f13.net

First off, system specs:
P4 @ 2.8 GHz
GeforceFX 5200 Ultra
1 Gig of DDR333
Running on a Viewsonic A90f+ @ 800x600@120hz.
Surround Sound courtesy of Logitech z680s plugged into Audigy Platinum

Pros:
BEAUTIFUL
Scary as fuck
Scary as fuck
Scary as fuck
Guns are loud

Cons:
Story dies after 15 minutes (but that's Doom for ya)
It's nothing more than an engine demo
Runs slow as shit
Then, somehow, runs even slower

Let me elaborate on the cons.

Story: It starts off seeming to have this fantastic story, almost Deus Ex 1 quality - but not quite. They send you on this mission to find a scientist, you get there and all hell breaks loose. Literally. After that it becomes a scarefest extravaganza with lots of shooting, and well, shit jumping out at you.

Engine Demo: Amazingly beautiful, brings absolutely nothing new to the genre. Honestly, it feels like a really really really beefed up DX 2 engine with the load screens removed. By the way, it's amazingly beautiful at 800x600. At 640x480 it moves fast as balls, but the mesh door effect of low res on a natively high res monitor rares it's ugly head.

Runs slow: On my machine, which most would consider beefy, I barely get 30 frames at 800x600 with graphics at Medium.

Yes, I warezed the game, to see if it would run - it doesn't and is already deleted. I will be cancelling my preorder until I get a new graphics card and then will finally pick it up. If you have a machine that can run it, I think it deserves the play through just for the experience. For now, I'll go back and beat Hitman Contracts.

Oh, and one more thing - I think the dynamic lighting is what brought my computer to a screeching halt. I mean we're talking:

1. Walking down well let dispersed lighting hallway / 30fps.
2. HOLY FUCK MONSTERS, WHERE ARE THE LIGHTS / 15fps
3. SWEET ASS WHAT WAS THAT, I GOT SHOT / 1fps while it renders the flash of light
4. Get out of hallway, lights turn back on, but are now directional from a rotoscope thingy / 5fps

They don't turn off at the low setting. I think I'm locked in because I have a directx9 card.

Edit: And again, to add about the storyline - The reason I mentioned it in the first post is with the amount of environmental flair they tossed into the game in the first 15 minutes, there was no reason to trash all that. They had a great rich foundation to build upon only to toss it away for some sound effects from the Gwar Library of Sound.

I take it that you're enjoying yourself at 800x600?  According to HOCP that's the res I'm gonna be looking at as well (medium quality) and it kind of turned me off.  Hopefully a demo will get here soon so that I can decide if I want to buy it or not.

I never judge stuff from HOCP or anywhere elses benchmarks because it's never real world. They generally have a fresh install of Windows XP with the latest firmware and drivers for everything. I, on the other hand, have 500 gigs of completely fucked up misallocated shit clogging up every nook, crannie and wedge of my computer, spread across 3 hard drives.

Just as I suspected...nothing to make me rush out and drop $1200 on a screaming hot new system just to play it.

I will have to get the *ahem* demo *cough* this evening myself as well.  See how it runs then decide to buy or not buy depending on performance on my system.

A game like this really needed a demo before launch.  Same with HL2, but HL2 will surely not have a demo out till months after launch as well.  MEH.

Is the 'demo' up on binary newsgroups?  That is where I usually get my 'demos'.

Dude. Just say your pirating it. I agree, this needed a demo. And I'm one to normally just outright buy games (too many, all the time). Anyway, no, I torrented it - from the usual place.

Edit: There are about 100,000 people downloading the torrent right now (I'm not seeding this blasphemous motherfucker). But anyway, I do believe that due to the graphic requirements that about 50,000 of them (at least) would have preferred a demo to having to download 1.7 gigs of 1 frame per second MADNESS.

I'm not having the same experience.  I have an Athlon 2200+ with a radeon 8500 64mb card with 512 MB system ram.  On install the game defaulted to LOW.  It seemed very smooth at that resolution, I'm not running FRAPS or anything it just felt fine.  Walking aorund looking at all the lights and details I didn't notice any problems.  A note:  640x480 in Doom 3 looks better than most games in 1280x764.

I bumped my settings up to medium (not only changes the resolution but increased the texture sizes and makes other enhancements) the game still seems quite playable but there is a little more tearing if I swing the mouse around wildly.  There is supposed to be an AVI recording feature in the console to record your game play.  Maybe I'll record 30 seconds or so and post it.

It sounds like it runs about as nice as the alpha did on my old system.  man that was a wasted download.  For something like this bit torrent might work out rather well.  I usually find newsgroups are faster for me though.

Either way, I will nab it one way or another.  As far as warez, of course that is what I am talking about.  I was just having fun.  *sniffle*

640x480 on the 19" Viewsonic just gives me too much of the screen door effect. I can, however, run it at the highest setting at that resolution. Either way, I'm gonna wait til I buy a new graphics card for EQII, HL2, and other shit before I pick it up.

