Getting away with Ultra Quality

[Bashe]

Since I got a new video card for Christmas, I've been able to play Doom 3 at a fairly nice framerate on high quality at 1024x768. I haven't played through the entire game since I've gotten the card, but I'm sure it can run most places at a quite acceptable framerate. I was wondering if I could bump up to Ultra Quality...after attempting to use it on my old card (back when it used to run stuff good) there wasn't much problem until a window popped up saying I didn't have enough memory for something, then I went back to high. Now that I have a better card, would I be able to run it without errors?

My specs:
Ahtlon 64 3000+ (1.81GHz SLOW!)
GeForce 6600 GT (with 128MB of memory, latest drivers, AGPx8)
Windows XP (if anyone cares)

[Regen]

Well to begin with its not all that its cracked up to be. not much more (if any) noticable difference between that and just plain "high quality" besides a rather stern warning of it needing "more than 500 megabytes of texture memory" and of course not being "recommended" (why i have no idea) i have the 256 meg version of your card, and incidentally thats the amount of on board video ram that "id" warned about everybody needing for this rather reserved level of "luxury" (it was more kind of a "hype" type of thing of a video setting) give it a shot and see what you think, youll be able to run it just fine, just dont be disappointed (its not the second coming) but hey doom3 looks fantastic at high/ultra high quality settings none the less!


And i have the a64 s754 3000+ @2.2ghz (2ghz stock) and 1gb (2x512) ram.

[DeumReaper]

Regen said:
Well to begin with its not all that its cracked up to be. not much more (if any) noticable difference between that and just plain "high quality" besides a rather stern warning of it needing "more than 500 megabytes of texture memory" and of course not being "recommended" (why i have no idea)

You do need a 512MB video card. Here's why:
Ultra-Quality is basically high-quality with completely uncompressed textures (while high has semi) and a few other little unimportant things as well. This takes up a huge amount of memory surpassing BF2 because the whole environment has to be rendered this way. Whether you notice the difference will be probably be opinion but there is one thing that a lot of people miss:
Yes, you can set DooM3 and Quake4 to Ultra-Quality without 512MB in the options menu. But ingame it detects that you don't have it in the .ini and it just plays on high-quality renderings, no changes at all. However, I don't know whether you can use a dual-card option (SLI,Crossfire,Dualvideo chipsets,etc.) and have 2 256MB to add it up so the game recognizes you have 512MB+.

[Regen]

Yeah i just remembered (after writing all that) that there was a 512 involved and mistaking it with a 256 (wishfull thinking eh?!) but i also remember hearing something about that setting still writing "large chunks of data directly to the hard drive" and being swapped out with the video card (if no 512's present, and to quite a performance hit if anything less than a 256 is detected) hence the warnings and me thinking it was still capable (somewhat) i still notice a slight difference with some textures, just not a big enough of one to make it noteworthy of a setting to have from "high". oh well, it still looks intense enough at those higher level settings, and still to this day not many can experience such settings in doom3.

[Texas Libra]

I'll be the first to say that even if you have a 512MB card there's no guarantee that the game will run smoothly. My friend has a 512MB Radeon on his new system (he got for less than 200 bucks thanks to a shipping error, lucky bastard) and when we tried to run Ultra on Doom 3 it lagged a bit as soon as the screen panned away from the "Incoming transport detected" video. Mind you when we originally scanned the system for optimal performance it went to High instead of Ultra.

Just a little FYI.

[AirRaid]

You do not need a 512MB video card.

What you do need is a 256MB card and oodles of (fast, preferably) RAM so that the game can swap out fast enough. I can run Doom3 very comfortably in Ultra, but seriously there is no visual difference, apart from noticably slower performance in action-heavy scenes. In the timedemo my PC will do ~60fps at ultra and upwards of 75 at high. That's quite a difference when you're actually playing. This is on a P4 3.2Ghz, 6800GT, 1GB pc3200 RAM.

Sure a 512MB card would be ideal, but the game will handle Ultra quality fine with a 256MB card.

[Texas Libra]

Unfortunately not everybody can afford oodles of RAM, because not everybody has oodles of money ;)

[Nautilus]

ATI is by oodles better than Nvidia, IMO. And Ultra-Quality can be run on a 256 MB video card, as AirRaid said.

[Bashe]

Oh well...the only thing keeping me from using Ultra Quality on my last card was an error message about not enough memory for something. I guess if the quality change is not that much I shouldn't even bother.

[Amaster]

The only thing that caught my eye when running ultra quality was that specular highlights seemed slightly sharper. It's no kind of dramatic difference and during normal gameplay you wont even notice.

[Bloodshedder]

Nautilus said:

ATI is by oodles better than Nvidia, IMO.

Historically, nVidia cards have been shown to possess greater performance in Doom 3 and Doom 3 engine-based games compared to their ATI counterparts.

[leileilol]

Nautilus said:

ATI is by oodles better than Nvidia, IMO. And Ultra-Quality can be run on a 256 MB video card, as AirRaid said.

The reason why it works on a 256mb (and a 128mb) is because the driver's texture quality is forcing texture compression, so it's not REAL ultra high quality.

[Tetzlaff]

Id Software could release a high resolution texture pack for Doom3, where all the 256x256 textures would have 512x512 resolution. This would make a lot of difference, and really deserve the tag "ultra quality".

[Nautilus]

Bloodshedder said:

Historically, nVidia cards have been shown to possess greater performance in Doom 3 and Doom 3 engine-based games compared to their ATI counterparts.

True, since ATI cards have had a history of being buggy until recently. But I personally prefer ATI cards to nVidia cards nowadays.

[dr_st]

Nautilus said:

True, since ATI cards have had a history of being buggy until recently. But I personally prefer ATI cards to nVidia cards nowadays.

It's not due to ATI being buggy or anything. Nvidia is traditionally better with OpenGL games, such as DOOM3, which among other things is heavily optimized for Nvidia cards.