Wirehead Studios

http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQ0 (http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQ0)

A few things to note, especially for those of you that run older systems:


This is very good news, and makes me laugh at those people who went out and spent $1000 or more upgrading for Doom3. A 2500+ with a 9800pro (my system) is capable of playing at high quality at 1024x768 without a problem, and the difference between high quality and ultra quality is next to nothing.

Older systems play and look great too!

stil going out to buy 1 gigh of ram  (making me have 1.5 gigh ) and those zalman headphones .

When did you get a 9800Pro?  I thought you were always broke!  :evil:

now you know why he is always broke

mom bought one for me for my birthday

It's not here yet, but it's coming

They're a little bit too enthusiastic about this whole 'you don't need powerful hardware!' thing, fi you ask me. They proclaim that the game is playable with older videocards too: avg fps: 29.5 -- that is NOT playable, for me :]
As soon as the average runs up into the 60-90, it's an acceptable gaming experience. Otherwise, I might aswell render the scenes in max, and flip through them on a rainy sunday afternoon. ;]

id says the game is designed to be playable at 30 fps, and as for your range, tabun, the engine is locked at 60 fps.

Please not that the 30 fps is average, meaning it WILL drop below. For me I would like it to never drop below 30, then I'd be happy.
Radeon 8500 should be enough but my card doesn't seem to know so I need to change that to maybe a 9800 pro. *sigh* but I'm still waiting for the big price drop i thought the X800 and 6800 would cause...

*RANT*
I don't like how this pci-express is affecting my buying options. Buy mother board now I need to have one with pci-express and that means i have to?change my gfx-card as well (GAAAaah)
buy Gfx now I'd have to go for something with agp 4x which means that my completely new gfx card would have to fly out the window if I want to upgrade the MB. (GAAAaah)

Oh yes, the engine limit of 60fps. _total bollocks idea warning_ I'm going to refrain from playing it extensively until that is resolved. It's a total bullshit hack to prevent 'trickjumping bugs' as seems to be their main reason. I'm confident that after x months, people will start to complain about the engine not allowing their next-next-next generations videocards from using their raw power. If that's not the case, the game can get bent, for all I care.
I wasn't born in the age of the Fruitbat to see idiotic limitations applied. '640k should be enough for everybody!'.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could remove it straight away with the com_maxfps cvar...

Doesnt bother me though, since my LCD refresh rate is 60 :)

Chivilance:  If it were that easy [H]ardOCP would have changed the setting.  They said it was an engine cap, which sounds a lot like there's no way to undo that.

I'm not really too thrilled with a 60FPS max myself.  60 looks like a bloody slideshow to me, and if I can get hardware (eventually) that can render at a higher framerate I'd like to use it for just that purpose.  They better have compensated for the choppiness in some way.  If there's a technical reason for the limitation let's hear it, otherwise I'm in agreement with Tabun.  If the problem is exploits, why not just lock the client's command rate in the same way the server runs at a specific clock?  I see no reason why the rendering framerate and the client's command framerate have to be linked.

Phoenix are you seriously sayng that you can tell the difference between 60 fps and 90 fps WITHOUT the fps counter in the corner?

Besides that I just wanted to remind you that Doom 3 is a much slower game than q3 so high fps shouldn't matter so much.

Genialus:

Unless you have very very poor eyesight, low refreshrate on your monitor or you blink all the time, it is easy to spot the difference between 60 and 90 fps.
Hell, I can easily spot the difference between 100 and 120, or 110 and 120 even, in quake 3. I'm pretty damned sure that with the proper hardware, I'd be able to tell the difference between 150 and 200 fps. Easily. The fact being, that you're not looking for something that is but something that isn't there, namely: (flickering, choppyness - ie.) the absense of smoothness.

I remember people telling me they couldn't spot the difference between 30 and 120 fps, and calling me a nut for setting my com_maxfps to 120. I feel really sorry for these folks, since they must be looking at the world with a constant stroboscope effect :]

--

Btw, in addition to Phoenix's post: Even if there was a good reason to prevent multiplayer problems by limiting the engine to 60 fps, I still don't see why that couldn't be disabled for single player mode. If you can't code a game to distinguish safely between the two, what the hell kind of programmer are you, anyway?