No offence, but that vid card you have is a piece of crap. I would consider your machine around avarage for gaming these days but drastically subpar with a fx5200, sorry man, there is no getting around it. That card stinks.

I think I also might have to pick up the "Demo" and see how it runs on my machine.

3.2 Northwood
1gig 3200 ram
FX5700 Ultra

ur penis is huger.

Seriously though, I run this dual monitored and can render shit in 3ds on the fly (and in Maestro). Doom 3 is just a fucking beast. My graphics card is absolutely fine for 99% of the games on the market right now.

I'll pick up a 5700 when it costs $99 in November, kthx. By then agp will be budget compared to pci express, imo.

You know, I experienced the same. According to the system check run by Doom 3 itself, medium settings at 800x600 was my designated sweet spot. I pushed that up to 1024x768 on high and I've probably not dropped below 25 FPS yet. The performance test may be a little too conservative with what constitutes a playable setting on some systems.

For reference, the pertinent components on my machine are: AMD 3000+ CPU, 1 GB RAM, ATI 9800 Pro /w 128MB

In the gameplay department, Doom 3 brings virtually nothing new to the table. However, coming from someone who was expecting nothing more than flashy (and boring) tech demo, I've still found the game to be somewhat enjoyable with its mix of elements from other popular shooters. So far this is the only id game I've managed to play for more than an hour.

Oh, you mean that companies provide other types of demos?  Of course I'm one of the rare breed that actually pirates with intent to purchase.  I just have no desire to purchase something only to find out that it will run in a 320x200 mode or something on my system and then discover that I'm unable to return it because it has been opened.

Ya, that's what I'm waiting for too, no need to buy a new GFX card when my mobo won't support AGP8x anyways.

As for Doom 3, I installed the alpha on a centrino laptop at work (CCity) and it seemed to run fine.  Will give info on how the acutal game runs on my comp at home (P4 2.53, 1GB, ti4600) when it finishes uh, downloading.

Would you say deep, psychological scary like System Shock 2?   I wouldn't ask except I was, alas, too much the wuss to finish SS2 and it'd be a bummer if Doom 3 was equally so.   On the other hand, games like Resident Evil don't particularly bother me.  I think it was the sense of isolation and limited ammunition that got to me in SS2.    Give me a big gun and a lot of ammo and I've enough artificial courage to get me through the (also artificial) fears.

As tempted as I am to get the "unofficial demo", I'm holding out.   I know if I played it, my motivation to blow $55 on the whole game basically goes kaput and, lets face it, if ID made a half-decent good game they deserve my money (actually this would be my brother's money since I'm still an unemployed wretch) at least as much as many other games I've bought in the past.

Not too worried about performance.  After all, I thought Deus Ex 2 was playable.

(Wish I knew where I stashed Serious Sam.  That'd give me a little something to occupy me until tommorow.   I'm tempted to install System Shock 2 again for "Conditioning."  I could make it worth my while with the new models (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/etienne.aubert/sshock/sshock_rebirth.htm).)

You are dirty thieves and make Carmack cry with your dishonesty and deceit.

Not I!     I'm being a good little talking wallet.

Now it'd be a forgivable sin if you could make Romero cry, but he's no longer working for ID last I heard.

AMD Dual Athlon XP 1900, 1.5 GB of RAM, Radeon 9800XT
FPS measurements using FRAPS

Game recommended: 800x600, MQ textures:  60 fps

1024x768, HQ textures:  60fps running around, 40fps in combat.

1024x768, HQ textures, 4x AA: 30 fps running around, teens in combat.

Never played System Shock 2, but the Doom 3 scary for me is the combination of atmosphere (fucking dark), creepy background music, and shit jumping out at you.  You KNOW something is going to jump out at you, and its still upsetting.

This is a less enjoyable kind of scary than a game like 'Undying' though, where not everything that is disturbing is out to rip your face off.

My first complaint about Doom 3 gameplay, aside from the 'its the same as Doom' factor, is that stuff can spawn in behind you, walking in from an area you have already cleared.  What the fuck is up with that?  Backed into a corner with a 90 degree field of view, and something is suddenly hitting me from behind?  Crap.  Cheapass crap bullshit.

If ammo=courage for you, don't get too trigger happy.  I've had to administer a zombie beatdown with the flashlight once already, though I was able to stock up on ammo shortly after.

God I hate bit torrents from the 'usual place'.  Funny how I can get a bit torrent from firerush.com at 200+ k/s consistently, but from the 'usual place' I am lucky to get 10 k/s.  Doom 3 had something like 3000 users and 30+ seeds and the fucker was only coming in at 2k/s.  So, something like 600 hours to complete.

Already 371/7531 on the good old binary group.

What bit torrent client do you use?  I have been using bit tornado, as it is supposed to be one of the faster ones.

I would like the 'usual site' to work fast because I love getting MST3k episodes, but at the transfer rates I get from their torrents it takes DAYS to download one episode.

