Doom 3 GOLD!

[a_h]

ui.

brain: off
bank account ready to clear?

I hope somebody will hold me back...next machine next year *argh*

[Rakido]

i guess i'll wait for independent reviews to come. it would not be the first sponsored "exclusive review" .

anyone heard about the multiplayer part? 5 Levels with max. 4 players?

and what's with the *new* features like checking for access codes in the internet?




Rakido

[dshumake]

Originally posted by Wombat
Something I read said that Ultra mode used uncompressed textures, and you'd need 512MB of video RAM to pull that off.

Parhelia 512 to the rescue.

dshumake

[schmosef]

I remember when 1MB of video memory was considered opulent.

[Byock]

Amen, I was happy when I bought a 512K IC chip, to take my card to 1MB.

[stcynic]

I am also curious about the AI of the enemies. The review did not mention that. As far as I can recall, I cannot remember any talk about Doom 3 having revolutionary new AI features. But it sure would be nice to go along with all the eye candy. Any rumors?

Also, kudos to Id for what was apparently a labor of love. Every indication is that they really but their hearts into this one.

[DGhost]

Originally posted by dshumake
Parhelia 512 to the rescue.

dshumake

RRRRRRRRIGggghhhhtttt

and the fact that the Parhelia's OpenGL layer is so bad that Doom3 will likely be close to unplayable to begin with makes that reeaaalll likely...

well, that and they don't have a 512MB Parhelia to begin with...

[bsdgeek]

Oh come now DGhost, "it should in theory be able to run on the ARB path." Words of assurance if ever I have heard them. Besides, Matrox and Carmack are in nearly constant contact, who else talks every "two years or so?" I'm sure even problems "that were apparently due to [hardware bugs]" have been ironed out.

Stop being so negative.

[DentyCracker]

Hmm, might be forced to go A64/X800 earlier than I planned

[Nicram]

Hehe. Good reason to stop buying Matrox.... Now Matrox will die.... by plasma gun from Doom :P

[Kruzin]

There will never be a single game that determines what hardware I run. Too much other stuff to concider that's more important than a game. If it can't run on the hardware I choose, then that software company won't get a sale out of me.

[GT98]

Originally posted by Kruzin
There will never be a single game that determines what hardware I run. Too much other stuff to consider that's more important than a game. If it can't run on the hardware I choose, then that software company won't get a sale out of me.

All depends on what you want use your PC for...some people are just fine with an integrated Video card, but theres no doubt that a video card that does good in Doom or HL2 will mean good sales for that company, even though it might not mean them moving lots of their high end video card.

It all plays out to checks and blanaces...and Matrox fails horribly in that deptment for me. They barely run the games I want to play and I can live with somewhat worse 2d quality if I get better driver and game support from someone else.

[Nicram]

Eh... Matrox fall so down... It was so nice (best for me) company some time ago (not long time ago) but now ... ? ? ? What happend ? Why i have to change my GFX card manyfacturer to play games....

[DGhost]

Originally posted by bsdgeek
Oh come now DGhost, "it should in theory be able to run on the ARB path." Words of assurance if ever I have heard them. Besides, Matrox and Carmack are in nearly constant contact, who else talks every "two years or so?" I'm sure even problems "that were apparently due to [hardware bugs]" have been ironed out.

Stop being so negative.

the Parhelia OpenGL stack is way too slow to be able to handle it, even *if* it can run on the ARB path. in OpenGL performance dropped through the floor when pixel shaders based off of Carmacks paper on shadows - the same algorithms that form the basis of the Doom3 graphics renderer - even at well under 1/5th the number of polys that I saw Doom3 scenes have. Native (ie, using MTX_Fragment_shader) render paths *did* *not* *help*. And yet the same algorithms would run just fine on a Radeon 8500, adjusted for the difference in texture units of course.

and the big if is if it can run the ARB path or not. Last I checked the Parhelia still uses OpenGL 1.3 which does not support the extensions required for the ARB path. It might be able to fall back onto the NV10 render path, I am not too positive though.

I'm not so much being negative as being a realist. If Matrox had not completely destroyed not only their developer relations team but also the driver team (which was working miracles as it was), they could have stood a chance. But they did, and as a result there has not even been attempts at the level of optimizations required to make Doom3 run right. In the 7 major driver revisions since its release (1.0.x to 1.7.x), they have not addressed any of the architectural problems of the OpenGL stack other than to make "certified" apps run somewhat correctly. And I had bad luck even with a few of those.

If Matrox had decided to take the development effort to make a "TurboGL" driver for the Parhelia, it could be possible. But, that would imply that the managment has reversed their decision and put development efforts into making games work. which has not happened.

I have been half tempted to pick up the P8X and see how many of the OpenGL issues I had up and disappear, but it is unfortunately not worth the cost to do.

[Mehen]

Don't forget that this is a CARMACK game, and all of his games run great. I'm not saying you're going to be able to run it with high settings on a budget level card, but I believe the game will scale down well to lower settings, maybe even all the way down to how it looks on the xbox version (quite bad comparitively, but Doom3 none-the-less.)