Doom 3 System Requirements Revealed

The Llama King writes "The Houston Chronicle's Computing column has got the Doom 3 minimum system requirements. Biggest eye-opener: 384 MB of memory. Lots of mainstream PCs have been sold with 256 MB of RAM, so upgrades will be in order. RAM chip manufacturers should be salivating about now. You'll also need a 1.5-GHz processor and a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 graphics card or better."

Re:thats it?

[Mysticode]

Although most (all?) new machines are going to meet these specs. There are a number of people out there (me for one) that will have to upgrade to meet the minimum specs. I have Duron 1.3 with 384MB RAM. Atleast I don't need to upgrade my video card - Radion 9600

Re:thats it?

[Threni]

I'm surprised it got an article on Slashdot in it's own right, given that the information was posted as a comment to the last Doom3 story here. I guess we're going to see lots more exciting Doom3 facts and figures here.

Very smart

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't spend $3000+ just to buy a new computer. You know id, some people have a life and don't spend their savings in a computer just for one game.
They are restricting their consumer base. Very smart, very smart.

P3 CPUs?

[mukund]

How about top-of-the-line Pentium3 CPUs? 1.5GHz definitely means a P4 or a similar Celeron, but weren't the 1.x GHz P4 cpus actually slower than high end P3 CPUs?

So I'm wondering if DOOM3 would work on a high-end P3 system as I have a dual CPU P3 system with a GeForce FX 5200 card.

Honestly, those are pretty low-end specs

[beavis88]

I'm betting that playing Doom 3 on the "minimum required" system will be the easiest way to force people to upgrade their hardware.

Hell, I have 1 GB RAM and a GF4600, and I'm fully expecting the performance to be bad enough to force an upgrade on my part...

Oh....I also was "surprised". *yawn*

[gorim]

In fact, I would have been majorly shocked if it wasn't some reasonable amount as 386MB. No useful modern PC should come with less than 512MB and should really have 1GB. If someone doesn't need 512MB of memory, then they don't need that pentium 1Gz+ either.

Re:Very smart

[kfg]

Wait a year and buy the same system used for two hundred bucks.

Sometimes patience really is a virtue.

KFG

DirectX 9.0?

[David Leppik]

If you're upgrading, look for at least 128 MB of video memory in a card with Direct X 9.0 capability that installs into an AGP slot.

I thought Carmack was a big OpenGL fan. (Maybe the last one in the video game industry.) Why would you need DirectX for Doom? Maybe that's just shorthand for certain shared requirements, such as programmable GPU capabilities.

But unlike a force hardware/Windows upgrade

[Gothmolly]

It will be worth it. When has Carmack ever done us wrong?

This shouldn't be considered a minimum for play

[boschmorden]

This should be considered a minimum for LOADING the game. I've played most of the first person shooters out there for the last few years. 256MB of RAM, or even 384MB is too little. Even with a nice graphics card your framerates will be very very low. I think if anyone wants to play and enjoy any of the games lately you'll need a minimum of 512, and even at that you'll need a gig to be comfortable. I think id is in a position where they can't raise the bar to 512 because they'd lose out on sales of people buying the game that had less. I think these people will purchase the game and realize they need more and go out and buy it.

It is not THAT simple, though

[WARM3CH]

When games announce the minimum requirements, they usually just mean a system that can just run the program but not they don't mean you can actually enjoy playing the game on such a machine. For example, Unreal Tournament 2004 minimum requirement is 256MB RAM but in practice, below 1GB you'll face paging that would slowdown the game every now and then. Now, 386MB for the minimum? That's in fact a huge requirement and I know of no other game with such a minimum requirements. If the guideline is 4 times the memory of the minimum system, that means you need something like 1.5GB RAM for a an acceptable gaming experience.

Re:From the article

[Have Blue]

Doom does use OpenGL, but DirectX version compliance levels are a convenient way to separate generations of cards. It's easier than posting a list of OpenGL extensions that must be supported.

Cheapest way to play Doom 3

[jvmatthe]

Wait for the Xbox version to come out. An Xbox plus Doom 3 will set you back $200, plus tax. If you don't have anything against Microsoft's console, it's obviously the best choice.

