Doom 3 in 2004?

With all the hubbub floating around the net lately about what would and what wouldn't run Doom3, we decided to bring an end to the system requirement confusion and contact the main man, John Carmack, himself. Here is the official word on the minimum system configuration you'll need to run Doom3.
[list]*1GHz CPU
*256MB RAM
*GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card[/list]Don't expect to run it fabulous with that system setup , but everything will be playable at least.

http://www.3dactionplanet.com/doom/#PQN433439

Hey, maybe those 1Ghz eMacs will be able to run Doom3 afterall. Pffff...yeah right. :p

Damn. I knew the requirements would be hefty but still...

Originally posted by job
http://www.3dactionplanet.com/doom/#PQN433439

Hey, maybe those 1Ghz eMacs [b]will be able to run Doom3 afterall. Pffff...yeah right. :p [/B]

ID's game engines have always been nicer to the less powerful systems. When you turn the graphic quality down on an ID game you get realistic frame increases unlike the Unreal Engine. If they are saying it will be playable with those specs I would say fully that even iBook will be able to play it.

Originally posted by Durandal7
Damn. I knew the requirements would be hefty but still...

That's a 1GHz Intel processor I would make a bet. Meaning that even a 700MHz G3 should be adequate.

yep - these are likely PC specs...

so take with a grain of salt.

arn

Originally posted by MacBandit
Meaning that even a 700MHz G3 should be adequate.

Possibly. A case in point would be Shadowbane. The Mac Mhz requirement was less, but the VRAM was more.

Originally posted by job
Possibly. A case in point would be Shadowbane. The Mac Mhz requirement was less, but the VRAM was more.

The megahertz used to be less in the 604e time where you only needed 133Mhz to run Unreal, while you needed a 180Mhz Pentium to run it.

Now the needed mega hertz are the same on PCs and Macs, I know people don't want to know this but a P3 is the same speed as a G3 and an AMD Althon XP is the same speed as a G4 clock for clock (according to SPEC benchmarking).

While the game will run on a 1Ghz eMac/iMac, you will have to put all the settings down to min which means you might as well play UT2003 because the graphics will be better. I also heard it will only work on a G4 or G5 because it has AltiVec enhancements and it is too slow on the G3. Anyway it is the graphics card that makes more of a difference in this game, you need a Geforce 3/ATI Radeon 8500 or better to get the most out of the game. There is no way it will run on a ATI 7500M in the ibooks.

I am truly surprised. I expected to see like a 2.0GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, and a hardware-based OpenGL-compatible video card with at least 64MB RAM.

I wonder how much of the visual processing will be performed by the video cards rather than the CPU?

processor wise that is.

These days Macs tend to need the same specs and sometimes even more. Probably because developpers aren't too worried about optimizing every last line of code in the mac version since it won't be used for benchmarks or even reviewed much. They just ride off the success of the PC version.

Another reason for needing equivalent processor speeds could be because the developers know that most mac users tend to have pretty crummy video cards (just look at what's offered in the new iMacs or eMacs) and depend more on the processor than the video card.

I would certainly hope that my dual G4/800 would be enough to play it, with an upgraded video card. The screenshots they've provided look great.