I have a serious question.

[Wobbo]

Katarhyne said:

Second of all, Wobbo - by all rights you should be seeing a "sorry, you're banned" screen right now but I'm in a pretty decent mood and to be fair, you brought up a valid (if flawed) point. Yes, Doom 3 is designed to run on Geforce256-level hardware. However, it is designed AROUND Geforce3-level hardware. But besides that, you DO realize that the Geforce256 DDR outperforms the Geforce 2 MX, right?
A Geforce 2 MX just isn't going to cut it - Geforce 2 Ultras can't even pull that off in 640x480, at least in the alpha.

Wtf? Youre a mod too? Its getting worse by the day! Lets suppose i was totally wrong, you dont BAN people for being wrong, you correct them. Anyhow, by geforce One Carmack was talking about the first geforce that arrived on the scene, very soon after quake 3 came out. Not geforce 3 level.

And dont judge the speed of the game by the alpha, even if that DOES represent the BEST potential of the engine at the time it was built (and it doesnt anyhow) many months have passed since its uh, "release" and we have a few more to go (at least) before the actual game come out. Now THAT cant be argued with.

If the game runs consistently over 30 fps in 512-314 im happy, so i guess this might be moot for me anyway :-)

and Africa isnt a country

[Fletcher`]

dsm said:

Rofl! How can all the poor people in Africa and other third world countries live?
Because they're used to living like that and that's the same answer I can give you.

At any rate, the days of playing games at a choppy framerate are over for me. Today, all of my games run decently.
:-)

I'm quite backwards. I can handle 640x480x16 with most special efects. Then again, I haven't gotten too many advanced games either. :P

[AndrewB]

"Playable" means you can play the game, beat the levels, win the game. If your computer can run Doom 3 at 320x240, all settings turned to minimum, running at 15FPS average, and win the game, then your settings are most definitely "playable."

Seriously, it's as if resolution and FPS and FSAA and bumpmapping and graphical effects has become more of "the game" than actual games. When the obsession is the eternal search for better graphics and performance, rather than the eternal search for an addicting and fun game, then it's not about games at all. It's about something else entirely. However, maybe I'm just influenced by the fact that I visit the Doom 3 technology forum more than the general forum. I'll bet that most gamers do care more about games than graphics and video cards.

??? Why are AndrewBs posts unanswerable?

I disagreed with her a few times. I guess she feels obligated to return the favor.

[EsH]

AndrewB said:

Seriously, it's as if resolution and FPS and FSAA and bumpmapping and graphical effects has become more of "the game" than actual games.

This is so true. While a person should natureally strive to get the best hardware he/she can afford towards getting the "full Doom3 experience", people that simply can't get these newer cards (for whatever reason) SHOULDN'T PANIC that they won't be able to play Doom3 at all. Despite what people are saying, you CAN run Doom3 on a GeForce1. It might be at 320x200, with all low-res textures, and no specular highlighting, and at 15fps, but it will be Doom3. You can still load the game up, play though all the levels, and win the thing. It will still look quite cool, the dynamic lighting and shadowing and bumpmapping will still be there. It will still look scary.

[Katarhyne]

EsH said:

This is so true. While a person should natureally strive to get the best hardware he/she can afford towards getting the "full Doom3 experience", people that simply can't get these newer cards (for whatever reason) SHOULDN'T PANIC that they won't be able to play Doom3 at all. Despite what people are saying, you CAN run Doom3 on a GeForce1. It might be at 320x200, with all low-res textures, and no specular highlighting, and at 15fps, but it will be Doom3. You can still load the game up, play though all the levels, and win the thing. It will still look quite cool, the dynamic lighting and shadowing and bumpmapping will still be there. It will still look scary.

I'm curious to hear who said that Doom 3 won't run on a Geforce 1. I never said it wouldn't run, I just said that I wouldn't consider it playable. To me, anything less than what I described earlier is wholly unacceptable and I don't consider that playable. Call me what you like, but I think that if you've got to butcher a game's settings like that (aurikan used to play Q3A with like r_picmip 20, ugh - though that's not why he did it) to play it then it simply isn't worth playing on your system.

Wobbo said:

Wtf? Youre a mod too? Its getting worse by the day! Lets suppose i was totally wrong, you dont BAN people for being wrong, you correct them. Anyhow, by geforce One Carmack was talking about the first geforce that arrived on the scene, very soon after quake 3 came out. Not geforce 3 level.

Yes, I'm a mod, and yes, I'm talking about the original Geforce - the Geforce256. And yes, I ban people for arguing with me. Get over it, because the subject of so-called "mod abuse" has been argued by people far more respected and far smarter than you. Doom 3 is designed around programmable TCL hardware. The Geforce 256 and Geforce 2 do not have this hardware. Therefore, while they will run the game, they are not the optimal platform. Thus, my original statement still stands, and you're still wrong. Congratulations for belaboring a point.

[EsH]

Katarhyne said:

I'm curious to hear who said that Doom 3 won't run on a Geforce 1. I never said it wouldn't run, I just said that I wouldn't consider it playable.

Yes, I'm sorry. When I said "won't run", I meant "won't run playably". You're absolutely right in that Doom3 should be played with the settings intended. Just trying to clear up some potential confusion for those who are stuck with GF1 level hardware. When it's said that "A Geforce 2 MX isn't going to run Doom 3 playably. Period. There IS no argument with this", some of us less technically oritented people will take that literally to mean that "Oh, I have a GeForce2MX, and I won't be able to play Doom3 after all". I guess I'm making things even more confused :(.

There used to be a thread on the fps people were hitting on the stolen alpha. Does anyone remember if someone through a GF1 level card at it?