Using BitTornado (Shadow's experimental client) and currently getting about 70-80 kB/s.  Source is a site who's name involves the death of a star.  Total time for the "unoffical demo" will be about 9 hours.

If you are using the same client, does the light ever turn green?  If not, you need to mess with your ports.  If so, then I am out of suggestions and will slink back into my cave.

Bittorrent never worked that well for me when I tried to use it to download game demos (that actually were game demos).   Seems to be the technology itself just isn't that well conceived.

I never liked BitTorrent 'til I tried it in Shareaza.  All the other clients used to cap my DL speed at my UL speed.  Not so with Shareaza; I ofter get around 200K/sec depending on what torrent I'm on.  Episodes of Dead Like Me and Penn & Teller Bullshit seem to just fly down the pipe, other torrents not so much, but I definitely get better results with that client than any other I've ever tried.

Ok if schild had that many good things to say it about this game is gonna be pretty fuckin cool. I mean, we all know how bad he wanted to come on here and totally bash it...don't we? Anyways, the 5200 is maybe a touch below par for todays standards, so I'm sure my overclocked P4,9800 pro 256, and 1 GB dual channel 3200 RAM will run this like a champ.

I hope you guys are using Peer Guardian when you use your BT client.  I left it running while at work today and blocked several connection attempts from Activision.

Anyway, I played the, ahem.. 'demo'... and decided, even though I can really only play in 800x600, that the game is definately worth a purchase.  I'm really amazed at just how stunning the faces looked even at these low details and can't begin to imagine just how great they must look in HQ 1600x1200.

Well, I've played an hour or so of it....

While it is a tad freaky at times, this game really doesn't hold a candle to Max Payne 2.  I'm incredibly underwhelmed.

Maybe it gets better later on.

Hate Peer Guardian with a passion.  The best one I've seen is ProtoWall along with the blocklist manager.  It uses much less system resources because it works on the driver level, and the blocklist manager pulls from a much larger pool of known IP ranges.

Thanks, I'll check that one out.

After about 45 minutes in game here are my impressions.

Graphics:  Between Good and Meh
-  Playing on Medium settings with resolution manually bumped up to 800x600.  FPS is acceptable.
-   Some things look nice, especially cut scenes and faces.
-  Some things look bad, mostly due to jaggies and graininess.
-  Overall it’s hard to tell because things are incredibly fucking dark.
-  I generally prefer style to sheer polygons; I think this influences my lackluster reaction.

Gameplay:  Average
-  You can push boxes around.  Yay.
-  Shooting at dark blobs in black shadows is not fun.
-  Things die in entertaining ways (at least from the shotgun).

Scariness:  No
-  Critters jumping out at predictable times yelling "Rawr" is not scary.
-  All the darkness is not scary either, it is annoying.
-  The Cradle level from Thief: Deadly Shadows is infinitely spookier.

Story:  It is Doom.  What did you expect?

Extras:
-  The PDA stuff is neat for about a minute, and then I realized it’s just a fancy take on the quest journal.  Kudos for the extra effort I suppose.
-  As I mentioned, the cut scenes and intro are well done.

Summary:  I played the game for less than an hour; I am now sleepy and going to bed early.

Yup, that is what I called the normal place.  Could be a port issue, but as I said earlier I gave up on that and got it off the newsgroups in about an hour for 1.7 gigs.


Played it for a few hours, intentionally going REALLLLLLL slow because I know the beginning of these games is usually the best and often the only thing worth playing.  I personally thought the faces, or rather the heads look awful.  Everyone looks undead before they even become zombies.  If they gave me the gun earlier I would have blown everyone to bits.

The gameplay is very meh.  The only thing new here is the fact that you can hold the flashlight or hold a gun, not both.  So you can see or shoot, your choice.  Needless to say this gets fucking annoying fast as you are often just shooting blind hoping to hit something.  At least the imp makes his own light when charging up the fireballs.  It is the zombie soldiers that can be a pain, using cover while in a pitch black room.  They seem to see me just freaking fine.  Also, why do zombie soldiers move like jackie chan while the other zombies move like I do on a bad arthritis day?

Overall I would say I like the game, because this is pretty much what I expected.  It is a tech demo.  It has more story than any past doom or quake game in the little datapad things, and that is pretty nifty, but nothing like unraveling the mysteries in System shock 1 or 2, where you actually LEARNED things about the plot that sometimes scared the crap out of you.  I know I sometimes found reading the SS1 and 2 datapads some of the scariest stuff in the game.

I am very dissapointed in the lack of a useful physics system.  Sure it is there, but it is pretty pointless.  Very few objects are designated as movable, and most of the neat looking stuff is just scripted sequences ala halflife1.  Halflife 2 looks to actually use the physics in the game.  Max Payne 2 and Far Cry also had much more apparent physics with more movable objects.  They physics doom3 does have are questionable at best as well.  Soda can on desktop.  Pistol firing at can.  I shoot it in the middle, it hops about an inch up in the air and moves back a little.  I shoot it at the top, same effect.  Shoot it in the middle again and this time it goes flying across the room like it has been fired out of a cannon.  Bad physics.

