This is controversial, but the idea of having to have a special video card that could do 3d effects was pretty crazy to some of us back in the day. In ye old days, a fast CPU was all that was really important and all that stuff was handled in software. Then came 3dfx, and PC gaming was never the same.

http://forums.wireplay.co.uk/showthread.php?1 … W.....my-dilema

Yer go SW, things seem far more natural, hitting peeps seems easier an the FPS is so much more important than dandy GFX, trust me.. I'm a gerbil.

The gerbil is right

Gerbils....
What do they know.
Now Hamsters....

That's in the case of Quake/Quake2 which had some rendering functionality lacking what its SW renderer had, like overbright lighting and gamma control. Also Quake2 had its lightmap shifted to half brightness in GL.

(also Quake's SW renderer used pointcloud rendering for distance models making players easier to spot in the distance. This is gone in Quake2)

Kensuke_Aida wrote:

Doom 3 was also notoriously ridiculous with its min system specs when it came out. I forget what they were offhand, but there were a bunch of pissed off people.

- John

Yes indeed, John. I was one. I had Win98SE and 256MB RAM while it required 384MB and WinXP.

Well, let me see (grabs his copy of Doom 3):

* English version of Microsoft(r) Windows(r) 2000/XP
* Pentium(r) 4 1.5 GHz or Athlon(tm) XP 1500+ processor
· 384MB RAM
· 8x Speed CD-ROM drive (1200KB/sec sustained transfer rate) and latest drivers
* 2.2GB of uncompressed free hard disk space (plus 400MB for Windows(r) swap file)
* 100% DirectX(r) 9.0b compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers
* 100% Windows(r) 2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and latest drivers
· 3D hardware Accelerator Card Required - 100% DirectX(r) 9.0b compatible 64MB Hardware Accelerated video card and the latest drivers.
o ATI(r) Radeon 8500
o ATI(r) Radeon 9000
o ATI(r) Radeon 9200
o ATI(r) Radeon 9500
o ATI(r) Radeon 9600
o ATI(r) Radeon 9700
o ATI(r) Radeon 9800
o All Nvidia(r) GeForce 3/Ti series
o All Nvidia(r) GeForce 4MX series
o All Nvidia(r) GeForce 4/Ti series
o All Nvidia(r) GeForce FX series
o Nvidia(r) GeForce 6800 series

This is copied straight from the readme.txt file in the CD, and I can tell you it's really nuts to try and run Doom 3 like this. I had an Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 Ti 200 64MB AGP, SB Live! Value and Windows 2000 SP4; the result wasn't pretty at all - blurry, bad level lighting, slow-motion monster attacks, random missing textures, low frame rate (single digits during intense fighting). Even a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz Northwood, GeForce 6600 256MB AGP, 2GB DDR2-333 RAM and Windows XP SP3 couldn't run it decently - FPS would drop like a stone in large levels and during battles with lots of gunfire. It wasn't until I got my current Core i5 rig that Doom 3 finally ran smoothly and without any problems/issues.

Yes I remember playing the demo and immediately uninstalling because it was unplayable. This was on a 3 Ghz P4 with 1 GB RAM and Geforce3. The bottleneck was probably the GFX card. And like you I only played the game properly recently.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Well, let me see (grabs his copy of Doom 3):
<snip>

Heh, I remember this game. I tried it on my XP2000+ with 512MB of RAM and a Geforce 4 4200. Unplayable unless you turned almost everything down to zero. Me and my brother agreed we needed a new computer to fully play this game and let it be. I didn't play it again until I upgraded to my Q6600 with Geforce 8800GTX in 2007. Then it ran very smooth at full resolution.

All of these reported issues with Doom 3's hardware requirements make me really appreciate how good it looked and how well it ran on my original Xbox back in the day 🤣

The original Quake made anything pre P133 worthless (same with a K5 and 686) and people were still gaming on high end 486 at the time (needed the FPU of an Intel Pentium).

DOOM 3 needed one hell of a GPU (and decent RAM size) to play nicely. Didn't they say it needed a video card with 512MB of RAM for full texture options and that was unheard of at the time of release.

Game developers have always taken the high end CPU + GPU at the time they start development for a base and expect them to be common by the time they get around to releasing the game. Don't think people upgrade like they used to so developers have backed off that strategy in the last few years. Then again they seem to like porting over console games which run like crap on even high end PCs.

DooM 3 was running nicely on an Athlon XP 2400+ with 512 MB RAM (uppgraded to 768 MB in the end if I remenber well) and a Geforce FX 5600 XT 256 MB @640x480 in high details (not ultra) with 2xQ AA. 😊
I was pretty impressed that it run this smooth at that time, Far Cry too with mixed settings between none or low (shadows and water), medium (effects) and high (textures).
Even Half Life 2 was enjoyable with this computer. 😀
Only drawback was the 640x480 or 800x600 max resolution for maximum fps, but with 2xQ AA and a CRT monitor that was limited to 1024x768 it wasn't a big deal anyway... 🤣
Games like FEAR and Painkiller BOOH were really too much for that pc tough (PS or SM 3.0 graphic cards were needed here 🤣 )

Yeah I don't think Doom 3 system requirements were bad

http://www.ntcompatible.com/thread28157-2.html

XP 2800+ 2.2ghz since September 2002 with 1gb of DDR333.

