobo and two new sticks of Kingston HyperX RAM - and of course payed 3 times what the stuff would cost on newegg. He hung around as the "upgrade specialists" installed it for him. Before he left I offered him 100 bucks for his old motherboard (an Asus P4PE), 2.4ghz CPU (just a Celeron, but they frankly perform MUCH better than morons give them credit for) and "obsolete" gigabyte of DDR333, and went home with a bag full of "obsolete" goodies.

Woohoooo! God bless people who refuse to accept their own ignorance. The system works!

Never forget, don't believe your eyes. It may look really smooth and good on your screen, you may think you're having fun, but if those benchmarks say it's old, then damn you it's time to spend money!

Benchmarks are everything!

Re:Heh heh

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you are incredibley CHEAP

fucking poor morons who cant afford the latest hardware

yourj ust like that win98fag earlier

Re:Heh heh

[untermensch]

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.

Re:Heh heh

[fireduck]

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...)

Re:Heh heh

[moonbender]

From the article:

There is no doubt that DOOM 3s minimum system specifications can easily deliver a good gaming experience. We found it simply incredible that a system this old could run DOOM 3 at all, much less run it well. It may be hard to believe, but we can honestly recommend spending $50 on DOOM 3 if you have a system comparable to this. You can still have a very worthy DOOM 3 experience with it.

I know some of you are thinking that it would be tough to call gaming at 640x480 a good gaming experience, but the environments in DOOM 3 are very forgiving in terms of resolution as discussed in our IQ section. Do we suggest you use a higher resolution to place yourself in an even more immersive environment? Without a doubt, but it is hardly a requirement to really feel a part of the DOOM 3 story.

And in the conlusion:

All that aside, I'm still astonished by our experience on the min spec system. While we think you'll likely have the best experience at the resolution and quality levels we suggested, dont think for a second that those are the actual requirements for playing DOOM 3. If I had a 1.5GHz Pentium and GeForce 4MX system that was two years old, I would still purchase this game knowing I was in for an incredible experience.

So yeah, I think this article is fairly balanced. They don't pretend you need the absolute latest and greatest to play the game. I don't think it's very insightful, really - their conclusion seems to be "well it runs best on really fast systems, but we guess you can also run it on older systems in 800x600" which isn't exactly a surprising outcome. OTOH I guess they do test Doom 3 on a large range of systems which will give you a fairly good idea at what res and quality settings your own systems will be able to run it, so the article does have its uses.

Re:Heh heh

[nkntr]

If it wasn't for the guys buying the new hardware and driving the benchmark ever forward, you would still be paying top dollar for old equipment. God bless the bench markers is what I say, and keep them stuffed as full of stats and framerates and clockspeeds as possible so I can keep getting cheap new hardware for my machines.

Re:Heh heh

[anon*127.0.0.1]

I'm glad to see someone agrees with me.

There is a direct, demonstrable link between video quality, frame rate, and the amount of fun you're having playing a game. If you don't have video quality and frame rate pushed to the max, you're simply cheating yourself. And since you "can't put a price on a good time", it only makes sense to spend whatever it takes to have the latest and absolute greatest hardware. I, for one, am thankful that all these hardware sites are helping us pick out the best new hardware, rather then spreading the ridiculous rumor that peoples current system will likely be good enough.

Re:Heh heh

[vasqzr]

I lurked about as the customer picked out a new mobo and two new sticks of Kingston HyperX RAM - and of course payed 3 times what the stuff would cost on newegg. He hung around as the "upgrade specialists" installed it for him. Before he left I offered him 100 bucks for his old motherboard (an Asus P4PE), 2.4ghz CPU (just a Celeron, but they frankly perform MUCH better than morons give them credit for) and "obsolete" gigabyte of DDR333, and went home with a bag full of "obsolete" goodies.

Great story. Reminds me of my days behind the tech bench at Best Buy. We used to buy old parts and even computers (that weren't really that old) at great prices like you did. Management really didn't like it and fired a few people over it, apparently some customers thought they were 'trading in' to the store.

Re:Heh heh

[FreonTrip]

Normally I'd agree, but this honestly seems to give hope to people running equipment that's older. That being said, your quip about an upcoming bargain hunter's windfall is right on the mark. *grins*

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

Re:Heh heh

[stratjakt]

The folks I'm talking about will read right past that, to the "this is what you need to play at highest settings at 1600x1200" part.

Just like the guy at CompUSA didn't want to hear that Dual channel DDR would yield him a 5-10% performance boost on paper, and wouldnt affect his gaming experience whatsoever.

Re:Heh heh

[rpdillon]

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.

Re:Heh heh

[Billly Gates]

Yes but that nice $1000 hardware will look quite nice with higher image and resolution settings in addition to more effects.

This brings me back memories of the 386 and 486 days when of course Wing Commander runs on a 386 with an EGA video card but man does it look special on VGA on a 486/dx2!

Then came all the fancy sound blaster awe cards in which doom1 and doom2 sounded so sweet.

Sure doom1 could play in crappy low res on a bargain sound card but it was smooth and sounded better on system X.

This created classes of gamers.

This has all ended recently as game makers shifted to the console and became conservative in hardware requirements.

Now it looks like ID is riviving the old days back.

The difference is I am back in school and poor again while my daddy was rich when I was a kid and let me play on his $4,000 system back in 93.

Re:Heh heh

[Babbster]

"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."

The guy said it was CompUSA but you're right on the mark. When I used to spend a lot of time in that store, mainly browsing, I'd steer people away from crap all the time, especially parents buying things for their kids. I do the same thing in stores selling console games. If you know something is either of low quality, or is unnecessary, it's only right to help them out unless you work in the place. Taking advantage of the person like the grandparent did is just lower than low.

Re:Heh heh

[john_smith_45678]

Celerons suck. Period.

Re:Heh heh

[Jeremy Erwin]

The article did mention that the low end cards were run without specular lighting, making for a somewhat darker world. It might be easier to see enemies with a card that's capable of sustaining the extra load of specular textures.

Re:Heh heh

[Gabrill]

Their "low end system" played at 22 fps average. Not 32, not even 30. Time and time again, those gaming sites stress that 30 is the minimum to enjoy a first person shooter. If you play at 22 fps in a multiplayer environment, you will be fragged before your first frame finishes rendering. In a single person environment you will have to draw the monsters into situations that won't bog the framerate down. Their 'miniumum system' performance is a joke.

Re:Heh heh

[raodin]

And if they do that, how is it HardOCP's fault? You can blame them for "tricking" the poor idiots into buying brand new hardware all you want, but the fact is, they made no real effort to do so. Instead, they emphasized again and again that current hardware WILL run the game acceptably. Place the blame where it belongs - squarely on the shoulders of those framerate freaks you're talking about.

Re:Heh heh

[mandolin]

I think it depends on the situation. Watching a granny-type get conned out of their money is one thing. I don't think in this scenario that I could have come up w/enough arguments to say "don't buy that" to a guy who wants to make an impulse purchase. The new kit *was* faster and the participants here obviously have completely different ideas about what "fast enough" means.

Also, the exchange was completely voluntary. And, there were buyer risks -- that used kit could've had a bullethole in it -- caveat emptor. And if the "victim" didn't have a needy relative, the old computer might have just sat in a closet for months. I also think people need to understand that spur-of-the-moment cash exchanges are usually one-sided.