Yes.  If a monitor is set to 60 Hz it drives me nuts, and I can tell just by looking at it.  I run my screen at 140 Hz at 800x600 and lower, and 100Hz at 1024x768.  In Quake 2 or Q3 I can easily tell the difference between cl_maxfps and com_maxfps values, with or without a frame ticker for the exact same reasons Tab mentioned.  I prefer to keep my game as smooth as I can, which is why I sacrifice a little resolution for more speed.  If it weren't for the fact it increases network lag I could push for an even higher refresh on my system, I've gotten over 200 fps in Q3, but I also run r_swapinterval 1 at the cost of framerate so rotational movement doesn't chop as bad, and vsync so I don't get any tearing.  I also run m_filter 1 so I get that smoothness on the mouse.

Tab I think WE should pitty YOU! You are the one that requires a high standard to enjoy a game :P

Then in addition to your post, If it's an engine cap that would suck for the mod community, say you wanted to create a... well...
Doom 3 : Generations  :ownage:  
It wouldn't be nice to have a cap there since games at certain paces like more fps than 60. I used to play Q3 at 90 fps but then capped it at 60 because phoenix, I think it was, said it was better for my ping.
But still you two claim you can see the difference and I'm sure you're not alone, that would make people choose the hl2 engine or am I guessing completely wrong here?
What other reasons could there be for this cap? What kind of trick jumping are we talking here? If it's only a slight advantage I would say that this is similar to allowing 5.1 sound in the game, which is surely an advantage as well.

Well, I can't really spot differences between 60 FPS and anything greater than 60 FPS mainly because I haven't been exposed to much of anything over 90.  I peak out at about 90 FPS in Quake 3 on 640 x 480, and I average 35 or so with UT2004 at the same resolution and with mostly default settings.  Both look great to me and do not seem to play choppy for the most part.  However, if I drop below 60 FPS in Quake 3, I begin to notice it immediately, but I can't really complain because I used to play Quake 3 with an average FPS of 8 or 10.  And as for monitor refresh rates, I can tell immediately what the setting is.  I don't ever want to go back to 60 Hz, it hurts my eyes.

The main thing I think you should worry about is can you even get 60fps fairly consistently from this game :D

you dont need that much frames , I ownder more in sof2 whe I was playing with 2 fps , then now when im playing with 90 fps

Oh I can easily enjoy games with sub-par FPS, colors, detail and resolution. I have, for years and years. Right now, I live in 2004, and I'm ready for mo' betta'. The new stuff ought to be proper. Why suddenly re-invent the wheel and make it square? Next thing you know they're going to go back to adlib sound, just because it prevents someone from hearing more then they should. Or why not just make it black and white? Or perhaps write the entire game in comic-book form and just mail it to everyone ;]

It's a matter of principle for me. I don't NEED to play Doom3. I will play it, when it makes sense. Scary games shouldn't be choppy or stuttery, because that takes you out of the experience. I have no difficulty waiting, and I'm sure that if I play it in july 2005, it will be quite enjoyable too.

hmm , that gives me an idea.

doom3 the text based game .

I mostly agree with this.

For me 60 is about as high as i need it to be for the most part. I beyond a 100 or so fps is really just the domain of video card benchmarking rather thanrele actual vance to game play. So in short if you system can churn out 300 fps it might make you feel like your wang is bigger than the other guys but its not really helping your game much.

My comps seem to hit a ceiling of 85 or 99.9 which is the monitor refresh rate. (at 100 the monitor blew up mind)

I don't know if I could change this,and don't care really. I'm happy with it.

As long as I can stop the view-bob I'm ok.

I'll play D3 sooner or later, like Tab, but only if I can turn off the bloody bobbing.

bs. Woods.
More/smoother visual input == better reaction time, higher precision on turning and reaction shots. It's just common sense. Also, just look at the people kicking arse in general, 9/10 of them are NOT playing with 60 fps or whereabouts.

