Doom 3 Concerns

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lowstandards

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Feb 10, 2004
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ABit IC-7
Pentium 4 3.0ghz @ 3.5ghz (15x234mhz)
1 GB PC-4000 OCZ Gold Edition DDR (1:1)
Hercules Radeon 9800XT
SB Audigy 2 ZS
160GB Maxtor SATA 150 Drive
Antec TruBlue 480W P/S

Notice the recent post on Doom 3 Minimum specs?:

"Todd Hollenshead, id's chief executive, said Doom 3 will require:

• A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500.
• 384 megabytes of memory.
• Two gigabytes of hard drive space.
• An nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/tech/weekly/2690450


I used to read the requirements/recommended specs on the PC boxes and this would tell me whether or not the game would run well on my PC.

However, I've noticed lately that games that tout their lighting engine capabilities run unacceptably on my system despite my specs being well above that of the recommended on the box. Take Thief 3 and the Spliter Cell series. Games that both have advanced lighting capabilities. Although pretty, I have come to understand that prettier lighting means slower framerates...significantly.

Now Doom 3 is coming which is yet another game that relies on its new advanced lighting engine not to mention probably the best graphics to date. My system more than doubles all of the minimum specs for Doom 3 except for the video card and I'm concerned that this game will barely run acceptably at 1024x768 with NO AA/AF!! I'm happy playing games with 1280x1024 with AT LEAST 4X AF on and preferably AA on. Now will Doom 3 continue the trend of "sophisticated lighting=much slower frame rates?" You know?

What do you guys think?
 
Your system will do great, but don't expect 1280x1024 high quality settings with any AA or AF. 1280x1024 Medium Quality it should do it. Or 1024 High should work fine. Reguardless, from what they are saying you should be able to really experience Doom 3 on that system.

Here is a preview that shows Doom 3 benchies on a P3 3.2GHz with a R9800XT. They will shortly come out with a Doom 3 hardware guide with loads more "how will my PC play Doom 3" answers.

<A HREF="http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQyLDQ=" target="_new">http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQyLDQ=</A>


ABIT IS7, P4 2.6C, 1GB Corsair XMS 4000 Pro Series, Radeon 9800 Pro, Santa Cruz, TruePower 430watt
 
It's partly the quality of the graphics engine that determines how fast it will run on your system. According to the <A HREF="http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQyLDQ=" target="_new">benchmarks</A> you will get acceptable performance at HIGH quality at 1024x768 with 8xAF, but your performance will suffer with 4xAA. Keep in mind however that the TimeDemo is designed to show off a lot of action and special effects, so it is sort of a "worst-case-scenario" benchmark. I would expect average performance to be higher than what the TimeDemo will show.
 
How can u even be worried!? Your setup is more than enough for doom3. I have a 9600Pro and I'm not even concerned about how my system will play the game. I know my setup will play it nicely becuase it will be stupid for id not to let the game be accessible to those who doesnt own a geforce6800 or x800.

Shuttle XPC SN45G
Athlon XP 3200+
nForce2 Ultra 400
Corsair 512mb ddr400
Radeon 9600 Pro
Western Digital 160GB HDD
Toshiba DVD-RW
 
How can I NOT be worried? Like I said in my post, I know my PC meets the specs required but my PC also met the specs required for...say...Splinter Cell. Now SC runs choppy at times where the game is showing off it's light rays and other fancy lighting that its engine is capable of. It was playable but annoying at times. I guess I'll just have to wait and see and I hope those benchmarks hold up. Thanks guys.
 
Well, as usual, they probably didn't optimize the game (Splinter Cell) for ATi as much as they did for nVidia. Here's the deal- your computer is very powerful, but if you want to play Doom at high detail, ABOVE 1024x768, with 4xAA/8xAF, then you're going to have to upgrade either to the X800XT or the 6800GT/Ultra. Wait 'til the game comes out in one week, like me, and see how happy you are with the performance on your 9800XT, it's a very powerful card. Me? I'm going to stick with my 9800 Pro.
 
yeah, i've decided to quit whining and wait for the game. We'll just have to wait and see. And Lets hope that ATI releases better drivers directed to Doom 3.
 
Your system is way more than enough to play Doom at very high settings, it's just that if you want to play at high res. then you're screwed because you don't have one of the latest graphics cards. The problem is that only an obsessed maniac would pay $500 for a graphics card. Wait and see what they cost in one year. It's kind of like the people who scrambled to buy the FX5800 when that hit the market.
 
im a crazy person who spent equiv of $500 on a gfx card :) and roughly that on the one before... why would u pay good money for anything less than the current best???

"Its only when you look at ants closely with a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames"
 
Looks like those with 9800pro and above with 256MB of ram will be able to play at "High". "Ultra High" requires 512MB of ram.

I'm a little bummed right now my 9800pro (128MB) is said not to handle "high". But still, I gotta think my 9800 pro is capable of rendering some awesome sh!t if the game utilizes it's potentil properly. Gee, that (buggy) Far Cry demo has some amazing graphics w/my card, D3 should look sweet.

Well, off to daydream about owning a $500 card

Mobile XP 2600+ (11X200)
Abit NF7-S v 2.0
Maxtor 60GB ATA 133 7200RPM
512MB Corsair Twinx 3200LL
BBA 9800 Pro
Enermax Noisetaker 420 watts
Win98SE
 
When you first install Doom, it automatically configures the graphics settings for good performance. However, I think you can go all the way up to "high detail" if you want. I think that the "ultra high" setting cannot be enabled right now, obviously, since there is no 512Mb 3D graphics card that is currently supported in the Doom drivers. I certainly hope that users will be able to override detail settings if we want to, and if we can't, if it's program-locked, then perhaps there will be some hacks to override it.