Arguing the other side of the coin...

it's only right to help them out unless you work in the place

In your moral universe, how come that makes it okay? This is why everybody thinks salespeople are arseholes -- they should be informative, not shysters.

Re:Heh heh

[oddbudman]

yeah I agree.

Playing a FPS is pointless if your framerate drops to 13 or so in a gun fight. You get fragged every time. Yet another misleading article aimed at getting more people to pre-order this game.(mho anyway)

The scary thing is that it is working. Take that TNT2 dude at the beginning of this thread for example.

Re:Heh heh

[count_zero011]

But you fail to realize that one of the major points of the [H]ard|OCP article was how nice it ran on "obsolete" hardware. While I agree that the upgrade cycle is slightly disgusting, it is not necessarily applying to people who just went out and bought new graphics cards two months ago.

Re:Heh heh

[Babbster]

If selling upgrades from DDR333 to DDR400 RAM is part of my job, then I've gotta do it - one should know the situation when hired. Of course, that's not a job I would want because I wouldn't want to be put in the position to feel I was ripping someone off. The questionable things salesfolks do aren't "okay" to me but I recognize the reality in which I reside. :)

Re:Heh heh

[snuf23]

Did you ever consider that some people may WANT to play at high res? Or with antialiasing on?
I am upgrading my system - not particularly for this game or half life 2 - but because I love high quality visuals and after trying AA & aniso support in games I want to play that way.
To be frank the game I play most is City of Heroes and turning on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering really improved the look of the game dramatically.
So is it retarded to buy a top of the line video card? I bought a Geforce 4 4400 when they first came out for $400 - and I loved it. I bought a 5600 Ultra for $200 and was disappointed because it just didn't give me boost I wanted. So personally for me, I find upgrading a big way, less frequently gives me the most enjoyment.
And why the upgrade now? The 2.4 pent 4 with 1GB DDR 333 and 5600 Ultra chokes on Far Cry unless I play at 800x600 no AA or aniso. Do I care that much about Far Cry? No not really, but its a sign that for what I want see onscreen my current setup won't cut it.
I wanted to play at 640x480 I'd buy an X box.
Some would call me an enthusiast - I guess you would call me a moron.
I do however, shop around for prices and try to optimize my purchases to get the best bang for the buck.
Saying that DDR 333 is as good as 400 or that a Celeron 2.4 is as good as an Athlon or P4 is just not true for high end applications. Try benching some video encoding on the Celeron. Believe me - I have.

Re:Heh heh

[swv3752]

Yeah, I found the review particularly helpful myself. I can probably get by with my AthlonXP 2100+ and get by with a Geforce4 or FX.

Re:Heh heh

[Wtcher]

A. I'm pretty sure the TNT2 guy was joking.
B. 22FPS is perfectly fine. The problem comes when your framerate jumps around - if it's constant, it's not a huge problem as long as it's not too low.

Re:Heh heh

[poofyhairguy82]

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

Why? He would be a good witness. He observed everything going on!

Re:Heh heh

[Gabrill]

And looking at those FRAPS graphs, I would have to conclude that there is plenty of frame rate jumping.

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 ...

Re:SMP

[ajservo]

Me thinks this means it's not multiprocessor enabled.

I could be wrong though.

Re:SMP

[micr0c0sm]

It's confirmed that there is no SMP support. Most games do not have it. Check the [H]ardForums for more info.

Re:SMP

[Tsunayoshi]

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.

Re:SMP

[UU7]

Uhh, whens the last time you checked out opterons ?

Only thing going "against" them is price, that and registered memory.

Re:SMP

[ca1v1n]

The mindbogglingly complex explicit resource management in real-time rendering changes quite dramatically when you add multiple resources. On systems with high-end graphics cards, where main memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck than CPU cycles, adding another processor isn't really going to do much. About the only good it's really going to do is let one processor handle the OS and other background operations while you're gaming on the other one, in which case you might as well use a barebones Win98SE system.

The spikes you see on that framerate graph have to do with scene complexity. When a half dozen monsters of different kinds are in your face shooting stuff at you, there's a hell of a lot more to render. It doesn't matter what resources you have, they're going to be strained more by that. About the only thing that's going to smooth it out is staying above the 60 FPS max.

Humans can distinguish framerate improvements up to 72 FPS, but 60 is is a more widely supported VSYNC rate (especially on LCDs), not to mention a lower one, and they seem to have been designing the game to be close enough to perfect that you won't really notice the difference in the heat of combat, which saves a lot of resources over actually perfect, and allows a lot more eye candy on older hardware.

Huh???

[TopShelf]

"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...

Re:Huh???

[Babbster]

Thank you. That was my first thought on reading this. While Doom 3 will certainly spur some graphics card, memory and processor/motherboard sales, I don't think that the average Sims player is going to go all creamy over it. Now, Sims 2 might be a different story...

Re:Huh???

[cephyn]

I have to agree with ya. Im still skeptical that doom3 will be any good, gameplay wise. sure it looks great, but...

Re:Huh???

[stratjakt]

It may be what's needed to get console junkies to spend some time gaming on the PC again, though.

A lot of people abandoned PC gaming about the time PS2 came out, or even Dreamcast. Suddenly the console had the same, even better, visual quality, didn't require you to spend 500 bucks on hardware every 6 months, and had a wider range of genre's and titles.

I'll pick up Doom 3, and regret spending the 60 bucks a week later, just like I did with Quake 3, RTCW, Unreal 2, and every other "revolutionary" PC title.

In the end, it's really just another FPS that bumps the eyecandy level up a notch.

Re:Huh???

[Overzeetop]

I'm not a FPS guy...never was very good at them, mainly due to the time involved in learning the controls. I read that line and thought - hey, maybe this ones for me!

Then I watched the trailer. Um...maybe not. SSDD. Looks cool though. I'll probably watch somebody else play it for a couple minutes extra before I get bored.

Re:Huh???

[JAD lifter]

I am also skeptical. Doom 3 deserves lots of hype, after all, Doom 1 & 2 were classic games. But I think that there is just waaaaaay to much hype going on. Doom 3 has been built up and built up so much that it will have to be truly revolutionary to live up to all the overinflated expectations.

I don't think it will live up to those expectations though. It will look really good and it will probably be a really fun FPS but it won't be much better than UT2004 or Far Cry. In fact, I am predicting that after Doom 3 has come out and people have had a chance to play it that many people will say that they think Far Cry is a better game. I do think that the games coming out in the next few years that are made with ID's new engine will blow people away.

Re:Huh???

[jburroug]

I'm not much of a gamer, I've never heard of a lot of the newer games that some people here are comparing to Doom3 much less played them, and I doubt I ever will. However I'm planning on buying Doom3 simply because it is Doom3. It's a major release of a title that is important to geek culture and is enough to pull me back into gaming for a couple of months to check it out and enjoy. I've needed to upgrade my MoBo and CPU for a while now anyway so whenever I pickup Doom3 I'll just set aside the whole weekend for a good ole geek-out and do the hardware updates and dive into tweaking and playing all at once.

After a few weeks D3 will start to get boring and I'll go back to use my computer for mundane tasks that will nevertheless benefit from the new hardware. Until Half-Life 2 comes out and then I'll become a gamer again for a few weeks, for the same reasons :)

Re:Huh???

[WuphonsReach]

I'm not a FPS guy...never was very good at them, mainly due to the time involved in learning the controls. I read that line and thought - hey, maybe this ones for me!

