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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Doom 3 Minimum Specs Revealed 100

Posted by simoniker from the making-the-unpossible-possible dept.
Thanks to The Phobos Lab, a Doom fansite, for their info, directly from John Carmack, that the minimum specs for Doom 3 will be "1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card." There's no word yet on recommended specs to get the best fidelity, but sites such as NewDoom.com and The Phobos Lab are keeping a close eye on the situation, including an interesting but very unconfirmed rumor that "a Doom 3 demo [will be available] for public playing at this year's QuakeCon" - probably wishful thinking, although Carmack is scheduled to speak there, and it's possible at least some new Doom details will be revealed.
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Doom 3 Minimum Specs Revealed More

Doom 3 Minimum Specs Revealed

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  • I get to re-upgrade my computer! I just spent $2k on parts, and now I need another precessor AND another video cards. Seems like just last year I forked over $150 for a new 7500, and now I need something bigger to get over 13fps. Great.

    Unfortunatly I was happy with my new system. This is about time to go buy a G5, or just give up and go for an Xbox, so sick of upgrading, must have spend $3000 in the last 3 years, seems a wastte, no?

    • Re:w00t! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Samedi1971 ( 194079 )
      I get to re-upgrade my computer! I just spent $2k on parts, and now I need another precessor AND another video cards. Seems like just last year I forked over $150 for a new 7500, and now I need something bigger to get over 13fps. Great.
      If you just spent $2k on computer parts and don't have a top of the line pc at least double the minimum spec, you're shopping in the wrong place!

      Or did you spend all that on case mods?

      must have spend $3000 in the last 3 years, seems a wastte, no?

      Sounds like you've def

      • He talks about G4 obviously a Mac user those things are expensive.
      • Lets see, 200 for an ASUS, 200 for 1g DDR, 150 for a new case (had a solid steel heat trap), 200 for winXP pro, with a Redhat dual boot (60, so I can finally learn linux, when I get a round to it), 20 for a new modem (cheapo 56k, since my previous one was a AMR, and my backup was an ISA, going to school in a month, not worth broadband). New 60g HD roughly 150, new 52x cd-rom 50, round IDE/floppy cable 30, CD-R about 150. And my one case mod, a biohazard fan grill, $9.99. And I decided that an ATI 7500 wa
        • next upgrade: total the value of your computer, if its over $800, dont upgrade. Thats been the sweet spot for PC's to keep up to date while getting day old donut prices.
          • Ah yes, everyone was telling me to just buy a new computer, ala Dell or Gateway, which I refuse to do, premade computers have a history of makeing me VERY made, like the my last IBM (a 333mhz) which had a whopping 2 ISA slots, and a single PCI. Know hard it was to find either an ISA SB or Voodoo? Impossible, meaning it was either video card or sound card, not both. That and I would have spent 800 on the compy and still would have had to fork over money for sound and RAM, and XP pro (will not EVER use home
        • You're spending $150 on a CDR (when good ones can be had for $50), $150 on a case (should be able to get a decent aluminum case for half that), $200 on a mobo ($100-150 gets you a really good board) and $30 for rounded cables (nice, but not really worth the money if it's tight) and you're whinging about spending $50-60 for a video card that doesn't completely suck (price range for GF4mx / GF fx5200 / Radeon 9[0,1,2]00)? I'm not even going to go into the insanity of spending $200 on XP, when you could pull
          • When I got the Radeon 7500 it costed more, since it was right whan the 9xxx series came out. More a case of bad timing I guess, like I bought my Voodoo4 right when 3dfx went away, smooth.

            I don't know where you were shopping for an XP Pro OEM, but mine cost 189, at Fry's, at discount. The mobo was also roughly 189, which is close enough to 200 to me. I just get rid of a crap ECS, had to do VERY odd boot routines to get it to actually boot with mouse/keyboard functions, so I purposely bought the best mobo
    • No, you don't upgrade *now*. There's still months before D3 and HL2 come out, during which your parts will still be aging, and you'll feel like a chump. Wait until the game comes out, see how it runs, THEN upgrade what you need to. Your wallet and computer will thank you.
    • Jeez! I just upgraded to a 1.33 TBird and a GEforce FX5200 for les than $110 Shipped. Explain to me again why I need a Mac?

    • Simple solution:

      Buy game.

      Invoice John Carmack the cost to upgrade your system. If he don't pay, sic a collection agency on'm.