Personally, I'm waiting for the Linux binary, since my Linux box it appears to have sufficient specs. I do regret that binary-only drivers (for my ATI or NVIDIA card) will probably be required.

hrm

[ewe2]

1 gig ram, nVIDIA 5700LE, HDD gigs to spare, and a 2.5GHz AMD chip. So far, so good.

Linux support out of the box? No. That's what matters to me.

Moo

[Chacham]

Upgrade for a game? Doesn't that increase the cost of the game? Games are expensive as it is, there's no reason they can't fit it in current common cases.

Games are made for people to play, not that people were made to play games. Games should fit current specifications, rather than demand more.

And then they wonder why sales are dismal.

Game consoles usually stay the same in each model, and games *must* work on them and cannot demand more. That's a good thing. It makes the developers do more with less. On PCs, people seem to do less with more. And that is a real problem.

Minimum requirements for... ?

[ZipR]

One thing the article doesn't mention -- what these requirements mean. If I meet the minimum requirements, will I have to play it at 640x480 with all of the bells and whistles off, or are those the minimum requirements for a good, immersive, full-on Doom 3 experience?

Re:What the hell

[tesmako]

I tell myself that I will upgrade it piece by piece over the following years every single time I have bought a new PC.

I never do.

In all honesty it is almost never worth the trouble for the small amount of money one might save, the motherboard, RAM and CPU are typically a few generations behind and updating the graphics card alone would make the CPU too much of a bottleneck. All in all I always end up with the same conclusion, just going off and replacing the whole thing makes economic sense and is a lot less trouble.

The Mac users has it right, very few people actually care about upgradeability.

Re:People don't care

[tomhudson]

When the first DOOM was released I had a few friends who said that needing a 486 PC just for a game was insane.

They upgraded after playing the game on someone else's PC.

Doom played fine full-screen on a 386/40 with 8 megs of ram (if you had more than 8 megs, you had to disable hidden refresh, so it actually played slower on machines with more memory).

Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"? Wait 6 months. After the initial surge, everyone will be overstock, and prices for better hardware will fall.

Re:thats it?

[Squishy Eyeball Jeff]

If it did, everyone and his brother would be complaining that it's nothing more than a rehash of old games underpinned by a new engine. Today's focus is more on content than ever before, so id had to ante up. A simple rehash would kill them.

Now, if they included the old levels as a bonus, that'd be another story.

Re:Moo

[schmoli]

Pardon my hostility, but this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard! Games, and specifically iD software, have always pushed the limits of the technology available to the public. Personally I think it's a great thing that they can come out with a game that is so advanced it can't even run at optimal settings on an existing consumer machine (when launched, at least). Telling people to only code to what's available would stop the evolution of graphics, coding, everything related to computers.

PC Gamer Life And Fun

[blueZhift]

Awww, such is the life of the PC gamer! In the old days, people would complain about these things, but the truth is that I think PC gamers live for this! I mean, who here doesn't like having an excuse to go out and seriously upgrade your rig?

Heck, I'm not even planning to get Doom 3, and I get all jittery just thinking about upgrading my old box, which is way overdue. But I've learned to wait until the game comes out and real people play on real systems, before doing any upgrade. That way you can get the right hardware and avoid any unforeseen incompatibilities.

Awww, the life of a PC Gamer...

Re:Moo

[JustNiz]

>> Upgrade for a game? Doesn't that increase the cost of the game?

No. It increases the amount that people with ghetto hardware will have to pay to play the game.

What alternative are you proposing? Do you really want games companies to stop innovating and not develop games that utilise new hardware/features?

Re:thats it?

[mirko]

This is the "other story" that I was refering too.

Meanwhile, in reality...

[LSD-OBS]

Look, these days, there will be 2 main types of people that will buy this game.

1) Oldskool die-hard Doom lovers. These people have been around long enough that the concept of hardware upgrades is nothing new to them. Chances are they will currently have good enough hardware for Doom 3, or they will take it for granted that they will need an upgrade before they buy the game.

2) Newskool FPS gamer kids. They take their gaming pretty seriously, and having the latest hardware is pretty much a competitive issue to them. If you find any of these guys with less than 512mb of RAM or a 3D card older than a GeForce 3, chances are they don't have the money to buy Doom 3 anyway.