Irrelevant.  If I pay money for a graphics card that can churn out 300 FPS I want to be able to use it to its fullest capacity.  That's like games keeper's comment about "You don't need that much frames."  That "Oh you don't need that" mentality is strikingly familiar.  Hey Woods, how about Feinstein saying you don't "need" that Nagant, eh?

I'll decide what I do and do not "need", thank you very much.

ah but thats the beauty part , we didnt pay that much money for our frames .
atleast not in doom3 .

Dang I feel sorry for all you hyper-sensitive blokes. So long as I stay above 40 fps or so, I can't tell differences beyond that any more. Ideally I would average around 50 fps, just to get a fairly safe margin for big firefights.

edit: exception to this is monitor refresh rate, which I always keep at a comfortable 85 hz so I don't see the scan lines out of the side of my eye.

I've been locked at no more than 60Hz for nearly a year now with this LCD, and I cant say it bothers me. Of course the picture is still smooth because the equipment refreshes differently. LCD's are less responsive and more wishy washy than CRT's, but they are so much easier on the eyes. I can easily stare at this thing for 12 hours straight, by which point eye strain is more likely to be from reading too much....

All in all its good, because it means as long as my favourite game runs at 60FPS, I dont feel the need to fork out for better computer equipment.

Alright, that 60 fps thing must clearly just mean models in the game clock or something, I don't know. But I quite frequently break the 60 fps "barrier" on lower settings.

I'm not so sure about that... I'm running the game at 640x480 with an AthlonXp 2500+ and a Radeon 9800 pro 128mb, and my machine's framerate dips down quite often below 60. I'd have to say on average, the framerate hovers around 30, and even less when there's intermediate action.

Tekhead:  What texture quality level are you at though?

And here are my thoughts on DOOM 3's performance with older machines...

I have an Althlon 1500 (1.4 Ghz) with 512 P2100 DDR RAM and  a Geforce 2 MX.

By running the game at 640 x 480 with Low Quality textures and every graphical option present in the menu disabled, I average 12 FPS and peak at about 22 FPS.  The single-player is still awesome in my opinion even if it's slightly less moody.  The real problem comes in the multi-player mode.  Without shadows and a lot of the other graphical niceties, I think DOOM 3's deathmatch loses a lot of its appeal.  It's still fun, but it's not the best or even relatively comparable.  (Grenades rock though.  ^_^ )  I need to play it some more to finalize my opinion, but I usually can get a good sense of the gameplay after one or two games.

Geforce..

2..


mx....

...


Why bother, even? :]

Well, now that I've tweaked the settings a bit (turned off all the extra goodies like shadows, bumpmapping, etc), I'm getting a near-constant 60fps at 800x600. However... the game just doesn't look the same... considering turning some of those visual features back on so that the damn thing doesn't look like quake 3 =[

You people and your obsession with max fps...

Consistency is the game here, not getting maximal rates.

Framerate hits are the  most frustrating thing to encounter, especially the ones where you start losing mouse control in additino to not being able to see anything.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showd...doc.aspx?i=2149 (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2149)

Something else to consider here besides graphics cards is CPU.  Read up and you'll get to see where AMD basically kicks Intel in the balls.  :ninja:

amd kicks intel more in the balls then that pho .


intel has to buy the copyright from AMD to make there prescott and northwood chipsets since they both  use AMD technologie .

now THATS getting kicked in the balls .

You know, for once I can't argue with you.  You have a very good point there. :)

On another note, here's a page that takes a stab at explaining why the Radeon series is lagging behind performance wise in Doom 3.  Bear in mind it's translated, so the English isn't perfect.  Some interesting quotes:


Apparently the Radeons don't handle occlusion testing as well as the GeForce cards, resulting in unnecessary overhead for the GPU.  Here's the full page:

http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/2004/07-30_english.php (http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/2004/07-30_english.php)