[Katarhyne]

Thanks for the clarification, EsH. ^.^ I never posted any of it in that thread but my friends and I ran a bunch of hardware through the Alpha to see how different hardware stacks up. Our analysis pretty much came up as this:

Nvidia does well overall. TNT2 fails to load the game, Geforce256 is pretty slow (from <5 to about 12 FPS just wandering around, though we didn't do any tweaking, so that's medium quality, 640x480x32), Geforce256 DDR is a fair bit faster, Geforce 2 MX400 was between the original Geforce256 and the Geforce DDR. We didn't test an MX200 because I won't allow that travesty in my house. Geforce 2 GTS starts to get into real playable FPS at the default settings (though it still eats it hard in combat), and naturally the Pro does marginally better. The Geforce 2 Ultra put up a surprisingly decent framerate, though again, it really eats it in combat. Not sure why that is, someone who cares to go nuts tweaking could probably find out (I suspect it has something to do with the particle system). Anyway, moving to the Geforce 3 core is a massive improvement, and the Ti200 obliterates the earlier cards even with it's relatively low clock rates. The original Geforce 3 is again marginally faster; same for the Ti500. The Geforce 4 MX cards performed abysmally for their price range, similar to the Geforce 2 line - though they were again, marginally faster. The Geforce 4 Ti cards did just fine, in fact - my brother's extremely-overclocked Ti4600 managed...I want to say it was 130 FPS but I can't be certain. It was pretty ridiculous, though. The Ti4600 is a pretty powerful part, really, it just lacks finesse.

ATI did worse and better. On the low-end, the original Radeons ate it, hard. The only card prior to the 8500 which really produced any kind of usable framerate was the 7500, and it was slightly slower than a Geforce 2 GTS. I suspect the Radeons' poor showing is due to the lack of Radeon-specific optimizations in the alpha. It's probably not using that third texture unit, which means that your nice Radeon 7500 is a highly-clocked Geforce 2 MX with HyperZ. The 8500, however, did extremely well, annihilating the Geforce 3s and performing on par with the 64MB Ti4200 (faster than the 128MB part, you know), and in some cases even better than that. The 9000 did considerably worse, and the 9700 Pro...well, do I really need to go there? We didn't have a 9500, 9500Pro, or a plain 9700 to test.

It's nice to note that the game never crashed once on any Nvidia or later ATI cards. It did, however, crash on these cards: PowerVR Kyro II, 3dfx Voodoo5, Matrox G400MAX, ATI Rage Fury MAXX, S3 Savage2000, 3DLabs Wildcat III 6210.

The only other cards it ran on were the SiS Xabre400 and the Matrox Parhelia. The Xabre did awful. It was a pain to watch. Looked okay, though, which tells me that they've ironed out some driver issues. I really think the Xabre could be a competititor if they could get their drivers worked out a bit more. The Parhelia did pretty well - it was somewhere between the Ti200 and the original Geforce. We didn't think to turn on r_UseParhelia, but I have a feeling it probably wouldn't have done anything - the Parhelia rendering path probably isn't implemented yet.

[EsH]

Thankyou, Katarhyne, for all your hardwork in this. If nothing else, this is a nice guage for all of us on where we stand hardware wise, so far. It's interesting to see the original 256 pulling 5-12 fps at medium detail. I'd be interested in learning what higher frame-rates can be reached by cutting back on specular highlighting, for instance (which should cut the fill-rate for lights by 2/3, if I understand correctly).

You said that you believe that the Matrox Parhelia backend probably wasn't implemented yet. So, was this card running the ARB exention path, w/o specular highlighting?

Thanks again-- probably one of the most concise and informative posts I've ever seen.

[Katarhyne]

I have a feeling, EsH, that the Parhelia was using the default DX8-class hardware path, the NV20 path.

If you want to hack up a config file and send it to me, I'd be happy to test a given card with that config.

[AirRaid]

What other hardware were those tests run on kat? Cpu, RAM etc?

[Katarhyne]

We used what we considered to be an "average" gaming system; AthlonXP 1600+, 384MB (3*128) DDR, MSI K7N420 (nForce original) motherboard. The 130FPS number quoted was on a 3.2Ghz P4 with...I believe 1GB of DDR. I believe he has a P4X400-based motherboard. Can't honestly say.

[Fredrik]

30 fps in 320x240 with bumpmaps disabled falls under my definition of playable.

[EVIL]

ey kat.. arent you a supermod?

[EsH]

Katarhyne said:

I have a feeling, EsH, that the Parhelia was using the default DX8-class hardware path, the NV20 path.

Yes, of course, that would make sense. I didn't realize that Matrox was so aggressively supporting NVidia's extentions.

If you want to hack up a config file and send it to me, I'd be happy to test a given card with that config.

Thanks for the offer, Katarhyne, but I don't know the first thing about Doom3 config files.

[Katarhyne]

Yes, I am, HAMMER-STROKE. Why do you ask? ._.;;

[Coraline]

GeForce 2 MX IS compatible. I play the DOOM III test everyday on the videocard. Runs fine, until there's A LOT of action, which rarely happens.
But, everyone, thanks for helping me convince them
No he's saying SquareSoft is much better that I-D Software (even in what they done). I even told them that ID INVENTED the Firt-person genre.
So, help me convince the homosexual (Mick is his name-reffer to him as gay Mick) dude that ID is not a shit-bucket company!!!!!!
THANKS A BUNCH!

[Tyockell]

Lord FlatHead said:

I think the game is supposed to look the same on all cards, at the expense of performance on the less powerful ones.

Not true I was running it on an Ati-radeon 7200 and it was very poor mis colored bits or graphics missing textures in the faces, hell the zombies had barely any graphics at all except the shape of them.

[EsH]

He said it's SUPPOSED to look the same ;). Remember, it's an alpha version!