  • Minimum? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ftvcs ( 629126 ) <f_t_v_c_s@yahoo.com> on Friday July 18, 2003 @04:30AM (#6469143) Journal
    There 's a nice article [tomshardware.com] on Tom's hardware.

    You need at least a R9600/FX5600 to play at a descent frame rate [tomshardware.com].

    • Re:Minimum? (Score:4, Informative)

      by kulmala ( 3852 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @04:44AM (#6469168) Homepage
      You need at least a R9600/FX5600 to play at a descent frame rate. [tomshardware.com]


      Sure... if you absolutely, positively have to play with the "Medium Quality, 1280x1024 / 32 bit" settings indicated in the image you linked to. The THG article mentions that there are several quality settings, and the resolution can surely be lowered, too. Therefore the minimum specs mentioned don't sound so far-fetched to me; a GF1 could probably handle (at least) "Low Quality, 640x480" settings.

      -Janne

      • Descent (Score:2, Interesting)

        by alatesystems ( 51331 )

        You need at least a R9600/FX5600 to play at a descent frame rate. [tomshardware.com]

        Hey, I liked Descent's frame rates. That was a great game and it came with my Creative ModemBlaster.

        On a related note, I've played a D3 alpha and it runs VERY slowly on my GeForce4 TI4400. I mean like 13fps standing looking at a door with smoke and stuff in between. When you start shooting a big drunk alabamaman up close and personal who looks like he just got out of a bar fight after beating his wife, then it slows

        • But that's an alpha - it IS likely to have shit performance... I'm guessing that you ARE relating that to what would be the final performance, if not, disregard the rest of this post :).

          This is one of the reasons I expect that companies don't like alphas/betas leaked - they are pretty crap in many areas usually, as they have not been fully optimised etc, and end up giving the wrong impression to people who tried them/had friends who tried them.

          Of course, I didn't get the alpha... 1) I don't use warez (and
          • I know that it is crappy framerates and stuff because it is a totally unoptimized alpha build. I can't wait for the real thing(and yes I will buy it). I just wanted to see what it LOOKS like now. And it looks great!!! I did not mean to be discouraging or anything. I played an alpha of ut2k3 as well(it was called unreal 2 then). It also looked great but performed slowly and look at it now; it runs fine on a gf2.

            Companies are not going to sell a software product that requires the newest video card/proc/
        • I too had really crappy framerates with my ti500.
          I wasn't very surprised to find out I didn't have
          my renderer specified right in doomconfig.cfg.
          Suddenly I had 65fps with no issues.
      • The parent posts exemplify why I dislike these declarations of minimum specs for a game: it's a spec that is based upon a subjective opinion on what is minimally acceptable. Someone made a call based on a framerate that they figured people will tolerate. This criteria doesn't really mean that much to me: I want to be able to gauge whether *I* will be happy with the performance.

        In my mind, the only way to do this is to give people some context. If someone said to me, "If you want to play at 640x480 at

      • Re:Minimum? (Score:1, Troll)

        by Moonshadow ( 84117 )
        Sure... if you absolutely, positively have to play with the "Medium Quality, 1280x1024 / 32 bit" settings indicated in the image you linked to.

        But what's the point of playing an engine tech demo if you're not going to turn it all the way up? ;)

        Kidding...kinda...

    • Descent is a completely different game series, completely different engine, completely different characteristics.

      But at least Loki ported Descent 3 to Linux.

      Enough stupid snotty anal spelling jokes.

      I'm just glad to see that for a change, I have a better-than-minimum system, though I'll have to buy more memory. (K7 2.1+, R8500LE, 128MB)
  • This just might be the killer app that forces everyone who hasn't already, to upgrade their computer. I'm sure the hardcore gamer will already exceed this requirement by a lot, but the casual gamer, he probably doesn't spend so much money on his computer just for playing Games. My desktop's video card barely meets the requirements.
    • Heh. If it's out by then, this is what I'm asking for for christmas: Doom 3 and any hardware upgrades I need to play it ;)
    • Everyone should game like I do. I wait 5 years after release and then I go buy it used. I get fantastic performance for little cash. Good things come to those who wait:)

  • I remember... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigBadDude ( 683684 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @04:45AM (#6469169)
    DOOM running smoothly on my 486/DX with 4MB of RAM.

    I got really upset when the next big game [heretic] required a minimum of 8MB. I had to pay $180 for that...