The scares have pretty much dissapated.  The first scare where everything first goes wrong was incredibly well done IMO.  Very very very cool and really surprised me.  I knew hell was going to break out, but not quite the way I expected.  Better than the halflife 1 ohshit scare at the beginning IMO.  Since then there is just the jump out 'boo' sort of scares.  And the scare that you will probably have to reload because you wasted a ton of ammo in that stupid pitch black room.  To relieve that scare I quicksave almost every fight.  I HATE running out of ammo in a game.  I already know the ammo cheat incase I need it.

I will give it another day before deleting or deciding to buy.  I suspect it will be the former because the game seems to be getting worse not better the more I play.

Oh, one thing I want to praise them on is a GREAT use of the computers and keypads.  Great to just walk up and click around the screens with the 'mouse'.  Best implimentation of this sort of thing I have seen yet in a game.  Learning that in the security room you can open up those lockers (like a prior pda told you) to get the first machine guns is neat.  I love the little animated interfaces.  I hope to see this feature become the norm in fps games.  But I find it pretty sad when fiddling with the ingame computers is more fun than actually playing the game and shooting the monsters.

Hell, I think I would prefer an adventure game with this engine.  Could be VERY interactive and pretty damn fun.

In other FPS news, CryTek released the SDK for modding their game yesterday.  The map editor was pre-existing, but the SDK apparently allows for changing the rules more, or something.  They use Lua for scripting support, and most of the 'game' code is written in it, so you don't need Visual Studio or anything, like Quake did as of Q2/Q3, and I believe Halflife did as well.

Frankly, I love the ability to see approximately forever in Far Cry.  And with a sniper rifle, you can shoot pretty dang far, too.

Back to the actual topic...
I'm curious how CPU-dependant it is.  I have a 1.4 Ghz Athlon(non-XP) 512 megs of DDR SDRAM and a 9600 Pro with 128 megs of DDR ram on it.

So my video card is well above minimum, and my CPU is under minimum.  Far Cry is beautiful at medium settings, 1024x768... and smooth as glass.
Only Doom 3 stuff I've read are for the minimum machine, and godlike hardware.

--
Alkiera

Friends who work at best buy rock. Got a legit copy.

My Rig:
3Ghz P4 / Intel D875PBZ Mobo
1GB PC3200 DDRAM
Radeon 9800XT 256MB
Audigy 2

I pull 35FPS or so at worse, 40-50 most of the time, and 60 if nothing's around.

Finally got to play for a while.

Doom 3, play in one act::

Marine: My god, it's full of stars!
Monsters: *pop out of strange hidden compartments* BOO LOLE
Marine: Eh. *BLAM*

*Repeat endlessly*

~Fin~

Not sure how it plays in the other difficulty modes, but I decided to start my run through on the easiest mode (rookie i think it is).  Never fear of running out of ammo.  I just primarily switch between the shotgun and the machine gun, with occasional swaps to the pistol (for the regular run of the mill zombies).  

Shotgun will kill pretty much all the critters i have encountered so far with one shot.  Just run up into its face, shoot it once, watch it die (again).

Hand grenades are fun for those bastard zombie marines who like to hide half way across a room and shoot at you from cover.

Must say, it is, as Schild said, SCARY AS FUCK, but only for the first two or three acts.  Then it just degenerates into things popping out of hidden pannels.  I mean fuck, it is VERY predictable when things will pop out of pannels too (usually happens when there is a conveniently placed super medkit or full armor powerup in a room).

I think the one thing that does signifigantly contribute to the scarry as fuck  feeling is the music.  Very well done for driving up the tension in the right places.

As to how well it runs for me:
P4 1.5, 512 meg ram, All-In-Wonder 9800Pro 128 (Motherboard unfortunately only supports 4x AGP) and i can run it passably well in 640x480 on Low with Shadows turned off.  It still gets some slowdown (especially in firefights with a lot of muzzle flashes and imps lobbing fireballs at me) but other then that, quite acceptabl.  And it still looks really good.  
May tray cranking it up to Medium with shadows off and see if it still plays as well.

A friend of mine downloaded a copy of Doom 3, and I brought home the CDs to see how it would run on my computer.  I'm running an Athlon XP 1600+,  512MB PC2100 RAM, GF4 Ti/4600.  The game automatically placed the settings at 640x480 in medium detail, the game ran just fine.  I then bumped it up to 1024x768 @ medium detail, and the game still runs well.  I'm not getting 30 FPS but it's not choppy and is 100% playable.  I'm impressed with the engine, it seems to really be optimized well.

