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Doom 3 for Mac Shipping
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SPUY767 said:
Please share whatever it is you're smoking with the rest of us.
Also, I feel bad for all you people without a PC to play games on who are all excited about Doom 3. The game was mediocre at best, and certainly not worth this level of anticipation.
buryyourbrideau said:
What on earth is the point of buying this for xbox, the whole point of this game is the amazing graphics and ok game-play. By putting it on xbox all you get is ok game-play cus there is no way in hell this game is going to look nearly as good on an xbox as it dose on a decent speced computer. So therefore this game on xbox defeats the purpose.
iriejedi said:
You either haven't played Doom 3, or read too much PC Gamer.
I can't decide which.
Rolleyes is right, but not at him, at YOU. Carmack and his crew designed this game largely with the XBOX in mind. Keep in mind most console games don't need to run the high resolutions required on a computer to make a game look good. NTSC resolutions, hell, even HDTV resolutions are amazingly low in comparison to what we consider acceptable on a computer game on a computer monitor.lordmac said:
I have no doubts this game will play just fine on the XBOX.
d.perel said:
That's the funniest part. We're all wringing our hands complaining about the performance of the game on the Mac platform, yet Doom 3 seems to be widely acknowledged as little more than a playable demo of Carmack's latest 3D engine. I can't comment too much, since I've only spent about an hour playing the game on a friend's PC, but from what I saw, after a short while the gameplay became repetitive, predictable, and...well...boring. If you Google around a bit you'll find plenty of reviews of the PC version and plenty of people expressing their opinion in forums and blogs. Don't get me wrong...there are plenty who enjoyed the game, but for a product that was as eagerly anticipated as Doom 3, I think there were an above average number of players who were disappointed with the final gameplay.
Graphics are a totally different story. Very impressive. I think it will just take a different development house to id to take the graphics engine and make a decent game out of it.
The real killer is that even though I didn't care all that much for the gameplay, and that the performance of the game on the Mac platform seems to be lacking a little, I'm still going to buy it just so I can say "OMFG teh d00mX0R 3 r0x0r5 teh G5!!111!!!"
having suffered through the entire thing last year on a PC more than capable of running it well, let me say that it is not. Just not very impressive.
If the game had been the 2nd level (first level has no fighting at all) and then the "hell" level, and then stopped, it would have been a great, albeit terribly short, experience. As it stands, most of the game is predictable and repetitive. If you still get scared with the lights go off for no reason and an imp jumps out of the previously-solid wall behind you 2 seconds later after 300-500 repetitions, then quite honestly you don't have any business playing a scary game in the first place. Stick with Mario.
I know they spent a long time on this, and I know that it is beautiful (what you can see of it, that is...SOOOOOOOO dark!) but it just really isn't that much fun to play after the 3rd or 4th level, when you realize nothing is really going to change. The bosses are cool, though.
(you could just go to level 2 and spawn one of each boss, fight them, jump to the lava level through the console and run around for a while, and then call it quits, because you've seen it all. They won't let you go outside onto the martian surface because you'll "run out of air" to breathe (apparently space marines haven't developed any way to breathe in their combat space suits!). The reality is, of course, that the engine runs like butt in big, open spaces that are well-lit, so they force you to run from door to door trying to stay inside where there is air.
As for it not being optimized for the G5, that is ignorance. Altivec optimizations rely on certain situations to be effective, and games essentially work against these situations most of the time. Doom 3 works fine on single-thread PCs despite the existence of multi-proc or (very soon now) multi-core machines. No game currently really "uses" the 2nd processor...even games that run great on a mac like UT2K4 and WOW.
The Aspyr developers have said pretty plainly that the limitations are primarily with the graphics card hardware and driver software that is available on the Mac.
And they consider 10.3.8 MUCH better than earlier versions...think about that. Apple will have to pony up pretty soon if they want to keep a "gaming" page on their website. Games aren't going to get any less hardware intensive...Have you seen what the Unreal 3 engine is going to be capable of? Combine the style and beauty of Half Life 2 with the technical prowess of Doom 3's lighting engine, enhance both, and there you go.
In a couple years you will see add-on boards to handle in-game physics calculations (PPUs) and we'll finally see things like fluid dynamics and volumetric real-time, surface and object deformation. Buildings will be totally destructable. And apple will probably still be trying to talk about "intense, blazing-fast" gaming with the 5200 64mb "ultra" graphics card that they will probably still be using in the 2000 dollar PowerMac.
[/rant]
If the game had been the 2nd level (first level has no fighting at all) and then the "hell" level, and then stopped, it would have been a great, albeit terribly short, experience. As it stands, most of the game is predictable and repetitive. If you still get scared with the lights go off for no reason and an imp jumps out of the previously-solid wall behind you 2 seconds later after 300-500 repetitions, then quite honestly you don't have any business playing a scary game in the first place. Stick with Mario.
I know they spent a long time on this, and I know that it is beautiful (what you can see of it, that is...SOOOOOOOO dark!) but it just really isn't that much fun to play after the 3rd or 4th level, when you realize nothing is really going to change. The bosses are cool, though.
(you could just go to level 2 and spawn one of each boss, fight them, jump to the lava level through the console and run around for a while, and then call it quits, because you've seen it all. They won't let you go outside onto the martian surface because you'll "run out of air" to breathe (apparently space marines haven't developed any way to breathe in their combat space suits!). The reality is, of course, that the engine runs like butt in big, open spaces that are well-lit, so they force you to run from door to door trying to stay inside where there is air.