    • Re:I remember... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 )
      Yeah, but we needed a boot disk to run Doom on a 4MB machine anyway.
      • I needed a boot disk to run almost all my games back in the day. It was annoying to make it the first time, but I learned a lot, and was pretty prowd when I learned that I did a better job allocating upper memory than memmaker (hey I was young and foolish).

        • Re:I remember... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by retto ( 668183 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @08:44AM (#6470088)

          Same here. I had to learn about memory management before memmaker came out, but it was really handy and like a geeky challenge to do better without using something like QEMM.

          I set up a little boot menu with different config.sys and autoexec.bat settings for XMS or EMS.

          DOOM is where me and my friends learned the most about networking. Just about everything I ever needed to know about modems or network drivers I learned trying to get DOOM to work.

      • not if you properly set your config.sys and autoexec.bat with dos's built in boot menu. If you told it not to load himem.sys, you could load doom and doomII fine on a 4mb machine without a boot disk.
        • Considering, though, that it was my family's computer and they regularly ran Windows on it (3.x that is), it was easier to just boot it from floppy when I wanted to play Doom than to try to get the system to play nicely with everyone else's crap.
    • i got upset when my friend had a copy of the heratic shareware and i couldn't get a copy because it was slightly bigger than would fit on a floppy disk.
    • Heretic was fun times. Hexen was fantastic too. (although hexen 2 never held my attention past the second level or so) It's too bad noone will ever make a simple fantasy hack'n'slash arcade style game like that again.

      • Heretic was fun times. Hexen was fantastic too.

        The funniest parts of those games was when you tried to type a cheat from DOOM and the exact opposite happened :)

        Trying to cheat? NOW YOU DIE!!!!

    • I remember paying almost $200 to upgrade my Atari400 to 32k just so I could play Crush, Crumble and Stomp. That was a *lot* of lawn mowing...
  • there will be a demo before it hits and we can all test it out on our machines ourselfs to see how crappy or decent it runs.

  • Whew! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Go Aptran ( 634129 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @05:36AM (#6469303)
    Looking at the specs makes me wince a little. We Mac folk will probably have to buy a G5 to play this baby... when (if) it's ported over.

    Seriously... while some people will gladly upgrade to be able to play, I wonder if this is the sort of thing that drives people to console systems. At least I know that when I buy a Playstation 2 game, it won't have to replace a section of it to be able to use it to its full potential.

    • Ive been driven to console systems because the games tend to be simply better (in the fun sense). Look at consoles like the SNES and that still has games that are far better than a lot of the cruft that comes out on pcs nowadays.

    • Re:Whew! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by yoyodyne ( 469596 )
      The flip side is that there can't be any ground-breaking games for the Playstation 2, you'll have to wait for Playstation 3.
    • Relatively speaking you can be gauranteed that any console game you buy will run exactly as fast as it is designed to.

      I long ago fought the never ending battle to stay up to date with the latest PC gaming equipment. Now I spend money on raw processor power, hd space, and memory, because my computer is now used for research.

      While it costs 50$ per game for the playstation 2 usually, it is much easier to budget for than the constantly increasing PC game system requirements.

      By the way, Ace Combat 04 is
    • Given that Carmack has essentially said that the latest G4's and graphic cards are adequate for games, If there has been concurrent development it has been on the G4. While they may include a G5 build if the speed difference is worth it (and it's only a matter of turning on an optimizer), if Mac Doom 3 comes out within the next year I doubt they'd cut out the large percentage of users that haven't upgraded. As others have hinted at, they have progressively gotten better at scalable quality. In other word
  • Whaddaya mean that Doom 3 won't run on my P3-500? Maybe I could get it going if I turned down the model detail a bit and upgraded my TNT1 to a TNT2. ;)

    /me wishes that the part about owning a P3-500 with a TNT1 as his primary gaming system was only a joke.

    DecafJedi

    • Thanks! You made me feel better about my P4-1.8 with a 32 meg TNT2! Seriously though, what games do you play on that? I'm probably going to upgrade once the Athlon 64 and P5 come out, but if I find a good enough reason not to, I'll save a good $1000 or so...
      • Let's see... lately, I've been playing games like Thief, Tropico, The Longest Journey, Quake 3, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, and a ton of old-school adventure games (including the recently-released Space Quest 0: Replicated [wiw.org]).

        Basically, I spend my time playing whatever was cutting edge three or four years ago. It works out fairly well when you're too cheap to buy games when they first hit the shelves anyway. Unfortunately, even the bargain bin games are starting to exceed my specs. Oh, well... someday

        • Get a better gfx card... The card makes all the difference.