The trick is to find one that scratches your personal itch and pulls you in. For me, it was the WWII FPS games that have come out over the past few years (MoHAA and Call of Duty). With Call of Duty, I've even gone as far as logging into the public multi-player servers and trying my hand against other players.

I haven't decided if I'll pickup DOOM3 yet... Duke Nukem 3D was a lot of fun back when I played it, but it had a good dose of comedy rather then being straight horror.

Re:Huh???

[karnal]

"SSDD."

Now, who here instantly thought "Single Sided Double Density" rather than "Same Shit, Different Day"?

I know I did....

Re:Huh???

[Xugumad]

I kinda figure, if the console junkies want to play Doom 3, they'll probably do it on the X-Box...

Autospooge

[AliasTheRoot]

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?

Re:Autospooge

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Go pick up the latest PCGamer and read the review. Or go check out PlanetDoom and read the reviews in the forum section. All signs point to it being an amazing game that completely lives up to the hype.

Re:Autospooge

[stratjakt]

I don't know, but I can tell you that Far Cry kicks ass. It supports the latest in rendering techniques, but more importantly, it's a fun game with great level design and awesome enemy AI.

Doom 3 isn't going to impress me nearly as much as it would have if Far Cry hadn't beat them to the punch. Id didn't set the bar this time, CryTech did.

Re:Autospooge

[Doogie5526]

These articles are on the technology that will be the basis for a lot of games for the next 5 years. I haven't seen any articles on the actual gameplay (closest is the article on the upcoming Doom3 Tournament).

I can't even name all the games that used the Quake3 engine. Fixing up your computer to run Doom 3 well will mean likely other games using its engine will run well too.

Re:Autospooge

[Shky]

Forgive him for this blasphemy, he knows not what he says...

Re:Autospooge

[stratjakt]

Gameplay? It moves, you shoot it. What's to say about the gameplay?

Re:Autospooge

[AliasTheRoot]

Planetdoom is fanboi land and PCGamer's opinion isn't worth the paper the four page advert from the publisher is printed on.

Re:Autospooge

[AliasTheRoot]

And to be honest, Epic does much better at licensing their Unreal engine out to third parties.

If all we have to look forward to in the next 5 years is a bunch of cheesy save the world from alien/hell/nazi/triad invasion in a FPS kind of way then i'm swearing of pc gaming.

There's only so many firstperson shooters and realtime strategies a gamer can take.

Re:Autospooge

[Liquidrage]

Because it's Doom 3 maybe?

Whether the gameplay itself warrants it or not, the game deserves more press in places like this because of the history of Doom and ID and Carmack.

If you haven't noticed there is a bit of Geek culture here and this game is a big deal for the Geek community.

Before we all saw the LotR in theaters we were all still hyped about it. And that's OK. Sure, Doom 3 could flop, but it's lofty place in our current Geek culture is justified.

Re:Autospooge

[stratjakt]

Fixing up your computer to run Doom 3 well will mean likely other games using its engine will run well too.

Not necessarily. The system you need to play Call of Duty is a world away from the system you need to play Q3A. Similarly compare Quake 1 and the first Half Life.

Re:Autospooge

[KDR_11k]

I read a review (in a magazine, sometimes magazines ARE faster than websites), it is good. Besides, even if it wasn't, it's a good engine for making mods and going to be pretty popular, so we can expect to see a lot of mods, some of them probably even good. Though I hope the /. editors won't decide that we need to know about every single one of them...

Re:Autospooge

[glsunder]

Based on the name of the site, asking planetdoom about doom3 would probably be like asking a baptist about jesus. You won't get an objective answer.

Re:Autospooge

[KDR_11k]

Considering it's been some time since Doom 3 went gold I'd say they tested the final version.

New Standards

[micr0c0sm]

It is obvious that this sets a new standard for hardware scaling in games. 640x480 at low quality looks stunning, as does 1600x1200 at high. The fact that 80% of modern hardware (remember 78.1% of statistics are made up) can run it proves that id software is as dedicated as ever to providing the best gaming experience as possible. This guide also sets a new standard in thorough reviews. Granted this shouldn't be expected for every game, although it proves [H]ardOCP is comprised of a dedicated team (thanks Kyle and everyone else) who only want to bring the best information to the end-user. I for one have a new level of respect for id software, and [H]ardOCP. They are both setting new standards in thier respective areas.

Hardware guide?

[FerretFrottage]

1. Chainsaw
2. Boomstick
3. Super boomstick
4. Chaingun
5. Rockets launcher
6. Plasma gun
7. BFG
and a bit of armor

what more do you need?

Aren't they standard issue for all Space Marines?

Re:Hardware guide?

[mewsenews]

2. Pistol

sorry.. doom nerd mode kicked in..

Re:Hardware guide?

[RatBastard]

1. Fist/Berserk Fist/Chansaw
2. Pistol
3. Shotgun/Combat Shotgun (D2)
4. Chaingun
5. Rocket Launcher
6. Plasma Rifle
7. BFG

(Yeah, I'm a nerd.)

new gamers?

[slashdotbs]

'With the prospect of so many new people being brought into gaming by DOOM 3...'

Does this mean they think a lot of people who will play Doom 3 will be 'new' to computer gaming? Aren't most the people excited by the (pending) release of the game people who have been playing games since the first Doom (and before)?

Re:new gamers?

[stratjakt]

The original Doom broke new ground, though. Noone really regarded the PC as a platform for games. There were mild amusements, stuff like Liesure Suit Larry and Cmdr Keen, but it was no competition for a Sega Genesis. Not only that, gaming was still coming of age.

Doom 3, however, is just another FPS title. Will it drive console die-hards to the PC? Maybe, maybe not. The effect it has, though, won't be nearly the effect that the original Doom had.

Re:new gamers?

[slashdotbs]

one reason console gamers prefer the console is that fact that they like to play games on the tv. not everyone is willing to hook up a pc to their television set. and many people have their pc in a room that's less accessible and/or social than the living room (such as the den, or the basement, or even a closet or a piece of closed-off home office furniture).

power isn't everything in entertainment. look at the xbox - it has more power than the ps2, but the ps2 is much more popular. pc gaming is also inherently more complex than console gaming, which is off-putting to people who want to plug in a cartridge (okay, i'm dating myself) and play a game.

I'm glad there were screen shots...

[MattRog]

Even looking at the configuration screen shots gave me a little wood: I can't imagine the unparalleled joy I will feel when I start it for the first time.

I suspect one of these things will occur:
1) my heart will stop for two or three seconds when I hear the first 5.1 audio
2) my bladder will burst from playing through the entire game in one marathon 54 hour session
3) I will immediately develop carpal tunnel and a permanent curved spine from sitting in my computer chair
4) My eyes will melt in their sockets like the Nazis in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark
5) all of the above

BRING IT ON

Re:I'm glad there were screen shots...

[Otter]

I'd urge to you to spend the next few months finding a girlfriend and bringing things to at least the "...for better or for worse, in sickness or in health..." stage.

Re:I'm glad there were screen shots...

[Babbster]

I tried that myself, but every time I hugged another girl in front of her, tried to play piano to increase my skill or cooked dinner and set the kitchen on fire, our relationship seemed to suffer. Nowadays, I don't even get the hug option, let alone the one to propose marriage.

Re:I'm glad there were screen shots...

[gonaddespammed.com]

6) Profit

Re:I'm glad there were screen shots...