The hardware requirements stated are really light for a game of that genre, especially considering the target market. I think the poster is rather off-target by insinuating that this is a problem.

Re:From the article

[lmfr]

"I thought doom 3 used OpenGL, not Direct X"

Don't forget that there's more to Direct X than Direct 3D. Doom 3 does use Direct X. (Well, I'm assuming it does as quake3 did require Direct X 7. I don't have a Doom 3 copy yet. :))

The requirement for Direct X 9 should be more for a easy way to figure if your graphics card supports the OpenGL extensions Doom 3 requires, as others have posted.

Re FX 5200, that graphics card *is* Direct X 9 compliant, but its performance sucks...

Re:1.5 GHz

[Roguelazer]

Actually, if you RTFA, you'll see that it says "1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 Processor or AMD Athlon 1500+". That covers it pretty well, I'd say.

Minimum requirements for now

[Xian97]

The Doom games were always a showcase for the engine's technology. It probably won't be for a year or two before developers that license the technology start hitting the full capabilities of the engine. When that happens, I look for the current minimum requirements to go up so plan accordingly for the games that will be built on the engine in the near future if you are going to upgrade your hardware. I think that the current recommended requirement will soon be the minimum when you see the next wave of games built on the technology that iD has created.

*cough* BULLSHIT *cough* BULLSHIT...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I'm really not buying these specs. What they mean is if you are one of these obsessed gamers with no other life who has to have the greatest fucking video card on some overclocked "riced out" box (preferably with a lucite window and lots of neon), then this is what you will need. And don't forget the flat-screen monitor [philips.com].

I mean come on. we've heard this line befor: "sure it'll run on an X, but you wont get the FULL experience". Yadda, yadda, yadda. And of course the fact that certain brand names are being thrown around means nothing, right? OPEN YA EYES, BOY!

Re:People don't care

[dasmegabyte]

Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"?

Not really. Some people don't upgrade as long as their computer is "Good Enough." When something comes along and proves their machine isn't "Good Enough" anymore, they upgrade. It's because the machine is old -- the game is just a catalyst. I had a buddy in college who upgraded his machine for Wing Commander Prophecy and again for Mechwarrier 4 -- compared to that, upgrading to Doom 3 (which will be undoubtedly a social success) doesn't seem like such a big deal.

(Incidentally, my upgrade cycle is based on how dirty my keyboard is. When the keyboard gets so dirty I don't want to touch it, I replace the whole thing. This usually takes about 2 years or so).

Fuck That

[windside]

There's no way in hell. Playing an FPS with a console-type controller instead of a keyboard is roughly equivalent to gouging out your own eyeballs, in terms of pain and frustration.

I remember the first time I tried Doom64 - UGH. Please. I'll stick to Mario, thanks.

Sure, there's bound to be a keyboard/mouse add-on for the XBox, but certainly not a cheap one. Factor in the karma burn for owning (nay, touching) an XBox and your effective cost has climbed far beyond that of a new CPU and some RAM.

Re:Oh my, it takes a lot of hardware! How dare the

[yeremein]

SAPPHIRE ATI RADEON 9200SE Video Card, 128MB DDR, 64-bit, TV-Out, 8X AGP -BULK OEM - $47, free shipping

Bad idea. Don't get an SE card for gaming--they have a crippled 64-bit memory bus. At the very least, splurge the extra $6 to get the full 9200, or better yet, get a DX9 compliant board like a Radeon 9600 (about $100) or FX5700 (about $110).

Re:Well, then you are stuck with ATI

[Jeremy Erwin]

what the...

The days of DirectX-only cards are long behind us. ATI supports OpenGL just fine, thank you.

OpenGL just happens to expose the design choices made by ATI and nVidia more readily, because most of the advanced functionality is exposed through vendor specific extensions. Later, the OpenGL Architectural Review Board may adopt them as ARB extensions, which signals to rest of the vendors that they should really think about implementing them, if they haven't already...

Carmack has griped [http] before about nVidia's inconsistent floating point behavior-- certain nVidia cards ran the ARB standard code path quite slowly, and thus required custom code paths to achieve decent performance.
But this gripe was 18 months ago, perhaps the pendulum has swung back.

blip

[mrm677]

People upgrading due to Doom3 requirements will cause no more than a tiny blip on the radar of memory manufacturers.