          I am currently playing Wolf:ET on my P3 450 with a crappy GF2 64MB. Put the settings down to minimum and it plays fine.

          I also completed Vice City on the same setup. It's jumpy when it rains but still enjoyable.
          • I'll echo that, I was running quake 3 just fine on my old Pentium II 300 with a Radeon 7000 after it became the cheapo card, and the settings turned down a little.
    • /me wishes that his P2-333 with a ATi Rage Pro as his only system was a joke. :)
      • Your wish has been granted: Your system is a joke!

        Me, of course, speaking as a hypocrite, considering I have 3 old PCs under the 200Mhz mark. And I'm still waiting for my Athlon XP & mobo to come back. Thankfully, I'm not a big gamer.

        And my PowerBook G4 is 667Mhz, with 512MB of RAM. (Full specs in my user bio, if you care) But I find it comforting that I get twice the number of keys/sec on distributed.net's RC5-72 project than my friends tricked-out gaming system with a 2.53Ghz P4.

  • Meh. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SD-VI ( 688382 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @07:20AM (#6469637)
    "Minimum requirements for playing the game after you install it: Pentium 4 2.0GHz or equivalent, GeForce4 Titanium 4200 or better"

    Doom III looks shiny enough, but I doubt it'll revolutionize anything. I'm really waiting for Half-Life 2, which should run on slower computers no problem thanks to the engine's massive scalability; they have textures so large no video card can handle them at decent speeds, and they say they're going to release those well after the actual game, once the hardware exists.

    Also, for people who complain about spending a lot, don't buy at the high end and make small upgrades regularly. There's a best buy in every generation. Right now the best buy is the Athlon XP 2500+ at $85, and until recently for video cards it was the Radeon 9500 Pro, which ATi stopped making because it was too fast. (The 9600 Pro is slower.) I've spent maybe $1200 over the last three years, a number I'm happy enough with, and my system is powerful enough.

    • It won't run on much slower a computer. I recall an interview stating that they were aiming on supporting an 800mhz CPU with at least a GF3 or Equiv.

  • Don't be mad at the specs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Carrion Creeper ( 673888 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @07:34AM (#6469711)
    Some of us look at this as a good reason to buy some spiffy new hardware. I was looking for a good excuse, now I have it. Thanks Carmack!

    On a related note, slashdotters are mad that they have to buy a ferrari to go 180mph in a car. Come on folks, these games are asking computers for some hefty calculations. Do you really think you can ask your computer to do five times as many polygons without better hardware?

    Do you think carmack/id are releasing crappy code? Those guys are fanatics.

  • Apple Macintosh Specs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by McCall ( 212035 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @07:58AM (#6469812) Homepage

    Isn't John Carmack a big NeXT and Apple OS X fan? I seem to remember that the first demo of Doom 3 was on Apple hardware [clanmacgaming.com].

    If thats true, and going off of previous games requirements I would imagine the specs for an OS X version would be very similar to the PC version.

    I doubt very much if it will ever see the light of day on MacOS 9 though :)

    • Dude, it's official! Apple confirms: Mac OS 9 is dead! Deader even than *BSD! Don't you remember the whole coffin thing?

      Sheez. It's like saying "I bet D3 won't run on windows 95!"

      (Entire post tongue-in-cheek; too much peanut butter)
  • My GForce 2 Ultra card easily comes in faster than the GF1 minimum, but I've only got a 900MHz Athlon. Presumably, this means its not going to do anything like run ok.

    But, the reason I've not bothered upgrading my CPU is because I play most of my games on my Xbox. Which only contains a 700MHz Celeron (or was it even slower? I can't remember).

    So am I really waiting for Xbox release, because the significantly faster processor in the PC is actually not good enough? Weird.
    • The Xbox doesn't have to bother with running windows, plus whatever else in the background. Also, since every xbox has the same hardware, programmers can optomize the code specifically for that hardware, while on a PC, you've nearly an infinite amount of configurations.

  • What's with this "minimum" thing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @08:14AM (#6469924)
    I get a little sick of minimum, recommended, etc. settings. By definition, if it's *minimum* then it should be good enough.

    I think game makers/distributors are sacrificing gameplay and quality in the effort to not lock out as many buyers and therefore increase sales.

    Besides, everybody knows the minimum specs required to actually USE a piece of software are the "recommended" specs. The stated "minimum" specs are just the specs it takes to keep the EXE from CRAPPING OUT before or immediately after loading.