On the gameplay side though, I'm not that impressed.  This game doesn't bring anything new to the table.  The graphics are top notch, but it's still just a run and gun FPS.  I can't believe people are saying this game is scary.  It isn't.  None of the stuff popping out of walls, teleporting in behind you, etc has scared me or made me jump.  Maybe I'm jaded.  System Shock and System Shock 2 are still by far the most frightening games I have played.

As I'm not one to pirate software anymore, I deleted the game and threw out the burned CDs.  I think I will pick up an original copy once it comes down in price, hits the bargain bin, or a used copy shows up somewhere.  Carmack did a great job on this engine as usual.  Now it's just time to wait for other developers to play with it and make some truely AAA titles.

-Liquidator

Yep, my copy is deleted as well. However I just finished Splinter Cell 2 and am about to finish Hitman 3. Both of which were worth their cost in gold as compared to Doom 3.

There's some creepy moments in Doom 3.   Mostly "boo!" styled stuff.  However, I find System Shock 2 a bit scarier.   For one thing, the bodies in System Shock 2 don't artifically gib to bits if you shoot them one more time than is absolutely necccessarry.   Ludicrous gibbage takes the edge off a bit.   Also, the feeling of isolation and mental terror is somewhat more pronounced in SS2, methinks.

The engine is quite well done.  There's already a few mods out for it that add things such as flashlights on the pistol and removing the gibbage.   Doom 3 looks to be extreme mod-friendly, which (considering it's fabulous engine should be second only to Half-Life 2's) should be it's main saving grace when it comes to determining value.

I just my copy today.  It's not as scary as I expected yet.  It's fun, though; the graphics are gorgeous even at low rez.  Too bad I get crappy framerates on my Radeon 9800 Pro... every time some big new graphic appears it gets choppy for a few seconds.

Bruce

Read this tweak off of planetDOOM:
http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/topic.asp?fid=5733&tid=1438663



Apparently you can change it all the way up to 512 w/ dimishing returns.

Greatly enhances your FPS.[/url][/quote]

That tweak actually does not affect FPS, but should help things like Sir Bruce is talking about.  It preloads more stuff the higher it is.  FPS tests are usually run with everything preloaded already so and timed demo fps tests are unaffected.

I think I will actually pick up the game for the mods.  I changed my mind once the game started finally getting more creepy.  With some of the blood red ingame cinematics, the floating and flying corpses, the undead baby cyborg things...

The gibbage is truly stupid, but done for performance reasons I suspect so the body poofs quickly.  The scubbing bubbles self cleaning blood is annoying as well.  Any blood not in the scene natively dissapears in just a few seconds.  With all the blood sprayed around the base I really don't think the zombies would have any blood left in them anyway.

One other thing I noticed is that I think the lighting in Splinter Cell 1 and 2 is arguably better than Doom3.  Diffuse lighting seemed to affect splinter cell.  If you were in a dark room and opened a door to a brighter room, the dark room got brighter.  At least in areas in direct 'line of sight' of the other room.  I have not seen this happen in doom yet.  I have been in almost pitch black rooms and opened doors into bright rooms, and turning around, the dark room was still just as pitch black.  Moving into the dark room and letting the door close made no change in lighting.  And some of these 'bright' rooms were actually really damn bright.  One room had some moving machinery so at one point during the animation it became super bright as a machine took a bright glowy thing out of another machine.  But still that dark room had an imaginary line at the door that no light would pass except the flashlight.

This was at high detail with all stuff turned on, and ultra does nothing to the lighting engine.

Actually the first time you run timedemo in DOOM 3 to benchmark a demo file things will stutter as it loads stuff from disc. Subsequent runs on the same demo file will be much smoother.



The DOOM 3 engine doesn't do real time radiosity (aka global illumination) which is the effect you are describing above. You can presumably fake it with various scripting hacks (e.g. if light in room a is on then ambient light in room b is increased by x) but like yourself I have not seen that happen yet (only just got the game).

The Half-Life 2 Source engine apparently can do real-time radiosity. It'll be interesting to see how well that works.

Another slightly annoying thing about the lightning is that not all the lights you see are truly dynamic -- e.g. there are colored flickering lights in the game but you don't see the flickering reflected on objects around the light. Since true dynamic lightning and stencil shadowing are the biggies in the new engine I would have expected them to enable that for those sorts of things.

[/quote]

I've got 1GB of RAM.  I have:

seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "512"
seta image_cacheMinK "524288"

but it doesn't help.  Whenever a demon first appears, either by teleport or part of some trigger sequence bursting out, or a door opening, or whatever, freeze, jerk, and then I start getting some reasonable framerates again.

Bruce

Don't know what to say, not a problem I have.  Running at 800x600 high detail.

System:
AMD2500
AsusA7N8X MB
1 gig DDR400 ram running at 333 now due to the cpu.
5900XT (128 mb Vram, same speed as the ultra) card overclocked slightly past 5900 ultra numbers.

I don't get any loading glitches or pauses.  It seems to get choppy when monsters are in my face hitting me, but with the weird hit effects it is hard to tell really.

