On a whim, I bought doom 3 yesterday (I had been waiting for it to come out for Xbox, but they keep pushing the date back, so...). If I remember correctly, the box says minimum requirements are a P4 1.8, 128mb RAM (system), 64MB RAM (video), an accelerator, and 2.2gb disc space. Now... I've been playing games long enough to know that most of the time, minimum requirements are what it takes to load the game... but that you'll need a little more to make it look good and run smoothly.

I've got a P4 2.4, 512mb RAM (system), 128mb RAM (video), and gobs of disc space. My video card is decent (Radeon 9200). So I should have been OK. I loaded the game, set the video quality to low, the resolution to 640x480, and turned off all the advanced video options except shadows. The game is too choppy to play, and video lags behind audio during the movie clips quite a bit.

I talked to my brother a bit this morning who's a big gamer... he said I should be looking at a minimum of a gig of RAM and a 256mb video card to get decent performance.

What are you all running, and how's the video performance? I know my box isn't great, and it's certainly not built as a gaming platform, but I'm really disappointed that I can't play the game at all. What a waste of $40.

 

OK, I downloaded the demo and played it for a few minutes on my work machine (P4 3.2, 2gigs system ram, 128mb video ram) and it runs MUUUCH better. Video cards are basically the same, so I'm guessing system RAM is the biggest difference.

Hrm....

 

A lot of the babble I've read about Doom 3 makes me happy that I didn't buy it.

They REALLY tweaked the game for a specific video card so that they could offload a lot of the rendering to the processor on the card itself. That's the only way to get real screaming performance at the highest rendering levels.

Past that, more RAM in the system is key in order to cache the textures and such.


fwiw, Half Life 2 runs _really well_ on a much wider spread of machines.

 

Jackson, as seen in the Doom 3 post by Wildbill, my very fast PC, also a 2.4 with 128 MB ATI 9600 Pro card ran it slow in anything above 640x480 res in the game.

All other games I can run 1024x768 and above, only Doom 3 chocked my rig, and I had to drop the res.
But at 640x480 with items turned up high, the game runs great with no stutter.

I will tell you that the game was designed for NVIDIA based 3D cards, and not ATI.
They just run better on a system with an NVIDIA based card from the gaming mags I read each month.

Now the new Half Life 2 game which has even better graphics than Doom 3, and will take "Game of the year", looks fantastic on my machine at 1024, and even at a higher res.

Why, when it has better graphics than Doom 3 does it run better?
The secret is the ATI label on the box.
The game was written with ATI video card users in mind.

It will play on NVIDIA cards too, but will run best on an ATI based chipset card better.