PC gamers represent a tiny fraction of machines (compared to businesses and normal consumers), and most hard-core gamers likely already have 384MB.

The only thing this requirement will cause is a lot of disappointed 13-year olds whose computer that Ma and Pa just bought him is not up to snuff.

Re:People don't care

[PitaBred]

What's with the "wait 6 months"? It's not as though hardware is ever doing anything but getting cheaper and faster. As long as you buy next-to-top-of-the-line, you'll get about the best bang for your buck. And next-to-top-of-the-line should run Doom3 admirably.
Secondly, if gaming is important to you, I don't think it really says "I need a life". Getting a new set of golf clubs costs more than a computer upgrade... do golfers also need a life?

Re:Fuck That

[Hollins]

I agree. Not only is control tedious without a mouse and keyboard, they have to crank down the rate you can turn to make the game controllable, which means they generally have to add some auto-aiming features. It's a completely different experience. On top of that, you have lower resolution, no console to enter commands (want fov 120? sorry) and you miss out on all the mods, which can be half the fun of iD games.

Console versions of FPS are barely shadows of the real thing.

Longhorn?

[Gr8Apes]

try again - longhorn won't be out until at least 2007, and many are saying 2008 or later. But even at its most optimistic, 2007-2004 = 3 years. :)

I think in 3 years, all current computers will be obsolete, with the possible exception of some 64 bit machines.

If anyone doubts that 64 bits aren't the wave of the near future, just look at all the digital cameras and DV camcorders being sold today. People will want to do digital things with that digital media, and 64 bits allows for that to happen faster (in some cases, just allows it to happen). 32 bits is dead, it just doesn't know it yet, much like the wasp body that doesn't know the head has been gone for hours.

Lastly, after seeing the "suggested" specs for a longhorn machine, nothing out there will run it yet. So, all machines will be replaced in 3 years anyways, provided anyone upgrades. (Heck, according to Infoworld, there's still a large contingent of win95/98 machines out in the corporate world. I personally know of 1 50K+ employee company where that is a true statement.)

Re:Let me guess....

[Karhgath]

I hope this was a joke...

64x64 texture?? 1996 called, they want their textures back. Usually High Res texture are at least around 512x512 at 32 bits, so around 8 megs per tetxures, a bit higher than 16k.

Most of the memory used nowadays are for textures. That's why videocards have 256/512mb ram now alone, mostly for the framebuffers and textures.

I won't even respond to the rest of your post =) You've obviously never written a multimedia/game application.

Re:thats it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but id will know exactly what the system specs. are and will tweak the game engine to fit that particular hardware. Not to mention the resolution will be set to something like 640x400. This is what make consoles great for games. New game comes out, I don't have to worry about upgrading or installing the lastest drivers.

Do golfers also need a life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:thats it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kharma? You have to be kidding. That's a something, but not a Karma.

Re:People don't care

[tomhudson]

Just a side note - OS2 ran fine on 286es - it was one of the original specs - assembler instead of c, 286 or better.

PC Games sales would probably be a lot better if they could find a way to date label them: "ALL PCS AFTER JAN 2002" instead of requiring people to know their components.

Ain't that the truth! You don't know how many times people have said "I have a problem" and I've asked them what they're running, and all they can tell me is the brand name. How much memory? They give me their hard disk size. Or "a hard disk and a floppy." What kind of video card? A 17" one. Aarrgh!

Re:Finally.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but you are spreading misinformation. Hear me out, before you decide to rant back, because this is from my long experience and should be pretty close to reality.

XP requires alot more than 128 MB RAM even if it can run along with that configuration. The problem will be that all RAM will be used up, so you will have to swap alot more.

For those who have enough RAM (roughly >=512 MB today), swapping to harddrive is a thing of the past. Heck, you can even turn off the paging file. With 1GB it's pretty safe, and it will prevent the stupid OS to swap out anything (yes, Windows will page out pages even if you have 2GB free RAM, REALLY stupid..)

For some optimizations in XP to work, you really need enough RAM. There's alot of tricks going on in the startup / hibernate startup and prefetching, which requires over 256MB RAM. So without enough RAM, XP can actually be slower than 2000 in some respects.

Removing spyware is an excellent suggestion.

