Date:
Thursday , July 29, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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The Official DOOM 3 [H]ardware Guide

id Software and HardOCP team up to bring you a real-world DOOM 3 hardware guide that will help you understand and maximize your DOOM 3 gaming experience.

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How To Use This Guide

This guide will be formatted to allow easy navigation of the information you need regarding system performance under DOOM 3. Using the pop up menu in the lower right corner of each page, you will see many selections available. These selections will allow you to choose a specific motherboard and processor at a listed speed. Once you have made your selection, the information provided will be broken down into groups sorted by the video cards used on that system. From there you will see the choices scale from top to bottom with the selection on top showing the newest technology available and grouped by video card builder.

Once you find the system type you are looking for, you will see the best playable resolution and texture quality obtained by that specific hardware along with a graphing of frames per second, or “fps.” The graphs show the actual fps performance in a real-world gameplay situation. These are NOT time demos or synthetic benchmarks. Certainly your thoughts may differ from ours about what is the "best playable IQ." Even though some of our specifics are higher than what DOOM 3 might auto-detect your computer at, we feel as though we have been conservative in our guidelines. We think you are much more likely to be able to increase image quality (IQ) beyond what we have specified, rather than not reach that level on comparable hardware.

We will be including an IQ section that will specifically address image quality in terms of resolution and texture compression. DOOM 3 is very different from many of the games we've experienced in the past where antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are concerned. These topics will be explained in detail as to what impact they will have on performance and gameplay.

We will also be including our own picks as to what we think will provide the ultimate DOOM 3 experience. DOOM 3’s sound designer, Christian Antkow, will also be sharing his thoughts on the best way to experience DOOM 3.

How We Tested

All of our testing was done at the id Software offices in Mesquite, Texas. Over a period of three and a half days, we put in 65 hours of testing that consisted entirely of DOOM 3 gameplay. As such, our conclusions here are based on real gameplay and not on timed game demos or synthetic benchmarking tools of any kind.

We sat down with id Software’s Marty Stratton to decide on some levels that would test out the extremes of gameplay and visuals. From that discussion, we chose the “Enpro” level as the focus of our gameplay testing. Our graphs show about six minutes of real-world DOOM 3 gameplay that comprises the first half of the Enpro level. The graphs you'll see will show the game's framerate measured in frames per second as we travel through the level. FRAPS was used to collect the fps data. During our testing we are performing the actions of any would-be player. We are shooting monsters, jumping, strafing, hiding, dodging, ducking, and blowing up all sorts of stuff as we move through the level. Unlike a timed demo, this real-world gameplay stresses the CPU by using the AI, sound, and physics engines, providing a record of real gameplay system performance.

Since this is actual gameplay, the events happening are not identical in nature. Some run-throughs are a bit different than others, but we have tried our best to keep a level of consistency so that the results are comparable.

Before doing our DOOM 3 FRAPS run-through, we played through several maps experimenting with different levels of resolution, antialiasing, and texture quality for each video card. From that we have picked what we thought to be the “best playable” quality supported by the system in question.

Again, we think we've been conservative in our opinions of the playable levels of IQ shown in our guide. It is totally plausible that you might find 1280x1024 a gameable resolution where we have suggested 1024x768 as the “best playable.” We do think that most gamers will agree with our conclusions here. We've played it a bit conservative because we know that many of you will use this guide to base your future computer hardware purchasing decisions on. We certainly do not want you to use our guide and come up disappointed with your purchases. We think you have a much better chance of being surprised and getting better results than ours, but for the most part we think that we are going to be dead-on in our decisions pertaining to IQ and fps performance.