After a bit of mucking around with different settings, I have come to the conclusion that the auto-detect is very conservative.  My system is as follows:

AMD 2100+ (overclocked to this speed)
1 gig PC2700 ram
ATI 9700 (non-pro)

The auto detect put me at Medium settings with 480x600 resolution.  I have never actually run the game at these settings because I immediately bumped the resolution to 600x800.  Results (based on FPS reported by Fraps):
-  Grainy graphics with jaggies.
-  60-80 FPS standing still
-  50-60 FPS during action

Leaving the main settings at Medium I then bumped things up to my standard resolution of 1280x1024 (also had 2x  AA on for a bit).  This setting (minus AA) is what I used to play the game:
-  Great graphics no noticeable tearing or jaggies.
-  60 FPS standing still
-  40 to 50 FPS during most action
-  30 FPS during intense action

Then I experimented a bit just to see how things worked out at higher settings.  Using High settings and 1280x1024 I had the following results:
-  Very pretty graphics
-  40 FPS standing still
-  20 to 30 FPS during action
-  15 FPS drops were noticed during heavy action.
Messing around with AA did not seem to affect things much at these settings.  I wonder if Doom simply ignores some settings when thing start getting really slow.

And just to try and make my PC implode I tried out Ultra and bumped things to 1600x1200:
-  Still very pretty, but not greatly improved from the previous settings.
-  15 FPS standing still or moving slowly
-  5 to 7 FPS during light action
-  Slideshow during any real fighting
AA settings did not make much difference.  Of course a 50% reduction when chugging along under 10 FPS will not be that noticeable (slow slideshow versus slideshow).

To summarize, I was somewhat surprised to see Doom3 playable at the higher settings.  For comparison recall that Halo settles for 30 FPS by default.  On my mediocre system I was able to maintain a similar FPS (next to last data set above) while running at a respectable resolution.  

While the Doom3 itself is kind of average to actually play, there is much enjoyment to be had trying to make one’s PC stroke out.

The 4.9 Beta Drivers (http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4547.html) have helped my performance issues somewhat.

Bruce

Couldn't determine much difference between having the cacheMegs set higher or otherwise.  Apparently with UseCache 1 it actually crashes when loading.

Good eye with the actual Catalyst drivers specifically built for optimizing Doom 3.

It's nothing I've actually benchmarked but CoH seems snappier too.

Hrm.  I have Cat. 4.7 (with opengl dll from 4.2, per recommendation from some website or another.)..

If this is the beta for 4.9... what happened to 4.8?  Does ATI skip numbers alot?

--
Alkiera

Ok, now I have Doom 3. Where I can buy some courage to play it?

IGE (http://www.ige.com)

Here you go. (http://www.fileplanet.com/filelist.aspx?st=1&sf=2&s=99111&v=0)

The game has not been out a week and there's already 20 mods for it.  If you're looking for courage, the UAC Sentry Bot or Flashlight Pistol should have you covered.

No they don't, at least not since they've switched to their monthly driver update program. 4.7 is the latest released version. 4.8 is in beta right now and is this month's upcoming release (the number after the "." is the month of release). Major changes are improvements to Far Cry performance. 4.9 is the September release with OpenGL performance improvements but they released a "beta" early for DOOM 3 players.

Still haven't finished the game yet, but I'm close.  However, I do have some observations/complaints about game mechanics:

1. Armor seems out of whack.  Instead of subtracting from armor and then health, it seems to subtract some portion of each every time you take damage.  But your health is always hurt far worse.  Frequently you'll find yourself at 90/125 armor but 10/100 health.  Moreover, armor is plentiful; you find it all over the place but it almost is an afterthought since keeping your health is so much more problematic in the game.

2. None of the weapons have very high ammo capacity before you have to reload.  I suppose this does make it a more tactical experience, constantly having to reload, but it becomes majorly annoying after a while.

3. Weapon damage also seems out of whack.  There's very little difference between the machine gun and the gatling gun.  The plasma rifle is only barely better, but even minor demons can soak up a few plasma bursts.  Because ammo is so scarce until the later levels, you pretty much have to constantly switch weapons, so you don't waste your big guns on zombies and the like.  And it really becomes a guessing game as to what weapon you'll need next because you don't know if the next badguy is gonna appear right in front of you or 50 feet away.

4. Grenades are very powerful, but almost impossible to use.  The throwing arc on them is something less-than-ballistic, and if you misjudge it, they bounce around all over the place.  Ideally such a weapon would be used to clean out groups of badguys around a corner or behind a barrier of some sort, but in practice the game rarely puts you in such a position where the enemies are close enough to throw the grenade yet aren't going to charge at you so it blows up in your face.  And they do no good for clearing out rooms or corridors before you enter them, because the enemies are almost always hidden behind stuff.