    • Re:What's with this "minimum" thing? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by travail_jgd ( 80602 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @09:04AM (#6470231)
      My impression is the "minimum" is for people who are willing to sacrifice features -- instead of being forced to buy new hardware. That's a fair trade-off, because very few people buy a new $400 video card every 6-12 months. I just got Serious Sam:SE out of the bargain bin, and turned down features so I don't need to pick up a geForce-class card right away. (Gaming isn't a priority for me.)

      "I think game makers/distributors are sacrificing gameplay and quality in the effort to not lock out as many buyers and therefore increase sales."

      And that's a good thing! How many copies of Half-Life 3 and Doom 3 would sell if the reference platform was a 4-CPU workstation with a professional-quality video card?
      • And that's a good thing! How many copies of Half-Life 3 and Doom 3 would sell if the reference platform was a 4-CPU workstation with a professional-quality video card?


        Probably just as many.
      • If you're not up to at least GF level gfx, you're a cheap bastard. You can get a -lot- of video card for $50-60 (GF4mx / GF fx5200 / radeon 9000-9200); or you can get a gf2mx for as little as $30. If you live in any reasonably sized city, you shouldn't have a problem scoring something cheaper on a local forsale newsgroup.
    • Minimum settings are not always the minimum setting. Example: Warcraft 3 wants a 16MB graphics card as minimum, I play with an 8MB graphics card... granted I play on below minimum settings and get 5fps, I CAN PLAY IT!
    • Bob Mandel @ The Adrenaline Avault wrote an article [avault.com] on this problem.

      As a game reviewer, I'm fed up with misleading and sometimes downright fraudulent system requirements for computer games. In my mind, the problems surrounding these rarely accurate specifications have gotten worse over time, with consumers basically playing a form of Russian roulette when it comes to whether an offering will run on their PCs. Industry observers privately admit that system requirements are most often unrealistically low.

    • Not always!

      On Ghost Recon for Mac, the Minimum Reqirements were above my 5-year old Mac's hardware specs. But it still runs like a champ, on the highest settings (or near-highest, can't remember). Soldier of Fortune 2 is a complete waste of time (10fps), even set to lowest settings across the board. And it has Minimum Reqs LOWER than Ghost Recon (if I remember correctly).

      I think it has more to do with the intelligence of the coding team than anything. That's why I hold out faith that the MinReqs might
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Xbox version... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rhinobird ( 151521 ) on Friday July 18, 2003 @11:59AM (#6471916) Homepage
      Oh yeah, it'll look fine on the Xbox.

      You don't have to do any anti-alaising due to how tv's work.

      You only have to run at around 640x480 (actually less than that, but it's a good rough estimate)

      only have to run at 30 fps, cause that's all a TV can handle

      It's a set hardware standard. Carmack said if he has a set HW standard, he can sqeeze 50% more performance out of his engines by hard coding to that set HW spec.
      • I think you're forgetting that the Xbox can run in High-Def. If it's going to be 1080i supported, than I have no worries about having to upgrade my PC.
        mmmm...Doom 3 on a High-Def big screen TV... Now if someone will finally release a frickin' keyboard and mouse for the system.
        • Microsoft HAS released a keyboard adapter [xbox.com]. Its free with the exception of $7 for shipping and handling. It allows any USB keyboard to work. I don't see why a USB mouse wouldn't work with it, as long as the game supported it.
        • I think you're forgetting that the Xbox can run in High-Def.

          Nope I didn't forget, I just thought it was irrelevant. Not many games support it and not many people have hi-def TV's. Until hi-def tv's come down to a reasonable price, not many people will buy them. I mean sure they're cool and all, but for $2500 I might as well just buy a spiffy keen new computer with a new 21 inch monitor and play the PC version of Doom III.
  • Minimum Specifications are provided by Software Companies because they need to set the benchmark with supporting the product. Imagine the headache a Customer Support person would face if they receive constant calls from users who complain of poor performance or inability to play the game on a 500 MZ Celeron, 64 MB of RAM, and a Voodoo2. What would really help with today's Gamer and Hardware Geek is to create a label showing the recommended specifications for 3 quality settings in the game (Low, Medium and

  • GF1 ? (Score:2)

    by dougmc ( 70836 )
    GF1?

    I don't think you mean an original GeForce or GeForce 256 ...

    Is GF1 shorthand for GeForce FX?

    And here I thought my Ti 4200 was pretty good ... bah!

  • .. is the game really that good? or is it just programmed that poorly?

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