[LupusUF]

Even looking at the configuration screen shots gave me a little wood

And people wonder why geeks don't have girlfriends

Re:I'm glad there were screen shots...

[IntergalacticWalrus]

> Two words: Stadium Pal http://stadiumpal.com/

This is so disturbing, I think I'll dedicate the rest of my life studying on time travel so someday I can build a time machine that will allow me to go back in time so I can kill everyone that was involved in the creation of this.

Re:Hardly Usefull

[Nosf3ratu]

What?

A Pentium II/Voodoo machine can't hardly run Quake3, which is a game that came out in 1998 (or was it late 97?). I think your troll is rather cute, but be honest, for id to make Doom 3 playable on a box such as an AMD 1800+ and a GeForce4 MX440, that's the complete opposite of a "marketing guide by the ultra-evil conspiracy between iD/nVidia/Dell".

On the topic of said troll, what the hell does Dell have to do with anything?

3D Sound?

[Lumpmoose]

The article recommends a 5.1 speaker setup. Since EAX isn't supported (erm, yet) and it uses software-based audio, how does the game interface with, say, a normal DD/DTS reciever and it's digital vs. 6-channel analog inputs? I'm waiting for a DD-advertised game to actually output a Dolby Digital signal w/o an nForce.

/hopeless Creative junkie

Re:3D Sound?

[Evangelion]

You haven't been paying attention.

Creative blackmailed id to include EAX support, so EAX support is in there.

It's 100% not required, though.

Re:3D Sound?

[AGTiny]

No shit, I am so sick of the state of the PC sound world these days... The Dolby Content Encoder you need to output real-time DD over SPDIF is only available on nForce *motherboards*. Hello??? This should be standard on every soundcard too. Dolby Digital is actually an open spec (A52) and there are open source encoders and decoders, so it should be possible to create a competing encoder product... maybe... although in the retail space they might get their ass sued off by Dolby.

I think whenever you see the term "5.1" used in the PC world, it generally always means analog 5.1 channel outputs. PC DVD players will convert DD/DTS into the analog outputs, or use SPDIF if you want, but I think all surround PC speaker systems use 5.1 analog connections. This is a bonus for high-res DVD audio where digital is banned, but kind of a pain for standard audio.

I think I will stick with some good headphones for a while.

Re:3D Sound?

[CrusadeR]

The EAX announcement pertained to future DOOM 3-engine titles, not DOOM 3 itself. DOOM 3 generates its 5.1 audio without utilizing any EAX-specific code.

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.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[Nosf3ratu]

Here's the long and short answer:

ATI 3d support is spotty at best. Nvidia support is excellent. Their cards perform just as good (if not better, in some cases) in Linux as they do in Windows. I have been gaming with Linux and Nvidia exclusively for about three years (including all the recent titles, such as RtCW, Q3, UT2K3, UT2K4, and ET) and it performs very well. Pair up a big nVidia with a 64bit Athlon, and you've got an excellent gaming rig.

So, the answer: The optimal hardware is the same, no matter what the operating system (although you would require less RAM on Linux, for example, if you use a slim window manager, as compared to XP, etc, etc, ymmv, and all that rot.)

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[untermensch]

With ATI cards at least, I'm sure the GNU/Linux performance will be considerably worse than Windows, since the best drivers available are based on the FireGL series, not the Catalyst series. I'm not sure how things stand with Nvidia, but again I strongly suspect the drivers won't be as good.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[stratjakt]

That's easy, you're pretty much limited to nVidia, since ATi's OpenGL support is blowful under Windows.

Couple that with the general crappiness of their drivers under linux and you've got yourself one hell of a losing combination.

In fact, like every other premiere title, Windows ATi users will probably have to wait a couple driver releases, or jump through some hoops, to play at all.

Call of Duty was horribly broken on ATi (hardlocks every 20 seconds). Thief 3 was broken (badly rendered shadows, which if you know anything about the Thief series, makes the game all-but unplayable). Far Cry was giving people problems. TRON 2.0 had problems, Halo had problems (you had to disable pixel shading to play it and it looked worse than Xbox!) Splinter Cell had problems, etc, etc, etc, etc..

And release after release comes out with bugfixes for esoteric shit that nobodies ever heard of.

Doom 3 should be no different. I can't wait to spend some time on the rage3d forums trying to figure out how to get it to run.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[stratjakt]

X + fluxbox seemingly takes up more memory than Windows XP does just sitting there.

But then again, they manage memory in different ways. Linux tends to abhor swapping, while Windows tends to do it opportunistically.

But then again, again, Xfree (that includes X.org) sucks from the "lean and mean window drawin' machine" point of view.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[Nosf3ratu]

Yes, you're interpreting how Linux uses memory wrong...memory *wants* to be used. Linux will use up all the memory it can and then dip into swap as a last resort. Windows, OTOH, will dynamically increase the swap partition, rather than attempt to free unused RAM. So you've got a constant thrashing issue. The story on swappiness in the 2.6 kernel series here on slashdot has some very good information about memory management in the Linux kernel.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[Minna Kirai]

X + fluxbox seemingly takes up more memory than Windows XP does just sitting there.

Hope you're not making the classic error of running "top" to find out how much RAM X uses. The total it prints includes your video card RAM... which could easily be 128 or even 256 greater than the actual usage.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[molarmass192]

Agreed, nVIDIA drivers for Linux are solid. If anyone wants to really squeeze all the possible juice out of their machine for gaming:

1) Switch to runlevel 1:
-> init 1
2) Disable swapping:
-> echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
3) Start sound manually:
-> /etc/init.d/alsasound start
4) Start networking manually:
-> /etc/init.d/network start
5) Start X without a window manager:
-> startx xterm
6) Launch Doom from the xterm prompt
-> /games/doom3/doom3.sh???

You might be able to take it a step further and try passing the doom startup script to startx but this doesn't work with all games. That said, here's hoping the Linux binaries are available VERY soon after next Tuesday since I'll have the game in hand that Thursday. I've got a GF3 Ti420 so I might be scrambling for a vid card this weekend, but I'm gonna try it first.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[mandolin]

You don't need a window manager (such as fluxbox) running in order to run a fullscreen X app. It makes a small but noticable (for me) difference.

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[black mariah]

I know a certain AC who's getting a sense of humor this Christmas...

Re:Hardware on GNU/Linux

[molarmass192]

Well of course there's no point to having the xterm in ram. The problem is that disabling swapping is all or nothing so far as I know. If the startx launcher works with D3, then the xterm's a non-issue, if it doesn't, then there's a 3.5M cost in memory that won't be available to the game. Obviously, the only reason I mentioned it was to avoid any OS driven disk access. Games typically want to hit the disk once in while regardless so it won't eliminate the disk from the equation. There's also a risk in completely disabling swap especially without gobs of memory.

Anyhow, all that aside, I think the steps I've described are overkill, but then again I have a half decent machine. However, I DO do this on my laptop, but it's not to increase performance, it's to squeeze a extra few minutes out of the battery. However, I also use the hdparm spin down trick to shut the drive off and start the powersaved.

I saw this weekend that BurstBuy is going to have Doom available on Wednesday morning, I'm awaiting any sign of Linux binaries at this point. I hope to hell it doesn't turn out to be a NWN like scenario where "soon after" meant 6 months.

Re:Hardly Usefull

[l0ungeb0y]

"On the topic of said troll"

Geee some people have no sense of humor.
Try getting out more, some fresh air and a stiff drink would definitely do you some good.

