![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , July 29, 2004
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
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.
System Video Quality Settings:
In DOOM 3 there are built-in quality settings that auto-configure based on your system's video card. When you launch the game for the first time it will automatically detect and apply the quality setting it deems best for your system. Additionally, there is a button available in the menu that will allow you to re-scan your system and adjust it to its optimal setting. There are four main quality settings available: Low Quality, Medium Quality, High Quality, and Ultra Quality. Each of these settings has a standard resolution associated with it. When you click the scan button it will find the best quality setting and use the preprogrammed resolution for that setting. It will not select a resolution different from what is programmed for that quality setting.
There is also an advanced menu that lets you enable and disable any image quality features that you choose. By default, all of these options are enabled, except for VSYNC which remains disabled. (In the screenshot of the advanced menu above the selection for VSYNC is turned on, but by default this selection is off.) The DOOM 3 gameplay framerate is capped at 60fps. From this advanced menu you can choose to disable shadows, specular lighting, and bump mapping as well. Be forewarned that disabling shadows and bump mapping do greatly impair the overall atmosphere and feel of the game. Each Advanced IQ setting is important in how the world of DOOM 3 is presented to you. id Software and HardOCP highly suggest leaving all of the Advanced menu visual settings enabled in order to be provided with an incredibly immersive experience.
There is one feature we simply must talk about and that is "Heat Haze." Heat Haze requires a DirectX 9 level video card in order to work. This feature is enabled automatically on those cards. It's one of those awesome effects that makes the word “Wow” come right out of your mouth when you first see it. Heat Haze adds a wavy “ripple” or "mirage" type effect to objects that have heat or steam coming from them. Heat Haze is also seen on fireballs being thrown by demons and produced by certain weapons in your arsenal that create a type of energy impact.
For our DOOM 3 experience we found it best to leave our driver control panel set at “Application Preference” allowing DOOM 3 to control visual aspects. DOOM 3 has a built in antialiasing control in the Advanced menu for selecting the level of antialiasing. Note that the High Quality setting automatically enables 8X anisotropic filtering, as we explain below.
For each quality setting (Low, Medium, High, and Ultra) there are various effects being manipulated. These effects include sound diversity and texture quality. Sound diversity is simply controlling the number of sounds DOOM 3 will use per sound shader for a given sound. For example, let's say you are shooting your gun and the bullets hit a wall. There could be ten different possible sounds to pick from for that one sound effect that are already in memory and ready to use. By reducing the number of sounds available in memory, or rather narrowing the sound diversity, Doom 3 can save on the amount memory being used.
Low Quality mode is basically for 64MB video cards in the value video card segment or older hardware. For people that run this level of video card (assuming it meets the minimum system requirements), you can be assured of a solid gaming experience. In Low Quality mode everything is compressed, including specular, diffuse, and normal maps. Any textures that are larger than 512x512 get downsized. Specular maps are also downsized to 64x64. The Low Quality setting also reduces sound diversity to the level of one sound per sound effect.
Medium Quality is built for those that own mainstream 128MB video cards. Medium Quality still compresses specular, diffuse, and normal maps, but it does not downsample any textures or specular maps. This means you will get the full texture sizes available in DOOM 3, though compressed. Sound diversity is also increased in Medium Quality giving you more sounds per sound effect.
High Quality is for those that have performance video cards with 256MB of local video card memory. High Quality does not compress normal maps at all, so there are no compression artifacts with any of the normal mapped textures. It does, however, compress specular and diffuse lighting. At High Quality, anisotropic filtering is automatically enabled at 8X. So along with the uncompressed normal map textures, you also are adding 8X anisotropic filtering to the performance and image quality equation. Depending on your system, we have found 128MB video cards that can handle High Quality mode very easily.
Ultra Quality is the cream of the crop for DOOM 3. In Ultra Quality nothing is compressed. Normal maps, and specular and diffuse lighting are all displayed at full resolution with no compression. Because of this, there is a tremendous amount of texture data needed on the video card, upwards of 500MB. While it will run on lesser cards, you may experience hitching or pausing due to the graphics card having to swap textures in and out of its memory buffer. That is why this setting is recommended for 512MB video cards. There is nothing stopping you from trying this quality setting if you want to, just keep in mind that the memory load is huge.
Quality Setting Comparisons:
The screenshots below compare Low, Medium, and High Quality settings. These screenshots were taken using DOOM 3's built-in screen capture utility, accessed by pressing “F12” on the keyboard. We used save game points to make sure each screenshot was in the exact same location. Note that the High Quality screenshot was taken at 800x600 versus 640x480 for the Low Quality and Medium Quality screenshots.
Low versus Medium versus High:
The very first image quality difference that struck us was the clear advantage of having 8X anisotropic filtering enabled in High Quality. The floor shows this advantage the best. Looking at the image, it's surprising just how good Low Quality looks. id Software has done an incredible job at making even the lowest quality setting look so good. In the second screenshot above, we cut out a portion of the first screenshot where we noticed the most obvious difference in texture quality between these three settings. In the third screenshot above, we can really see what a great job id Software has done. The textures look absolutely incredible in Low Quality. The most obvious difference we see here is in the addition of 8X anisotropic filtering in High Quality and the more defined shadow lines on the tube coming down from the ceiling in Medium versus Low Quality. The fourth screenshot comparison shows us the additional detail being added by the move to Medium Quality. With 8X anisotropic filtering enabled at High Quality, much more detail is visible on the floor. In the very last screenshot comparison you can see that the light emanating from the flashlight looks similar throughout all quality settings and that the monster looks absolutely incredible even in the Low Quality shot, with slightly more detail being seen at High Quality.
High versus Ultra:
Now to compare High Quality and Ultra Quality. For these screenshots we used an ATI Radeon X800XT-PE at 1600x1200 in High and Ultra Quality settings and compared them side-by-side. Remember, in High and Ultra Quality modes the normal maps are already uncompressed, so we're looking for differences in the lighting which is compressed in the High Quality mode and uncompressed using the Ultra Quality setting.
The screenshot comparison we notice the most difference in here is in the fifth set above. It appears that the uncompressed specular light map is adding more detail to the monster's belly, since the texture itself is already uncompressed between High and Ultra Quality settings. The difference however is so slight that when you are playing the game at its normally fast paced speed you are unlikely to see any difference. This is actually great news, as when you are running at the High Quality setting you know you are very near to the best visual gaming experience DOOM 3 has to offer.
Please do note that it is possible to see a bit more quality difference in-game as we are using compressed jpeg images.