Doom 3 demo1 High Quality
9700 x8Pro X8Pro/16pipes
320X240 =41.9 52.9 52.9
400x300 =41.8 52.9 52.9
512x384 =41.8 52.9 52.9
640x480 =41.8 52.9 52.9
800x600 =39.5 52.9 52.9
1024x768 =32.9 52.2 52.9
1152x864 =28.9 50.0 51.2
1280x1024=23.7 45.1 48.9
1600x1200=14.4 36.8 41.7

In reference to the original poster about processor speed and Doom 3. I just downlocked my XP 2800 (2.2ghz) to 1300mhz. […]
Show full quote

In reference to the original poster about processor speed and Doom 3. I just downlocked my XP 2800 (2.2ghz) to 1300mhz.

1024X768=32fps with x800 (32 fps with 9700 @ 2.2ghz)
1600X1200=32fps with x800 (14fps with 9700 @ 2.2ghz)

Still "playable" even at 1.3ghz with an x800. So I have no doubt that an X800, 6800 paired with a 2ghz P4 would be just fine. The main factor in Doom 3 is video card speed NOT processor speed.

Of course timedemo's do not properly reflect minimum FPS but considering that these scores are equal to my 1024X768 scores with my 9700 and I was playing Doom 3 just fine too.

As you can see the processor wasn't holding Doom 3 back 😉

Doom3...
All these benchmarks make me wanta try it again.
I don't even remember what machine I originally played that game on.
I think I'm missing a CD tho, it had 3 or 4 CD's?? I only seem to have 3.
Bleh I'll just try loading it later.
Edit:
Its 3 cd's
I really don't remember much about this game 🤣
Did you do the tests at Medium Quality or Ultra?
Its defaulting to Medium for me.

I think I played it at 800x600 with a Celeron 2.4, 512MB and a GeForce FX 5600XT. It seemed to play fine, so around 30 fps I would assume. With a lot of frame drops obviously. Needless to say though, its system requirements were higher than Far Cry and Half-Life 2, the other most important FPS games of 2004.

Doom 3 - Amd Xp 3000+ Nf2 1GB DDR 400 DC, Geforce FX 5800 128mb SBLIVE! sound enabled timedemo demo1 1

Default Medium Quality Settings.
640x480 = 54.2fps
800x600 = 52.1fps
1024x768= 43.0fps
1152x864= 37.3
1280x1024= 29.9fps

Ultra Quality
640x480=51.3
800x600=47.9
1024x768=38.7
1152x864=33.2
1280x1024=26.5

FPS doesn't seem great at all.. when it lists a Geforce3\Radeon8500 as MIN req in the readme.

Unless you're expecting 60fps, it seems just fine to me. What did you expect? The FX5800 was already about a year and a half old by this point (and it wasn't really great to begin with). You would have had quite a bit better results with an FX5900 or 5950 not to mention an 6800 and 6800GT which were top of the line cards back then.

You have to keep things in perspective. Nowadays you can still play games with your old 8800GT (if it hasn't died yet that is 😵 ), back then it was unheard of to keep a piece of hardware, much more a graphics card for 6-7 years!

fyy wrote:

Total Annihilation (1997) Minimum CPU Type: Pentium Minimum CPU Speed: 100 MHz Minimum RAM Required: 16 MB Minimum Hard Disk […]
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Total Annihilation (1997)
Minimum CPU Type: Pentium
Minimum CPU Speed: 100 MHz
Minimum RAM Required: 16 MB
Minimum Hard Disk Space: 40 MB
Graphics Type: SVGA
Graphics Resolution: 640x480
Color Depth: 256 Colors

Those listed requirements aren't that bad, but the actual game will play like crap on those requirements. It really needs a 400mhz+ CPU and 64mb+ Ram to have a good time with a decent unit count and map size.

And it's still an epic game to this day.

that seems to be the case with alot of games, the system requirements are as low as possible so that more people will buy the game. Deus Ex for instance needs a minimum of a 300Mhz PII, but I would say the game is only really smooth with 700Mhz or more PIII/Athlon.

Of course, what is considers smooth now is different than it was 15 or 20 years ago . There was a time when 640x480 at 30fps was seen as very good. nowadays 60+ is the standard.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

It wasn't until I got my current Core i5 rig that Doom 3 finally ran smoothly and without any problems/issues.

I remember playing Doom 3 at 1680 x 1050 resolution on a Core 2 Duo with a GeForce 7900GTO and even on such a machine you ran into situations that taxed the frame rate 😀

I wasn't expecting anything outa that doom3 bench 😁
I barely played the game when I got it, I remember nearly nothing about it 🤣.
I just thought I'd bench it on period correct hardware for it?
A good bench basis for the 9700 bench above? these 2 cards competed the systems are similar too.
Seems about as bad as JK's min req claiming its playable on a P90 in software 🤣.

Yeah it's wasn't very good compared to the earlier Doom games.

I do need to go back and replay Doom 3 with all the graphics mods especially since I never bothered with the expansion (because I was so disappointed with the game).

Guess we need to determine what period correct hardware would be. Doom 3 was released in August of 2004.

I'm of that opinion that at least decent hardware from the same year the game was released should be sufficient.

I see minimum requirements as meaning that I can run the game on the hardware I have, not that I would actually play it with that hardware.

I did play Quake 1 on a 486DX4/100 with a VLB cirrus logic card. Not pretty and I never really liked the game especially since Duke Nukem 3D ran and looked better.

I did recognize the technical acheivement that it was but it was my fault for using ancient hardware. Hey I was only 16 and we weren't rich!