For the humor impaired or with hyperactive anal cavities:
IT WAS A JOKE,buying a new machine for a version upgrade from Doom2 to Doom3 yadda yadda yadda.

I know I know... it was waaaaaaaaayyyyy to subtle a joke.

*feh*

w00t!

[penginkun]

Looks like my Athlon 2500+ and Radeon 9600SE will work out OK. Now all I need is a copy of the game...anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Re:w00t!

[Cyberhwk]

Sure I'll just give you a copy of my game. .... Oh wait. I like Id software. Besides my ego, superego, and id all say that I should keep my copy to my self because its more benefit to me that way.

Re:w00t!

[penginkun]

Sounds reasonable. I hope they release a demo soon so I can scope it out (or have they already? I guess I should check, eh?). And hey, I just looked, and my card is 128mb! I thought it was 64, but nope, it's 128! Whee! Slightly higher quality! 8^)

Doom3 Board

[vurg]

Don't forget your customized Doom 3 zboard keyset.

Re:Doom3 Board

[stratjakt]

Ahh! Piss me off.

I bought a z-board a couple weeks ago. If I had have waited I could have gotten a free Doom 3 keyset.

Oh well, all the FPS keysets are the same as the (generic) Crossfire keyset, they just have game-specific doodles on them.

Btw, I love the zBoard, even as a regular keyboard. I was really skeptical of it when I first saw it. But, the base is solid and a bit heavy, the key action is great, and the gaming keysets rock.

JPEG Compression

[Overand]

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.

Re:JPEG Compression

[Jameth]

Actually, they're very well compressed. Yes, they are JPGs, but they're at a very high quality, as you can see by looking at them closely. Yes, there are a very few visual artifacts, but when you actually look at them unzoomed (as they were intended to be viewed) you can easily see the differences in quality between one picture and the next.

The only images compressed at a noticeably low quality were the shots of the video control panel, which obviously doesn't warrant wasted bandwidth. Likewise, going with lossless PNGs or JPEGs would have been a waste of bandwidth which HardOCP likely cannot afford, particularly in light of a slashdotting.

Re:JPEG Compression

[shanebdavis]

I'd second that. It is absolutely rediculous to compare image quality that subtle with a JPG. The JPG artifacts washed out any differences, at least that I could see. They should have selected a few small comparison areas and encoded them in 24bit png.

Big question for me...

[wanerious]

Will the monsters still fight each other? That was the coolest thing (to me) about Doom/Doom II.

Re:Big question for me...

[Metsys]

If you take a look at the Doom 3 Trailers (availble on most gaming sites and doom3.com), it depicts scenes of monsters fighting eachother. Of course it could very well be scripted, but you never know. In a week or so I can tell you :).

Spoiler alert!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnnnnnnh! By God, please don't read the article if you are a spoiler-sensitive person. The fps-graph clearly indicates the locations of monsters as the article describes how "some heavy action that requires the video card to draw several monsters at one time, the frame rate can drop down". Thankfully I didn't look at the x-axis too carefully. Be cautious, people! This article may truly be the demise of your Doom3 experience!

Re:Spoiler alert!!!

[stratjakt]

Now, when the framerate drops to 7fps when theres monsters on the screen (ie; you're actually playing and not just wandering around gushing about how well-rendered the floor tiles are - this is the point I stopped reading, btw), how can you say that's a good gaming experience?

When I actually encounter an enemy in an FPS, and the game goes to 7fps, that's what I call a frustrating and shitty gaming experience.

"Gaming" to the HardOCP/TomsHardware crowd is standing there, looking at the wall textures, and seeing how anti-aliased they are.

Re:Spoiler alert!!!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

When I actually encounter an enemy in an FPS, and the game goes to 7fps,

...is when you have to get a hold of some fucking cash and upgrade your i386 SX 16 mhz. Go for TWO WHOLE MEGS of ram. Use Quemm 386 and get all of your TSR's in UMA and HMA. Hook up some headphones to your AdBlaster sound card and NOW you're ready for DOOM 3.

Minimum Required System

[spellraiser]

Strange that this hasn't been posted already ... well, here it is:

DX 9.0 compatible 3D card w/ 64MB RAM*
MS Windows 2000/XP
Pentium 4 1.5 GHz or Athlon XP 1500+
384 MB RAM
8x CD-ROM
2.2 GB of HD space
Broadband (for multiplayer)

*Supported 3D Graphics chipsets:
ATI: Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800
NVIDIA: GeForce 3, GeForce 4MX, GeForce 4 Titanium, GeForce FX, GeForce 6

Re:Minimum Required System

[gpinzone]

Sorry if this is an old issue, but DirectX 9.0 3D card? Aren't they using OpenGL?

Re:Minimum Required System

[DeltaSigma]

They refer to DirectX 9.0 cards because that's what most people recognize. It IS an OpenGL card, and it will use OpenGL rendering paths. However the OpenGL enhancements present on a DirectX 9 card are better than the OpenGL enhancements on a DirectX 8 card... ...it's all a name game pretty much.

Quake?

[skiman1979]

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

Re:Quake?

[C_Kode]

They should switch it to that big chiseled stone :"ID" that used to pound into the screen at the begining of Quake 3

Re:Quake?

[AndyBusch]

The Quake icon gets used for the id stuff specifically.

Re:Quake?

[skiman1979]

Well I guess that would make sense. There's no Gentoo icon either. Gentoo stories go under some other icon (I forget which one.) I do agree with C Kode that they should have an ID icon for ID stories. Although maybe there are not enough ID stories to warrant an icon for it?

I agree

[rd_syringe]

People are really masturbating all over this game to obscene levels. It's not going to be *that* big of a milestone in gaming. It's another atmospheric FPS shooter with a plotline.

I mean, I've already done the shadowy, bump-mapped corridor thing in a little game called Far Cry that in addition to that, has outdoor levels with an infinite distance. I doubt I'll be seeing anything in Doom 3 that is as fun as driving an inflatable boat into an enemy camp on a gorgeous outdoor beach.

The indoor areas of Far Cry look exactly like Doom 3's screenshots. Just less shadowy.

Answers

[rd_syringe]

An unoriginal plot

Doom started that plot years before Half-Life.

An unoriginal genre

Doom started that genre years before Quake.

Did id even bother hiring writers?

Yes, they did.

High hardware requirements

The HardOCP article makes it a point to state that the minimum spec machine ran the game great.

Nice troll.

Re:Answers

[stratjakt]

Doom didn't start the genre, it popularized it.

And it doesn't automagically make Doom 3 a unique and inspired title. Until I see it, it's just another FPS.

HardOCP says it "ran great", yet they say it dropped to 7 fps when monsters were on screen. That sounds like it's running pretty shitty to me.

Re:Answers

[rd_syringe]

Clearly, you didn't even bother to read the article.

Yes, Doom started that genre. Before that was what, Wolfenstein 3D? After Doom came out, 3D shooters were an established genre, and companies spent years trying to top it. The only one to do it was...Quake.

You're just prejudging against it. No matter, I'll be the one having fun. Next.

Re:Answers

[Noose For A Neck]

"Doom started that plot years before Half-Life"? Half-Life doesn't share a plot with Doom, but Doom III does. Do you know what a plot is? It's also a member of an unorignal genre - that is to say, there are many, many other games in the same shoot-the-aliens-to-pieces-from-first-person-persp ective group. It hardly matters that Doom did it before Quake (what does Quake have to do with this?). It's like Doom II, but with prettier graphics and sound. No plot innovation. No interesting take on FPSes. It's a formulaic as you could get - it's as if they're using it as a vehicle to sell engine licenses.

