Buying a new Doom computer, is this strong enough?

[Doom_user]

I need a notebook that can run all Doom source ports and levels at 1920x1080 with max settings and maintain a minimum 35 frames per second.

I'm considering this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834131444

one. Would it be strong enough, or do I need something more powerful?

[fraggle]

Software or hardware rendering?

[Doom_user]

While I'd ideally be able to run both, hardware rendering is far more important to me.

[u9whg9uwnhgiq]

I have an awful PC, I can not run many games.

But I can run doom on 1366x768 on max settings in skulltag @200 fps

[kristus]

Considering most hardware rendered ports use OpenGL, I'd recommend you getting a computer with a Geforce GPU rather than a Radeon since ATI's OpenGL support is notoriously shoddy.

[Orangestar]

darkpixelblade said:

I have an awful PC, I can not run many games.

But I can run doom on 1366x768 on max settings in skulltag @200 fps

This, pretty much. Doom's not very hardware intensive. More or less, it's usually the WADs that cause slowdown. I remember getting terrible slowdown in Skulltag (Single Player!) playing some slaughtermaps on both Hardware (OpenGL) and Software rendering.

[chungy]

kristus said:

Considering most hardware rendered ports use OpenGL, I'd recommend you getting a computer with a Geforce GPU rather than a Radeon since ATI's OpenGL support is notoriously shoddy.

That'd be like saying non-IE browsers' support for HTML is "notoriously shoddy" just because the others are more rigid on the specs.

(AKA: NVIDIA only has that perception because they are so forgiving on taking any old crappy input and doing *something*. Some devs rely on that too much)

[Torturephile]

I had a low-end laptop from 2008. I ran Doom on it and I got always 60FPS unless too many dynamic lights on GZDoom (hardware rendered) or too many details in a map (Deus Vult II)/staring at the ceiling of insanely tall rooms (Drown in Blood map 1).

[Csonicgo]

chungy said:

That'd be like saying non-IE browsers' support for HTML is "notoriously shoddy" just because the others are more rigid on the specs.

(AKA: NVIDIA only has that perception because they are so forgiving on taking any old crappy input and doing *something*. Some devs rely on that too much)

Compliance or not, Consumers don't give a damn if it's "shoddy". they just [/b]see[b] an NVidia working flawlessly on New Game X, unlike their competitors, who insist on compliance (and get shoddy performance as a result).

That matters because NVidia is a business built on what you "see".

Conspiracy? Nah, it's just business.

[Gez]

chungy said:

That'd be like saying non-IE browsers' support for HTML is "notoriously shoddy" just because the others are more rigid on the specs.

(AKA: NVIDIA only has that perception because they are so forgiving on taking any old crappy input and doing *something*. Some devs rely on that too much)

Nvidia is more careful not to break backward compatibility (when ATI finally added OpenGL 4.0 support to their drivers, it took them a long time to notice that in doing so they had broken support for OpenGL 1.x-to-3.x); and their drivers are much better optimized. If you take an ATI and an Nvidia which get about the same scores on Direct3D benchmarks, but compare their OpenGL benchmark scores, you'll see a startling discrepancy. Taking more time to render a polygon with OpenGL than with Direct3D isn't compliance; it's incompetence (or at the very least, insouciance).

Just for fun, google "ati opengl issues" and "nvidia opengl issues". The former gives me "around 11 100 000 results", while the latter only yields "around 295 000 results". A difference by a factor of 38.

ATI doesn't care about OpenGL because their customer base is mostly gamers, and games are mostly DirectX. Nvidia has not just gamers, but also a solid professional customer base which rely on OpenGL for things such as medical imaging.

[Phml]

ATI drivers are nightmarish to install and configure compared to NVIDIA. Most of you guys would probably disagree or be genuinely surprised this is even a problem, but you aren't the guys who have to ask for help picking up a computer either.

When it comes to that stuff, the second worst piece of advice I ever listened to was "ATI is fine nowadays, save a third of the price for the same performance" (and if you have to ask, the first one was "build your own rig, it's easy and you'll save money").

[Blzut3]

chungy said:

(AKA: NVIDIA only has that perception because they are so forgiving on taking any old crappy input and doing *something*. Some devs rely on that too much)

Even as an AMD graphics user, I'm not so sure about that. It wasn't too long ago that KDE had to blacklist catalyst from the OpenGL 2.0 back end (forcing the OpenGL 1 or software backends) since OpenGL 2.0 support wasn't up to par with mesa. I believe it's fine now though.

That said, it's still way easier to find a high performance single slot (as in the cooler doesn't protrude into the second slot) GPU from AMD than from nVidia. Currently there is a single slot HD7850 available. Not sure how that compares to nVidia's offerings. I know I'm in the minority that cares about this though. :P