Best gaming rig for all-round Classic Doom play

[phobosdeimos1]

As I finally crawled out of unemployement once again, the dream of a new PC isn't so unreachable.

If you were to buy a fairly decent, value for money gaming PC rigged up to play all Doom Source ports to the best of their ability with whatever Mega Mods may be released in the future, (so essentially a PC dedicated to Classic Doom)

what would you recommend?

Of course I don't expect a specific mass-produced model of Computer to come to mind, but if you were to lay down the ground requirements of being able to pimp out your Doom with intense Hardware-accelerated ports (and of course still being able to run the major Doom modding programs (DB2, SLADE 3) to a very comfortable level, what would they be?

Hopefully by now mastering the smooth running of Doom should be possible.

[Nomad]

You could probably play Risen3d or whatever the fanciest port is these days pretty fine on a Pentium 4 with 512mb RAM video card. I suspect you could build such a rig for under $200 these days.

[40oz]

A while ago I found a bunch of office desktop pcs for under $50 each that I was actually planning on checking out today. I was thinking about wiping the hard drive and using it strictly for odamex. The specs aren't really fabulous but $50 isn't that much of a loss for a Doom Machine. I'll let you know how it plays out.

[Phml]

My 2007 rig, which can run many modern games OK, chokes on some resource intensive mods or source port options. Few and far between, thankfully, but regardless how high you go it's likely you could still get slowdowns on some mods if you crank various graphic settings high enough (i.e. Sunder Map09 in GZDoom with dynamic lights). I'd go for a mid-line gaming PC, in the $500 to $1000 range, and call it a day (but, ultimately, *I* wouldn't upgrade for just Doom).

[Super Jamie]

Ironically, Doom Builder 2 has higher system requirements than any classic engine (Vanilla, PrBoom+) ever will.

[_bruce_]

You can get such a machine for free - many folks who update like crazy and are happy to give away their "outdated" stuff.

[Pirx]

i still had an older machine of mine here a year ago, mainly as an internet box, but most doom wads ran just fine on it in 640x400 i think, except for some large gzdoom maps like UTNT, demon eclipse or cheogsh, which i found unplayable. this affected only maps with custom textures that probably didn't fit into the 64 mb geforce ti 500 graphics card that ran with a pentium 3 @ 800 mhz and 512 mb ram. i used it sometimes for deathmatching with some guy, maps with stock textures ran perfectly on it. i gave that box away, and the current gaming pc is without doubt able to handle anything doom-related at 1920x1200.


edit:

anyway, there's the monitor issue: doom looks cartoony for me on modern display. i have a 26" TN monitor, the CRT is long gone, but i remember that doom looked more vivid on it, with better contrast. or maybe that's just being spoiled by modern graphics. someone who has a CRT should make a comparison... i find that palplus.wad brings back a lot of doom's feel on the CRT. or perhaps upgrading to an IPS monitor will help.

[Gez]

Super Jamie said:

Ironically, Doom Builder 2 has higher system requirements than any classic engine (Vanilla, PrBoom+) ever will.

For vanilla, well duh. Windows versions 5.0 and above have higher system requirements than vanilla, and anything that requires Windows to work will therefore have higher system requirements even if all they do themselves is print one character to the system console and exit.

(Incidentally, why do people capitalize vanilla Doom as Vanilla Doom? It's not a proper noun, it's an adjective.)

While pretty much any available port will render vanilla Doom (using vanilla here to refer to "original, unchanged game data" rather than "original, unchanged game engine") just fine on any computer from this century rather than the previous (despite being run on 32- or 64-bit multitasking GUI-fied OSes rather than good old DOS); some of the custom mods and add-ons may push the limits a lot. If you're using an OpenGL port, you'll have to hope that your OpenGL drivers are decently optimized (not a given because lol, everybody uses Direct3D amirite?). If you're playing maps like Sunder, the software renderer will beg for mercy. If you're using hi-res texture packs that give you STARTAN3 in 2048x1024 and the likes, your RAM or VRAM will go on strike. And so on. But the IWADs themselves? They should be fine on just about anything with anything.

[tempun]

Gez said:

If you're playing maps like Sunder, the software renderer will beg for mercy.

On my netbook, PrBoom+ software renderer is faster. And level 11 there lags due to monsters, not rendering.

[Xeros612]

You could just pull a hex11 and find some piece of shit in the dumpster and be set for life for pretty much every pre-Doom3 doom game ever. (Though hopefully you'd be able to avoid the mindset of "everything that can't run on this dumpster computer is terrible and unoptimized and everything closed-source is evil". :P )


Honestly man you don't even need to -try-. A generic base model sold at a department store could probably run everything Doom related comfortably. (Unless said wad is as well optimized as Frostbite 1.5, that is.) Hell, even Doom 3 could be run at pretty good settings with such a computer.