Just because you don't like my opinion doesn't make me a troll, that's just a nasty word to pull out when you've got nothing good to argue with in rebuttal.

Re:Answers

[cozziewozzie]

Dude, you expect interesting take on FPSes from a DOOM game? You're probably the type of guy who goes to watch 'Dumb and dumber' and then complain how it lacks depth, how its take on existentialism is shallow when compared to Sartre's early works yada yada.

It's DOOM. It's a legend. It should stay the way it is. Leave FPS 'plots' to other games, it's DOOM and we want to shoot some zombies.

Re:Hardware guide?http://games.slashdot.org/commen

[RonnyJ]

Aren't they standard issue for all Space Marines?

And if not, no need for wasting money on them, just type in IDKFA!

Re:Hardly Usefull

[goldspider]

Good job spotting that troll. It's funny when the tinfoil hats come out and theorize that X game company is in bed with A, B, and C company to sell overpriced hardware.

And besides, everybody knows that iD is conspiring with Alienware! :)

Doom 4 will have holosuite quality graphics

[alen]

That's right. If you have a star trek holosuite you will be able to have the ultimate Doom experience, up to having your own heart attack from the realism.

Re:Doom 4 will have holosuite quality graphics

[Talinom]

I'm sorry. If I had a holosuite I'd rather play with Lara Croft.

Performance Dual Head VGA card?

[sacherjj]

What are people using out there for performance gaming that also want to use dual monitors for other work? I would envision setting up the computer to single screen to play DOOM3, then changing back for other apps. But most performance 3D cards come with only a single VGA and single DVI port.

Re:Performance Dual Head VGA card?

[ostiguy]

some of the very high end nvidia cards offer dual dvi. i don't think any non flight sim games support dual head though

LCD is bad for gaming? Time to rethink this...

[LighthouseJ]

How is an LCD bad for gaming, the refresh rate?

I play HL and GTA:VC on my Dell Laptop with the 15.4" display and it looks much much better than my 21" CRT I use a secondary monitor. The refresh is amazing, and the picture quality is crazy crisp. I would use an LCD over a CRT any day, even a smaller LCD too.

Will There Be Demos?

[LighthouseJ]

Any word anywhere on Doom 3 demos? If at all possible, I try the game demos to see how the game performs on my computer. I don't want to buy an unreturnable software game and find out I'd need to upgrade laptop hardware before it's framerates are sane enough to play with.

Re:Will There Be Demos?

[Minna Kirai]

Any word anywhere on Doom 3 demos?

Get with it! The demo has been out all year.

Re:Will There Be Demos?

[LighthouseJ]

Coming from you, that means less than nothing, coward. If you're going to step in and be a dick, at least log in and own up to your comments.

Re:Will There Be Demos?

[LighthouseJ]

Out all year? I did some researching (that I could have done before asking) and found out that a demo won't be out till it's done, which looks like after Doom 3 is on the shelves soon.

Re:Will There Be Demos?

[celerityfm]

He's probably referring to the leaked Doom E3 demo.

Remember? :)

Re:Will There Be Demos?

[execom]

Demos, I don't know but I hope there will be Deimos :)

Re:Will There Be Demos?

[LighthouseJ]

ah, no I didn't until you brought it back up, it's a possibility. Good sleuthing on that story.

Re:Hardly Usefull

[hal2814]

Not Alienware. That's just a front. iD is really consiping with Aliens! That's why Doom3 and Alien Vs Predator are coming out so close to each other.

Quake 3 Icon

[Rethcir]

Ok, there's been what, like 10 stories about Doom 3 over the past two weeks? Isn't it time the Slashdot powers that be come up with some kind of Doom 3 graphic next to the main post, instead of the Quake 3 logo? Doom 3 is obviously a quantum leap ahead of Q3, I think it's a little bit backwards to use an old icon.

Re:Quake 3 Icon

[Lispy]

Yeah, at least an overall Doom Icon would be appropriate. Or an id-icon, if it is for webspace forget about he Compaq icon, they were bought by HP a year ago. While you're at it please update the Ximian Icon with a Novell logo, the Palm III icon with a Tungsten and pleeeease the GNOME icon with a GNOME2 icon. Thank you...

Re:Bah.

[Overzeetop]

Yeah, me too. Intel, intel, intel. My favorites from the review:

"AMD systems totally suck ass in Doom 3."
"Even overclocked to 3.145GHZ, the AMD64 systems could barely manage 5 FPS."

and, of course

"We marveled at the fastasic results from our 800 MHz Celeron...truly a new day in gaming performace from a CPU."

What? I made those up? Hmmm, guess we should have read the article.

(I did, and AMD cleaned up. But just about anything made this millenium can run the game.)

The report said nothing

[foidulus]

about the benefits of speed holes. I put a few in my machine and I am rip roaring ready to go!

a little biased twords geforce cards

[Truekaiser]

but what should i expect from a site that has a static ad for bfg branded geforce cards on the left side. but it's nice to know my radeon 9800 pro can run this game if i somehow break down and decide to buy it. 4 person multiplayer? lol

Re:a little biased twords geforce cards

[xsecrets]

actually it's the game that is biased towards nvidia, and you can't really blame ID for that, because it is an OpenGL game and nvidia just has better OpenGL drivers than ATI no matter what anyone says.

Any one figured out ... ?

[Tharian]

I see that they talk about whether a person should use a 5.1 sound system or headphones, but I can't find any mention of recommended sound cards.

Has any one heard of any suggestions or recommendations there?

Re:Any one figured out ... ?

[sirGullible]

the reason there aren't any recommended sound cards is that doom3 relies on cpu power for sound, so it wont make a huge difference whether you have onboard sound or the newst audigy card(creative is evil)

Re:Any one figured out ... ?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Previous reviews and previews have implied that the brand of sound card doesn't much matter (at least for quake iii), but it should be capable of driving 6 speakers.

Re:Any one figured out ... ?

[Tharian]

Thank you.

I've got a dual athlon... how's the SMP?

[Thaidog]

God I hope it's actually meaningful this time... eh quake 3 smp = ass on wheels.

yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...will it have live action porn stars in the transitions, like Wing Commander?

LCDs Great (if Pixel Response Time ~ 16ms)

[MooseByte]

I've got an NEC MultiSync LCD screen with a 16ms (avg) response time, and FPS games display beautifully. Just have to make sure the PRT is at least 16ms or so. The low-end LCDs are too laggy, pixel-wise, and you get that horrible ghosting.

Re:LCDs Great (if Pixel Response Time ~ 16ms)

[elFarto the 2nd]

I've had my Iiyama AS4637UTBK TFT for about a year. Even tho it has a response time of 35ms, it still plays games beautifully, espically at 1280x1024

Regards
elFarto

Re:LCDs Great (if Pixel Response Time ~ 16ms)

[Dave_Chimaera]

Hyundai Q17 here I think its a 20ms panel but not 100% sure and I've not noticed any problems with it at all - no ghosting, great image quality (via DVI, I'm told VGA isn't too clever on this display but I've never had reason to check for myself) and light to carry. And as for that 'true gamer' rubbish - two words: LAN Parties - I can carry everything I need on my person and still get great performance (Shuttle XPC and aforementioned TFT, with rucksack for other bits) and is a hell of a lot easier than shifting my 19"CRT around the place. Stick to native resolution (1280x1024) and with vsync on and its beautiful :)

Re:Bah.

