Doom 3 Benchmarks/Demo/OS X/Linux

Benchmarks

The official benchmarks have been released by id. id Software’s Official DOOM3 Benchmarks (HardOCP) covers it in detail, showing you that if your card was purchased in the last year, you can probably play the game at high quality. Let’s get the recommendation out of the way:

“There is no way for a $500 [ATI] X800XT-PE to compete with a $400 [NVidia] 6800GT when the GT is simply going to outperform the more expensive card by a good margin. … for those of you that are in the high end video card market, the GeForce 6800GT looks to very much be the sweet spot when it comes to playing DOOM 3 with all the eye candy turned on at high resolutions.”

That’s right, the NVidia part is noticeably better at playing DOOM 3. This is probably due, in part, to “the Nvidia drivers hav[ing] been tuned for Doom’s primary light/surface interaction fragment program”, but also due to 4 more pixel pipelines than ATI’s part (16 as opposed to 12). Take a look at the benchmark and ATI is pretty much 25% behind on all of them. DOOM 3 is purely bandwidth/pipeline limited in the graphic card.

If you’ve got the latest and greatest card, the 6800 Ultra, you can expect almost 70FPS at 1600x1200 in High-quality mode with 8x Anisotropic filtering (makes textures blend more smoothly and look better). With 4x Anti-Aliasing (no more jaggies and more photorealistic look), you can play at the same rate at 1024x768. The lower-priced GT part gets about the same here.

If you’ve got the year-old NVIDIA 5950 Ultra or the ATI 9800XT, you can play at Medium Quality at 1024x768 at 50FPS. You’ll get about 45FPS at High Quality with 8X Anisotropic filtering. That’s actually quite good performance if you’ve already got one of these cards.

Quality modes

Robert Duffy, of id Software, has a .plan update (Shack News) explaining some other stuff about DOOM’s graphics usage and the Ultra Quality level. Loading all of the graphics in uncompressed format (texture, diffuse map, specular map, normal map) will, “[i]n a typical DOOM 3 level, … hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data”. Since pushing this kind of data around can easily lead to “50+ MB … of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second )”, it gets choppy even on high-end systems, so DOOM 3 “require[s] a 512MB Video card before setting [Ultra-Quality mode] automatically.” I don’t even know where you’d find such a card today.

The high quality, medium quality and low quality modes basically “uses compression for specular, diffuse, and normal maps” High quality mode does not use compression for the normal maps, so bump-mapping still yields graphics that are “very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss”. Low quality additionally “downsizes textures over 512x512”, allowing 64MB cards to play the game comfortably. Basically the 4 modes are directly equal to the amount of memory you have on your card:

• Ultra = 512MB
• High = 256MB
• Medium = 128MB
• Low = 64MB

The features supported by your card also play a role in how everything looks, but, basically DOOM’s quality is determined by memory, rather than numerous tweakable engine settings.

OS X and Linux

On DOOM 3 Demo, Linux & Mac Versions (Shack News) sheds some light on id’s cross platform approach. The game is going to ship for the PC, is already slated for the X-Box (and probably done too since the second-to-last demo movie issued was from the X-Box) and “Linux binaries will be available very soon after the PC game hits store shelves.”

OS X games will have to wait a bit, but “it’s definitely coming”. It’s just that “[m]ore remains to be done for the OSX version of DOOM 3 and that will take some time … we won’t release the OSX version until it’s just as polished as the PC version.”

Sensible, but probably disappointing to those that remember the first Quake 3 Test appeared only for the Macintosh because it was such a stable hardward platform. Guess they got all the kinks worked out in X-Box development.

Demo

The same article also mentions that, while a demo is definitely in the works, there is no fixed date for it. “We will release the demo as soon as it’s done, but this probably won’t happen until after the game has arrived on U.S. store shelves.” If you want to read anything into it, you can assume they’re already a good part done with the demo. If you’re a realist, you can assume that everyone at id is on vacation right now, after the gold release.

If, like me, your video card goes into a cold sweat just thinking about playing the DOOM 3 slide show for you, you’ll probably wait for the demo and see if it even has a prayer of running. Then you’ll go to a buddy’s house, see it running at High Quality mode and run out and kill your credit card anyway.