5. The constantly flipping back and forth with the flashlight got old real fast.  Sure, you can use the shortcut to flip back to your last weapon, but half the time that's not the one you need.  Oh, and it forgets what the weapon was after you used your PDA.  If they wanted to keep the cool feel of the flashlight, they should have just attached lights to the barrel of each weapon and save the player the headache.

Anyway, despite these annoyances, I think the game is a blast, although I think it falls short in the scariness department.  It does do a good job, though, of teaching you how to IFF quickly (telling a demon from a flying piece of debris that won't hurt you) and control your fire (shooting at anything that moves will just waste your ammo and chances are you won't do a lot of damage).  And the graphics are absolutely gorgeous.

I wonder if someone will make a Doom 3 movie?

Bruce

These friendly people can help you out with that (http://www.thebeerstore.ca/)

If I ever can get my hands on a 6800GT...but I have willpower...I...can...wait...

Anyway, everyone's observations are interesting. Especially the hardware ones...must...nevermind.

The armor thing sounds a bit odd, but whatever. One copes.

Limited ammunition seems a trend. From DOOM (lots) to Quake (not so much) to Half Life (revolvers? How 1970!). Once again, one copes. At least the damned things don't wear out after 15 shots.

Weapon damage in DOOM always was goofy. A doublegun that hit like a rocket launcher. A sniper shotgun. The plasma gun whose output was dependent on your CPU power (neat in a way, though). The notorious BFG with the mystery secondary energy effects. Plasma bolts always were only 2x as compared to bullets, though. It was all about the rate of fire...

The whole ambush thing is just classic DOOM (and Quake). The later DOOM games (Final DOOM in particular) relied on the "20-revenants-to- your-face" trap way too much. You saved a lot and learned what to expect where. The zen DOOM experience, I guess. I still enjoy jDOOM coop games, especially the absolutely brutal Plutonia Experiment. Much easier with two, as opposed to going it alone (coop mode in the PC version?).

I always was and will continue to be a big DOOM fan. The atmosphere, the history of the game, the tempo of destruction, the cheesiness...it's all good. Looking forward to this version as much as any. Now if I could just find that 6800GT...

A .44 Magnum is not a laughing matter, my friend.  It may not look as sleek and sexy as some tinny little 9MM, but it'll kill an engine block in one shot, baby.

Besides which, you go out to the range and you'll see a hell of a lot of people firing .44s, .38s, whatever.  There's a reason the revolver's been around as long as it has; it's a great design.

What?! Oh crap!  

We forgot to obsess over if Doom 3 carries on "The Doom tradition" i.e. Thief 3 vrs Thief I, II.

True, I've noticed.

But this isn't really a Doom game. Doom was about the levels, it was about tons of enemies in both labyrinths and open spaces. The levels had no realistic purpose aside the gameplay.

This Doom instead is a mix of various games. There's System Shock, there's Half-Life, there's Silent Hill etc.. Doom just inspires this game.

I consider it quite awesome as a game, despite it's not my genre. But it cannot even be considered a shooter. Not a good shooter, at least. This is a survival-horror, extremely well done, with contaminations from other genres. It's a special game with a lot of appeal.

There are little parts quite "meh". For example the disintegration effect on the bodies. I have a torch in my hand, I hit a guy and it disintegrates.. ? That's really lame for a game with so much detail to feel believable and immersive. Same for the interaction. Only two three objects responding to the physic or to a weapon. They didn't even added different sounds for the various materials. I definitely think that the interaction is the worst aspect of this game.

I think interaction is still a weak spot in many games. MMRPG environments being so static are just another example of this.

It's still DOOM. The backstory aspect, at least. It seems gameplay is very different now. I think the decision for a hyper-detailed environment would pretty much nix the demon-wave attacks of the first games (although, Serious Sam brings that back in spades with a pretty good graphics engine).

The revolver in Half-Life was a Colt Python, so that makes it a .357. Regardless, .44, .357, or .454, none will leave more than a shiny spot on an engine block. The point was it was a very ammunition restricted weapon, as opposed to your plasma rifle and 600 cells of demon-roasting goodness on tap whenever you tripped the revenent trap (well, the second time you tripped it, since the first time would usually have you reloading the game).

I guess I'll have to get the game. Expect a report on how badly it runs on a 3000XP with an aging (but faithful!) Ti4400 card.

I agree with you here.  Also, not all corpses are real corpses... body parts, and some almost whole bodies, don't gib at all, because they aren't treated like a corpse.  Also, the gib effect is always the same, which is lame.  You're right about many of the surfaces as well; nothing like hitting a pile of goo and hearing the metal "twang" of the wall it's textured over.

Many of the small items you can move around, but you can't destroy them.  However, like the big crates and chairs, they seem to have no weight or momentum, so you just bump they and they go float-flopping around.  You can crunch coke cans, and blow up barrels, and some windows do shatter, but that's about it.  I also get annoyed when some safety glass is breakable, but most of it isn't... except, of course, for monsters in scripted sequences, who can break through safety glass my rocket launcher can only leave a smudge on.