[geeber]

I'll wait for someone who hasn't gone to bed with ID software and Nvidia to review the game before I pass judgement.

I'd suggest you not worry about any reviews and wait to play the game yourself before you pass judgement.

Weeeeeeeeee!

[Lisandro]

My FX5200 *will* play it and look amazing to boot! We love you John!

Re:LCD is bad for gaming? Time to rethink this...

[Babbster]

The refresh rate isn't a big problem unless you desire visible fps over 60 (the vast majority of LCDs refresh at 60 Hz). The "response time," though can cause a problem. This is the speed at which the pixels change color. Slow response time is why all the old LCDs used to leave mouse trails even before mouse trails were a setup option in a GUI. Things have improved to the point where such trails are hardly noticeable, but in fast-moving games you can still end up with afterimages as the LCD pixels attempt to display the next frame.

Great write up Kyle & Brent!

[digitalwanderer]

After reading it all I can say is thanks for all the time and effort you put in to that, I still have trouble believing you did that all in just three days of testing! :shock:

Oh, and I'm having trouble believing about no-AA being not really noticeable...but you get the benefit of the doubt until I can get the game and check it out for meself. ;)

Re:LCD is bad for gaming? Time to rethink this...

[ViolentGreen]

For me the main ones are response time and color quality. There are pleanty of 15" lcds out for $300 but the response time will be 20 ms or worse and the color is oftwn washed out lookign.

I'd love to have an LCD that I could use for gaming. I'd want one with at 1600x1200 resolution with a response time of at least 12ms. That will put me around $1000 which is a heck of a lot more then I want to pay for a monitor.

What would your momma think?

[Cyberhwk]

What would your momma think of you not helping out someone in need?!!

Priceless

[john_smith_45678]

* Doom 3 - $50
* New system to run Doom 3 - $650-100+
* Not realizing the irony of this - priceless

Dither?

[mfh]

>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.

Re:Dither?

[Viking Coder]

No way. All of the differences you point out are completely masked by the JPG differences. (Those "cubes" you refered to are DCT 8x8 boundary artifacts.)

I look at computer-generated image quality differences all day long at my job, and comparing these two images, there basically aren't any. I've additionally used a JPG Artifact removal tool on the two images, and then done the image differencing trick, and you have to turn gamma up by about 1.5 before you see *any* differences, and I believe all of those are positional differences. Turning the gamma up by about 2.5 is even more revealing: the differences between the images are hugely dominated by JPG differences.

Look again.

We'd both need better source images to make any strong claims about one card being better or worse than the other. From where I'm sitting, they're nearly identical.

Re:LCD is bad for gaming? Time to rethink this...

[Babbster]

Anyone who uses the phrase "true gamer" has need of some attitude adjustment. They're probably just a little too invested in an almost entirely useless hobby (one in which I engage in the full knowledge that it's just entertainment like any other).

Re:What's the big deal?

[Viking Coder]

It's the authors. Just like people line up to read the next J.K. Rowlings novel, before there have been any reviews out, people line up to buy the next John Carmack game.

It could be called "The Facts of Life: Tuti versus Natalie" and people would line up around the block for it.

That said, have you read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel?

Translating this all back into the world of technology, it's just the Next Big Thing. I've been waiting since, what, 1999 for this? For me, it's kind of like, Return of the King. I really liked Fellowship of the Ring, and The Two Towers, and I just knew that ROTK was going to be great. I just knew it! Granted, I pretty much felt the same way about Star Wars I and Matrix II and Matrix III. But, people are optimists about entertainment, and the act of being optomistic about it is honestly almost as much fun as the thing itself. I *crave* Doom 3.

Another 10 pages of Graphics...

[Loiosh-de-Taltos]

Again I am disappointed in an 'advanced' guide that spends 90% of its time dealing with graphics and dedicates only a single half-heated page (a quote from the developer) speaking of the sound design. The goals of this guide are to provide, "an upgrade that will make a real difference and offer you the greatest improvement in gameplay for the money spent." GamePlay. Gameplay involves SOUND especially on this game.

How about mentioning the different sound cards? The quality difference between 24bit/96Kbps 5.1 on the Audigy 2 and the Dolby Digital 5.1 support the nForce 2 offers? Yeah, thanks.

Re:Will There Be Demos? YES!

[celerityfm]

From Todd Hollenshed of id's plan file:

"Demo: our priority was finishing the game first and now we are turning our attention to the demo. I don't have any information to share regarding any specific content, but I don't believe that we have ever disappointed in that regard in the past. We will release the demo as soon as it's done, but this probably won't happen until after the game has arrived on U.S. store shelves."

So yes there will be a demo, but unfortunately not until after the games been out for a while.

Analog movement?

[jensen404]

How about a keyboard with some pressure sensitive
WASD keys? That is one thing console controllers are better at... you can adjust your character's speed with an analog control.
A mouse is better for view control, of course.

Re:Analog movement?

[CronoCloud]

I hate WASD with a passion. a keyboard for an action game?

That's why I play console FPS's with the analog stick in the left hand, PSone or USB mouse (Playstation 2) in the right. Best compromise. Analog movement and accurate targeting.

Ahh okay.

[mfh]

> We'd both need better source images to make any strong claims about one card being better or worse than the other. From where I'm sitting, they're nearly identical.

You know I thought they might be artifacts from the image, but I figured that the guys from the review wouldn't do that. I think we would need zero compression images to distinguish it better, so I have to agree with you there. I guess we'll have to wait and see, eh?

Re:Ahh okay.

[zapp]

Not zero compression, but loss-less compression like PNG.

What of Accelerated-X?

[FreonTrip]

In the time that I've perused Slashdot's gaming section, I've never once heard anyone even mention the possibility of paying for an X11 server. Everything I've seen and read leads me to believe that it's a worthwhile investment, especially for ATI cards. The drivers are stable, fast, and perform well both in 2D and 3D. Can someone furnish an answer to this?

Slightly disappointing

[ildon]

Because they were going for "best playable IQ" as they call it, the benchmarks are EXTREMELY hard to compare. I would not be able to use this myself to determine a future hardware purchase. Rather, I find this more useful as a "will Doom3 play well on my computer" article. For that it is quite useful. As for my next hardware purchase, I'll wait for the traditional timedemo benchmarks with the tests all at the same IQ level.

Re:LCD is bad for gaming? Time to rethink this...

[inquisitor]

...except that Doom 3 frame-limits to 60fps anyway, so you won't be having any problems there.

I have a Toshiba Tecra M2, and its screen is OK for UT2K4, which can get very fast moving, so I'd assume it won't have a problem with Doom 3, apart from its somewhat underpowered GFGo 5200 forcing me to play at 640x480. It is a digital panel, though, so people with LCD problems may wish to use DVI (although strangely, only decent flat panels usually have DVI, when it would help the awful ones more.)

