Doom 3 Hardware Guide Debuts 392
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.'"
New Hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Autospooge (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Heh heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sweeeeeet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heh heh (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Sweeeeeet. (Score:2, Insightful)
JPEG Compression (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And on the software front... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Heh heh (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Dither? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [hardocp.com] 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:New Hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
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:SMP (Score:1, Insightful)
Deja Vu (Score:0, Insightful)
The engines were great, don't get me wrong, but the actual game was dull as mince. It's only when someone with imagination takes the ID engines and makes a nice game (MOHAA,RTCW Multiplayer, Alice etc.) that you get a decent experience. Yes ID make lovely graphics engines, but that's about it. All of their games are point, shoot, frag fests and always have been.
Take Half Life, great game, imaginative, immerses you in the story, all using the Quake2 engine. Whereas Quake2 was dull dull dull.
I will look forward to Half Life 2 and Battlefield 2 (looks more impressive as a game than Doom3 does, from what I've seen so far) but not Doom3. The more hype I hear about it the less I want to play it. There's more to a game than fancy graphics.
Re:Sweeeeeet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Believe me, I tried everything to get UT2003 to run well on this system. /me pukes and then faints.