The bosses should have been tweaked to take more punishment and dish out less.  Too often survivng a boss encounter takes more luck than anything else.  I had to look up on the web how to defeat the Guardian; the in-game hint tells you the general idea which I was following, but there wasn't enough feedback in the game to let me know I was actually doing damage to it rather than wasting my shots doing the wrong thing.

Bruce

Thank God, someone added duct tape!

http://ducttape.glenmurphy.com/

Bruce

Sounds like either lazy development, they didn't feel like implementing all the little extras that people like, or they are a victim of developing for the X-Box, if your using all your processor power and memory on graphics and the basic textures theres very little room for things like bullet holes and swapping models and sound effects around when you shoot things.  Probably a mixture of both aspects really.

Finished it.  Cyberdemon was a letdown; the Guardian was far tougher.

Delta Labs were the best maps of the bunch.  Really amazing stuff.

Bruce

I bet beating it doesn't feel as good as getting the ranking "Ninja Extraordinaire" on a Hitman: Contracts mission.

Slightly off topic, but I found this pretty amusing:

"What if Doom 3 were open sourced?"

http://entertainment.newsforge.com/entertainment/04/08/02/1228248.shtml?tid=22&tid=132

Open... bwa.. ha... open... source... Doom

...

BWAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Yes, we'll just go ahead and open source our CASH FUCKING COW GAME ENGINE THAT WE WANT TO LICENSE OUT FOR MILLIONS A POP.

Goddamn, some people on the Internet reinvent stupid on a daily basis.

Edit: Oh shit, it gets better.



WHAT FUCKING PLANET ARE YOU LIVING ON?

IMO, Hell was the best level in the whole game and should have been longer. They needed to cut out some of the lab maps and add more hell maps.

I still haven't beat it, but man it does get pretty intense later on, though a bit too easy. I really enjoy when they try to throw  3-4 or more monsters at you, than it begins to feel like doom.

Yeah, more jumping puzzles.  No thank you.  Hell was like a mini Xen.   Pretty awful IMO.  Why was there nothing scary or new in hell?  The game itself up to that point had far more creepy things than were in hell.  There was nothing scary or creepy about hell.  It was pretty, but unimaginative.  Painkiller had a better hell (awful game, good graphics).

I wasn't very keen on the concept to begin with. Think this 'review' sealed it for me...

http://www.machall.com/index.php?strip_id=290

(link originally found on PA)

Normal human beings have some degree of night vision. Games (and films for that matter) that don't respect that fact always piss me off.

Think I'll pass.

I finished Doom 3 today.  It wasn't too bad.   The last boss wasn't nearly as tough as the Guardian.

The gameplay is tolerable, in my opinion.   It's a standard First Person Shooter, sure, but it's not really sucky FPS.   I've played sucky FPS: Doom 3 isn't one of them.   The environments are the main star of the show - I especially liked the interactive things such as the cranes and rail vehicles.

Towards the end, I was really good at swapping between my flashlight and weaponry (it helps to know that hitting the f key again swaps you back to your last used weapon), and I could actually guess where the enemies were if I was in the dark.   Once you've got this down, it doesn't bother you much that the game is mostly dark - it actually does make the enviornment a bit more interesting.

I finally broke down and bought it.

I've been enjoying it. It is different. It's not traditional DOOM. No "bring on the underworld" stands. It reminds me most of Alien Trilogy on the PSX and Metroid Prime. Small numbers of relatively difficult enemies and dripping with atmosphere. I still haven't adjusted to actually taking imps seriously. Of course, I started on ultraviol...err, veteren difficulty.

My hardware is a bit off, but performing surprisingly well. Onboard sound on the nForce2 is about to get the boot. Not adequate in this game. The 3000XP/Ti4400 combo is adequate. Good framerates at 1024x768 with 2xAA on medium. Probably could stretch it a bit more, but it runs pretty smoothly and looks good enough for now. The FX6800 should be here next week, so it'll be a moot point then.

I like it. The environments definately have more than a few stand and stare moments. Pretty amazing. I'm curious what Raven will do with this engine in Quake 4.

Until you use your PDA.  Then the f key "forgets" what your last weapon was.  Very fucking annoying.

Bruce

Yes, this is true.  Course, once you're aware of it you can just semi-quickly swap to a weapon and get your flashlight out again.

Bought this game.  Installed it.  Played it.  Crashed to the Desktop.  Updated drivers.  Played it again.


My God, talk about a step backwards.  What a fucking sucky game.

Way to ignore years and years of 'non-graphical' game development.

Fuck.

Finished it Saturday night. It should be up on Ebay later today.

The Inquirer has a story (http://www.theinquirer.net/) on a person with too much free time on their hands. Doom 3 on a Voodoo2 SLI setup.

Check the gory screenshots here (http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1462).

That's just silly.

However, that game looks much more playable than the screenshots I've seen of standard Doom 3.  No Dooming Darkness, mainly.

Alkiera