Okay, I googled it

[roystgnr]

And the first link tells me that W32.Welchia attacks the RPC DCOM vulnerability found in Windows {NT,2K,XP,2K3} and the WebDAV vulnerability found in IIS 5.0, but specifically lists Windows 98 among the "Systems Not Affected". Is there a different version which also attacks stock 9x installations?

your setup is adequate, but Abit is better

[nbert]

don't you think that it's quite exceptional that they have a section comparing mobos? Different manufacturers of the same chipset are usually pretty close in terms of perfomance (~4% is the highest I ever read in articles about certain chipsets). However, it perfectly makes sense to me after reading 21 pages featuring Abit ads.
"Yes, your system is able to run it and it looks great, however, we'd like to make you read ~20 pages of appendix before we'll tell you. Just look at it this way - you'll know how your system performs before we come to a decent conclusion, so you don't have to look it up anymore. Apart from that we must make sure that you read every page, because otherwise noone will click on the banners we have. And btw, did you know that Abit motherboards rule, but other products by Abit didn't live up to our expectations, because we have different sponsors for sound and video." Just my (highly biased) roundup.

(and yes, my main box is equipped with an Abit board. I guess that's the reason it came to my attention)

Hyperthreading?

[ovoskeuiks]

does this mean P4's hyperthreading isn't supported?

Re:Hyperthreading?

[micr0c0sm]

Hyperthreading is supported, because it's a built in feature of the processor...
It's like telling a one-armed man to build a house, and a two armed man - the two armed man will be faster, but no special instructions are needed to tell him how to build with the other hand.

muggings and taking on more work

[PortWineBoy]

I took a contract job this weekend just to pick up enough cash to buy an ATI x800.

I should have thought more about muggings though. Do they require a weapon?

Re:What's the big deal?

[WuphonsReach]

That said, have you read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel?

If you compare book #3 and book #4 to the first two books... then yes, yes I have read a bad J.K. Rowlings novel. (The first two were rather simplistic plots, a bit formulaic, and too many instances of hero learns new skill by accident in chapter 7 only to use it to save the world in chapter 8.

Fortunately, her skills at crafting a tale have gotten better in each book, so I feel comfortable believing that the next book will be a good read. (I have not read book #5 yet... waiting for the paperback edition.)

Uh...

[Cyno01]

The new Apple Displays have a 16ms refresh rate. Thats plenty good for gaming. I think there are only a few samsung displays that are quicker than that at 12ms... I bought a 20" yesterday. :D

Hardware requirements for the OSX version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really hoping that I will be able to play this game on my PB12 1Ghz, 512mb, GeForce FX Go5200 (gasp) 32MB ... i know this isn't a gaming maching but if a 2 year old PC can handle this game I'd hope that a machine I bought in March ( rev.C with 64mb card came out a month later ) will play at least in low quality.

Re:Hardware requirements for the OSX version?

[TxdoHawk]

I wouldn't hold my breath. Mac versions of games usually wind up with higher system requirements than their PC counterparts. My guess is that the minimum CPU for the Mac version will need to be 2.0Ghz, and 32mb cards aren't even supported in the PC version, so in short, no.

True min spec and GLSL support?

[Saville]

Long ago John Carmack said in Jan 2003 Doom3 was going to have a ARB1, nv1x, nv2x, R2x0, nv3x, and ARB2 path. We recently heard the nv3x path was dropped now that nvidia's driver compiler does a good enough job on optimizing a ARB_fragment_programs (Pixel Shader 2.0 in D3D terms) that the nv3x isn't needed. But is the ARB1 path still around?

The article says the min spec is:
*Supported 3D Graphics chipsets:
ATI: Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800
NVIDIA: GeForce 3, GeForce 4MX, GeForce 4 Titanium, GeForce FX, GeForce 6
It doesn't list other manufacturers, but I don't know if this really implies other manufacturers currently can't run it.

What about the PowerVR Kyro (no cube map support), Radeon 7x00, Intel Extreme Integrated, SiS Xabre (useless drivers), Matrox Parhelia, 3DLabs P10/P9? Without the ARB1 path they wouldn't be able to run the game. Well 3Dlabs used to support nvidia's register combiner extensions so could use the nv1x path if their drivers are up to snuff. It is one thing to be able to run the game quickly (the reson the GeForce4MX is supported when it is technically just a quicker version of the older GeForce/GeForce2/GeForce2MX) to ensure the game is enjoyable, but it is another thing to not be able to run it at all due to not supporting modern OpenGL extensions. It would be nice if older cards could run Doom3, slowly and without specular, instead of not at all.

Also what about GLSL? Even longer ago Mr. Carmack said in June 2002 (wow, they've been working a long time!) "I am now committed to supporting an OpenGL 2.0 renderer for Doom through all the spec evolutions" in refernce to the GL shading language. Will there be a Doom3 renderer which uses the high level GLSL extension instead of the fragment program extension? I get the impression there won't be, and it would be pretty pointless with the fragment program support, but 3Dlabs currently only supports the high level fragment shaders, not the low level fragment programs...

AMD64 support

[Saville]

I know this is a silly question since the rumours say 64bit windows won't be out until 1H 2005, but I recently saw a demo that claims to be 27% faster compiled as 64bit vs the 32bit version.

Have any id employees mentioned anything about an AMD64 version?

Good news (for me as a Radeon 8500 owner)

[robnauta]

Min Spec Bottom Line

There is no doubt that DOOM 3's minimum system specifications can easily deliver a good gaming experience. We found it simply incredible that a system this old could run DOOM 3 at all, much less run it well. It may be hard to believe, but we can honestly recommend spending $50 on DOOM 3 if you have a system comparable to this. You can still have a very worthy DOOM 3 experience with it.

I know some of you are thinking that it would be tough to call gaming at 640x480 a good gaming experience, but the environments in DOOM 3 are very forgiving in terms of resolution as discussed in our IQ section. Do we suggest you use a higher resolution to place yourself in an even more immersive environment? Without a doubt, but it is hardly a requirement to really feel a part of the DOOM 3 story.

As mentioned in our id Software's Official DOOM3 Benchmarks article, id Software has resourced hundreds of man hours in order to optimize DOOM 3 for a wide install base. It is truly amazing that so many people will be able to enjoy DOOM 3, possibly even those that have not upgraded their computer for years.

This is certainly good news. For years we've heard the lamers whine that you only can play on a new 3 GHz system, that people will need to spend $1000 on the top Ultra videocards, but any PC that's not more than 3 years old will do. Great achievement by ID.

Re:Their logic escapes me

[TxdoHawk]

Hey, can you lend me your preview copy of Doom 3? Since, you know, I'm sure you're not so dumb that you'd go ripping on id's writers and Doom 3's plot without playing the game yourself.

Pssst......s_mixahead

[minasoko]

I'm really looking forward to playing around with the console and experimenting with cvars to tweak performance. The evolution of my Quake 3 config is one factor that makes me still play it today, 5 years later. Remember, there're tons of little tweaks for the q3 engine, not accessible through menus that can have a dramatic effect on frame rate at little or no cost. Yay for Carmack's engines.

Re:LCD is bad for gaming? Time to rethink this...

[platypus]

Do LCDs with 1600x1200 and 12ms response time even exist?

Laptop Graphics Cards NOT SUPPORTED by Doom 3

[fifthace]

Well, I had problems with my GeforceFX go5600 with running Doom 3, in that it failed to initialize opengl...

So I contacted Activision, who told me that laptop equivalent graphics cards (Radeon 9600, 9700, and the new 9800 and future X600, GeforceFX 5200, 5600, 5650 and 5700) of desktop cards are unequivocally unsupported.

So the moral of the story is don't by this game for your gaming laptop!