Turning off anti-virus is a horrible idea. Every Windows computer connected to the internet today requires: firewall, antivirus, adaware/spybot s&d and some other webbrowser/email than IE and OE. You're playing russian roulette if you skip ANY of these steps..

You are right about P2P, though you seem unaware that is's a completely different issue. If you run a P2P application, it will eventually swap out your entire RAM no matter how much RAM you have. It's a limitation of the OS that it's so braindead. It's because there's no limit to how much an application can cache files, so it will eventually cache everything you share and receieve. This is good for a server setup, but not for a desktop PC. So if you're running P2P or similar apps, they should be on a dedicated server or run inside something like VMWare or Bochs.

RAM is cheap nowadays, and you'll get alot more out of your computer if you buy enough of it. The harddrive can really bring any computer down to its knees, if it's constantly swapping.

You will not increase the FPS in gaming, as you correctly state. However, you will not be subject to swapping in the middle of a game either. Swapping will usually happen in the most intense scenes of a game, so it's really a good thing to get more RAM.

As for other applications. If you're a developer, you always have 10-20 programs open. There's really no point in making things more difficult for yourself by closing an application you will have a need for 10 minutes later. RAM is cheap.

To upgrade your GHZ will make a good overall performance. Upgrading RAM will ensure that performance doesn't drop under heavy stress.

You see, it's important to define what performance you really mean. You're right in much of what you say, but I will also stress that memory shouldn't be skipped either. Too many computers today are sold with way too little RAM, and then the owners think they need a faster system, just because it kneels under heavy stress. They just need more RAM.

It's kind of like how people buy a new PC to get faster Internet. Of course, your internet will not become any faster. If you're on a modem, then you need broadband. So the right observation and understanding is important.

Re:People don't care

[IntlHarvester]

Better yet, the hardware industry (Intel, AMD, ATI, NVidia) should come up with a rating system like "Game:A", "Game:B" and so on.

Then game vendors could just say "Game:C class PC required, Game:D or better recommended".

Right now, they've dug themselves into a hole by making it difficult for regular users to buy games. I know when SimCity 4 came out, there were a lot of confused people saying "I just bought a fancy new Dell and this game won't run!" because they had Intel video.

(And I was thinking of OS/2 v2. Also Win3.1 could run on a 286, but it wasn't really useful unless you had a faster 386 at least.)

Re: do golfers also need a life?

[TalMaximus]

Ummm, anyone else bothered by the fact that there is a joke about shooting our President in this thread. Political issues aside the man is still the President and jokes or comments about shooting him are not funny.

Re:thats it?

[drinkypoo]

I really thought that half-life was the first FPS with an immersive story. Of course, a lot of the puzzles are amazingly wanky and wading through hordes of soldiers gets really old really rapidly. What I really hate is people hiding stuff behind bushes in current FPSes; Even the most powerful computers don't seem to have the power to render that kind of thing such that you can get the kind of visual cues that you would get in a real life analogue of such a situation. People keep acting like a FPS is the real world and it makes the game less immersive because the technology isn't there. I was hoping that UT2004 would have grass effects that improved the situation but that doesn't seem to have happened.

Maybe that's why I like racing games so much, the point has come where they look fantastic and the visual clues you get are actually useful.

Re:thats it?

[wolrahnaes]

the difference between a GF2 GTS and the GF3 was very superficial.

Umm....wrong...

GF2GTS is a NV1x card, with no programmable shaders. DX7 class gear. Hardware T&L was the extent of the "high end graphics" capability of this chip. Later nVidia confusingly renamed these Geforce4MX, as compared to the real GF4Ti, which was a tweaked GF3.

GF3 was an entirely new generation of chip, the NV2x (using x as a variable, not to be confused with NV2X which is the GF3/nForce hybrid used in the Xbox)
NV2x was the first generation of DX8 hardware with programmable shaders.

Re:Cheapest way to play Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

AC comment remix
If they don't know anything about Linux, they don't need to hear it from someone on slashdot making an -off the top of their head- estimate about its usage. Also, as a side note, Linux can and more than likely will be the future gaming platform OS. Gaming companies do not want MS to have any amount of control over them.

Here is the issue. First, your comment is pointless... serves no purpose other than to discourage those who feel Linux is a better choice than Windows (because you make them look like idiot fanboys)