The other thing is that even if you have to settle for "medium detail", as long as you have nVidia NV3x- or ATi R3x0-class hardware, or better, the game will be running on the ARB2 codepath which is the "real deal", single-pass and full-feature, and you will get to experience the really cool pixel and vertex effects. So even if you have to deal with slightly less-cool textures than your friend's 6800, you can still enjoy most of what the game offers graphically. I am eager to see the performance on the lesser ARB2-supported cards, like the GeFX5600 and ATi 9200, because unfortunately we've only seen benchmarks for the really fast cards. The slower GeFX cards can fall back to the older NV codepaths if the performance is too slow, probably done either through the console or some hacks. Oh well, we'll see in a week.
 
makes me happy i invested a little extra in a 9800xt after I read u need a 256mb card for high texture res 😛

"Its only when you look at ants closely with a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames"
 
Great, not only did I get a 128MB vid card (instead of the 256MB version) I now read that D3 won't play on win98se or ME. wtf??

Mobile XP 2600+ (11X200)
Abit NF7-S v 2.0
Maxtor 60GB ATA 133 7200RPM
512MB Corsair Twinx 3200LL
BBA 9800 Pro
Enermax Noisetaker 420 watts
Win98SE
 
I used to be an "early adopter" too. Now I've changed my strategy. I will always be upgrading my cpu on a roughly annual basis, so I know that I will eventually have the X800XT or 6800 Ultra in my rig. But instead of buying it now, I'll be getting one in 6 months or so for a lot less money. By then there will actually be games capable of using Shader 3.0, PCI-X will be a viable option and a 512MB card might be out there. It's like a year ago when the first DX9 cards came out. They ran $500 or so, and a lot of people snapped them up. But no games ran DX9 at that time. Now I can get a 9800XT with 256MB for about half the price it was when it first came out, and there are dozens of DX9 titles to strut its stuff on. So if you know you will always upgrade, you get a lot more bang for your buck by waiting.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Acterra on 07/28/04 04:41 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
Man... if upgrading to XP scares you so much, grab Windows 2000! Your computer is more than capable of running either OS... so what's the big deal? (Not to mention less memory management issues, superior file system [FAT32 does SUCK!] and significant reduction in BSODs).

The other thing about 2000 is that you can borrow the CD from someone and not have to worry about product activation or any form of the copy protection with XP. (Personally I use XP Pro corporate... but have been happy using Win 2000 in the past).

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>
 
You can still enable "high" quality if you want, but we don't know yet what kind of performance hit the game will take. Also, you don't appear to have enough RAM for high quality, I would say 768Mb-1Gb is more like it, especially if you want to invite more texture data than your video card can handle. I expect that the game will still look amazing at medium detail, all we can do is wait and see.
 
I wholeheartedly agree, it's just too expensive to be an "early adopter" anymore. The fact is that launch prices on the new hardware are so high nowadays that they are simply beyond the means of most of us, and because of short supply we're talking Hollywood prices. I never pay more than around $200-225 for a new card, and when I see the online prices for 6800's and X800's I laugh because I know that in 6-8 months they will cost drastically less. And even though we're frothing in anticipation of Doom, we really need a solid group of new-gen. games to know whether the new ATi's or NV's are the card of choice.

Another note- even though we may see 512Mb flavors of X800 and 6800, they may not run entirely smooth on Ultra high settings, as <A HREF="http://www.webdog.org/plans/313/" target="_new">Robert Duffy noted on the recent .plan update</A>, we may have to wait for next year's hardware to run that mode entirely smoothly.

Also, link to <A HREF="http://www.teamradeon.com/" target="_new">Team Radeon's site</A> to read their response to <A HREF="http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQy" target="_new">HardOCP's Doom Benchmarks</A>, it may quell the urge to jump and buy the 6800 without waiting a few weeks...
 
When will Doom III be released?



/\/\ito
----------
asus a7n8x dlx (bios 1003), xp2600/333, 2x512mb pc2700, radeon 9800pro 128mb, winxp sp1, dx 9.0b, catalyst 4.5
Note: no OC!
 
:lol: Earlier today, a large portion of the source code for the hotly-anticipated Doom 3 was downloaded from id software's network, apparently through keyloggers and through an exploit in Microsoft's Outlook Express e-mail client. Employees of id software are still trying to assess what exactly was uploaded from their network, and they are expected to release a statement soon. The FBI and other authorities are working to indentify the perpetrators, however, in light of the recent events, the August 3 release date has been pushed back to an unknown date as certain program code, primarily the networking code, will have to be re-written in order to prevent rampant hacking of the release version. :lol:
 
tbh winME was gheyness incarnate and win98se was just as bad.... I had win98se and i initially upgraded to win2k
(eventually) and suddenly i could turn my pc off without fear that when I turned it back on it wouldnt be working or that files wouldnt have gone missing or be corrupted and now I use XP corp and outta the 3 (i use my machine for gaming only) win98se was a crash and bsod whore, win2k was much better but still not great and now i have XP games rarely crash and if they do windows stays stable so no need for a reboot and even if i do reboot XP is back up in a flash. So my advice is upgrade to XP and NTFS yur drive and be happy

"Its only when you look at ants closely with a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames"
 
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