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Cyb

Yes, But Will My Computer Run It?

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Now that Doom 3 has gone gold you may be wondering the best hardware to run it on (if you happen to enjoy upgrading and have lots of spare cash around). Well, HardOCP has your answer. The article has a few comments from Carmack as well as the usual NVidia vs ATI benchmarks (where ATI promptly has their asses handed to them). For anyone into the hardware lingo (which I'm not, so don't take me too seriously), the ATI X800XT-PE (ATI's latest and greatest card) is outperformed by NVidia's 6800 GT which is a downclocked version (I believe) of their top of the line card (6800 Ultra)... all in all the savings will be around $100 if you go with the 6800 GT, though ATI's cards perform up to snuff with NVidia's if you turn of AA or play in 1024x768. Anyways, it's all up to you, and don't forget Doom 3 will still run on a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 (though how well remains to be seen), so if you have something better than that you might want to save up your cash.

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Athlon 64 FX-51 2.2 ghz
1 gig of PC3200 ram
Geforce FX 5950 Ultra 256mb

Yeah, I think I can run it.

MUWHAHAAHAHHAHAAHaaa....

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I don't know if this necessarily reflects badly on the existing ATI cards, though.

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The interview with Robert Duffy in the new pcgamer answers a lot of hardware related questions.

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good you posted this, Im hoping to get a new computer soon that can run doom3 so it helps to know this in advance. :D Oh, and ATI owns for graphics, NVidia sucks.

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That really answers a lot of questions.

Still, it would be nice to see some tests on even lower end systems.

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MasterOFDeath said:

good you posted this, Im hoping to get a new computer soon that can run doom3 so it helps to know this in advance. :D Oh, and ATI owns for graphics, NVidia sucks.


You are an idiot. nVidia are clearly leaders and always will be.

I have an ATI Radeon X800 and I am not ashamed to say nVidia are better than ATI. If i said ATI are better than nVidia, I would be lying. Just like you are to yourself.

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It would be nice to benchmarks on lower spec stuff, because i'm not upgrading just to turn AA on. The new Nvidia beats ATI because it has very fast stencil buffers (for shadow effects).

Nvidia benefit from optimising for opengl and Doom3 whereas ATI have concentrated on DX9 and fast shaders (and Valve). This isn't new as ATI have always been slower in opengl which is why they are rewriting the drivers.

How much detail do you see in the dark anyway?

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All this is fine and stuff, but...
WHAT"S THE SYSTEM RAM REQUIREMENTS! Yeesh... I've looked everywhere and I can't find a single thing that tells me how much RAM the system needs to run. Forget the video card... I'm running the old NVidia TNT 32MB PCI card and my board supports a 4x AGP card, so obviously I'm going to upgrade the card eventually, but I need to konw if I should spend the money on throwing a 256MB stick of RAM on there or if I shouldn't even bother. I currently have 256MB but one stick is slower than the other and it's annoying the crap outta me.

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BlackFish said:

pah they probably just optimized it for Nvidia cards so they can have revenge against ATi for leaking their game. :)


nah, i think it because d3 is ogl.

anyways, I wish they showed tests on lower end computers, especially with the geforce 3/4 series of cards. damn it.

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The article is pretty uninformative - it tells us what we get IF we upgrade (to an insane P3 @ 3,6GHz with 4 gigs ram...) but not what we can expect if we DON'T upgrade. I want numbers for all sorts of system configs, damnit! They should have let AnandTech do the testing. But then again, NVidia and ATI probably just supplied the top-of-the-line cards for this in order to ride the Doom 3 wave to get more sales of top-of-the-line cards. If they showed that an older card will do just fine, there would be no point for them to be as involved in this test as they apparantly were (with representatives at id during testing and all).

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IMO nVidia is far better placed to rule the next gen of videocards. In the last gen ATI won out due to pure power but this isn't the case with the next gen cards. With nVidia's new self optimising instruction compiler it frees developers to do what ever they want in either OpenGL or D3D.

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DoomRater said:

All this is fine and stuff, but...
WHAT"S THE SYSTEM RAM REQUIREMENTS! Yeesh... I've looked everywhere


384Mb ram absolute minimum. Athlon 1500+ or intel 1500 minimum processor.

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I love the report. "Do you have one of these kick-ass configurations? If you do, congradulations: It'll run mediocre!!!"

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Ricki said:

You are an idiot. nVidia are clearly leaders and always will be.

I have an ATI Radeon X800 and I am not ashamed to say nVidia are better than ATI. If i said ATI are better than nVidia, I would be lying. Just like you are to yourself.


Actually, I'd say that overall ATI has an edge on nVidia. DOOM 3 is friendlier to nVidia's cards though (as they're geared towards openGL, and not so much direct X), which is why I would choose nVidia at this point.

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I dunno much about the current line of ATI (just that I still haven't forgotten them for their ATI Rage Pro crap)

Onl gripe I have about my Nvidia card so far though is that it have pretty shitty Direct3D support. I had a Matrox G450 before and it was much better for D3d stuff. But then again. How often do you play a D3D game these days? Last game I can remember is Rollcage Stage 2

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Oh, well -- ATI is definitely extremely good these days, in my opinion. I would just choose nVidia though, because of their openGl bias. It simply runs DOOM 3 better. In that case, that's the card to buy. (for me at least)

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While I think my experience will be more than acceptable, though, I'm still shooting for a better card. As soon as I get more money, priority number one is to get one of the new geForce cards. The GT is more affordable, but the Ultra is significantly more powerful.

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I've been reading around and it looks like nVidia's 6xxx series are a better value solution than ATI's XT cards. Shader and directx performance is similar and opengl is better. So you won't loose out on HL2 if you choose nVidia.

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