As for it not being optimized for the G5, that is ignorance. Altivec optimizations rely on certain situations to be effective, and games essentially work against these situations most of the time. Doom 3 works fine on single-thread PCs despite the existence of multi-proc or (very soon now) multi-core machines. No game currently really "uses" the 2nd processor...even games that run great on a mac like UT2K4 and WOW.
The Aspyr developers have said pretty plainly that the limitations are primarily with the graphics card hardware and driver software that is available on the Mac.
And they consider 10.3.8 MUCH better than earlier versions...think about that. Apple will have to pony up pretty soon if they want to keep a "gaming" page on their website. Games aren't going to get any less hardware intensive...Have you seen what the Unreal 3 engine is going to be capable of? Combine the style and beauty of Half Life 2 with the technical prowess of Doom 3's lighting engine, enhance both, and there you go.
In a couple years you will see add-on boards to handle in-game physics calculations (PPUs) and we'll finally see things like fluid dynamics and volumetric real-time, surface and object deformation. Buildings will be totally destructable. And apple will probably still be trying to talk about "intense, blazing-fast" gaming with the 5200 64mb "ultra" graphics card that they will probably still be using in the 2000 dollar PowerMac.
[/rant]
oingoboingo said:
This is the game in a nutshell. Dark hallway after dark hallway. The game relies largely on things being dark and popping out at you. After a while the novelty wears off and you become extremely conditioned to the game. All of the monsters are scripted, and you start to develop a sense of what is going to trigger monsters after playing the game for a few hours. Touching a ladder almost always spawns something, picking up a powerup ALWAYS does, etc. The story is even more laughable, considering iD hired some hackjob "real science fiction writer."
The coolest part of the whole game is the Hell level, which is entirely too short, and the ending leaves you sitting there going, "That's it?"
Not worth the $50, and certainly not worth getting excited over... Especially to lag through it dropping frames on a Mac. If you're dead set on playing Doom 3, play it on someone else's PC, or wait for it on XBOX. But trust me... you're really not missing much.
More from Glenda Adams
Apologies if this has already been dissected and probed, but Glenda Adams has said a little more about the problems inherent in porting from x86 to PowerPC in an interview with barefeats.com (http://barefeats.com/doom3.html). There's more to it than just graphics driver issues (although they are a hugely important part).
From the article:
"The performance differences you see between Doom 3 Mac and Windows, especially on high end cards, is due to a lot of factors (in general order from smallest impact to largest):
1. PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed. It requires re-engineering much of the game's math code to keep data in native formats more often. This isn't 'bad' coding on the PC -- they don't have the performance penalty, and converting results to ints saves memory and can be faster in many algorithms on that platform. It would only be a few percentage points that could be gained on the Mac, so its one of those optimizations that just isn't feasible to do for the speed increase.
2. Compiler differences. gcc, the compiler used on the Mac, currently can't do some of the more complex optimizations that Visual Studio can on the PC. Especially when inlining small functions, the PC has an advantage. Add to this that the PowerPC has a higher overhead for functional calls, and not having as much inlining drops frame rates another few percentage points.
3. More robust and modern OpenGL implementation on OS X. The fact that OpenGL is engineered from the ground up on OS X to be accessible from many applications at once is wonderful for the rest of the world, but does have a performance hit for games. Sharing GL with the rest of the system invokes a small overhead that Windows doesn't have, since Windows can basically assume GL is just in use for one application.
4. OpenGL framework/drivers split on OS X. On Windows, ATI and nVidia are responsible for the OpenGL code all the way from the hardware to the game. On the Mac, Apple handles the top layers of OpenGL and then hands data off to the video card drivers. On Windows this allows the video card manufacturers to do some more direct optimizations that make sure data gets passed to the card as fast as possible. The Mac can't short circuit that process, since there is a fairly well defined boundary between GL and the video card drivers. This is complicated by the more modern GL implementation on OS X as well- Apple can't just put in a bunch of hacks to shove data around the wall and into the cards, just for the game.
5. And the last, but definitely most important factor: Amount of time Apple/ATI/nVidia have had to optimize specifically for Doom 3. On Windows, ATI/NVIDIA spent multiple programmer years tuning their OpenGL implementations for Doom 3, starting back over a year ago while the game was still in development. Apple/ATi/NVIDIA have done an immense amount of work on OS X's GL in the last 3-4 months, but there is no way they could get as much done as the dozens of Windows engineers working on the problem for over a year. 10.3.8 includes a huge number of GL optimizations that make a big difference in Doom 3, and the game wouldn't have been in any shape to ship without these. One of the biggest things ATi & nVidia do on the PC for Doom 3 is have application specific OpenGL optimizations just for the game. They can detect Doom3 is the application using GL, and even which shaders it is downloading -- then they can shift to a mode that is highly optimized just for those cases."
Apologies if this has already been dissected and probed, but Glenda Adams has said a little more about the problems inherent in porting from x86 to PowerPC in an interview with barefeats.com (http://barefeats.com/doom3.html). There's more to it than just graphics driver issues (although they are a hugely important part).
From the article:
"The performance differences you see between Doom 3 Mac and Windows, especially on high end cards, is due to a lot of factors (in general order from smallest impact to largest):
1. PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed. It requires re-engineering much of the game's math code to keep data in native formats more often. This isn't 'bad' coding on the PC -- they don't have the performance penalty, and converting results to ints saves memory and can be faster in many algorithms on that platform. It would only be a few percentage points that could be gained on the Mac, so its one of those optimizations that just isn't feasible to do for the speed increase.
2. Compiler differences. gcc, the compiler used on the Mac, currently can't do some of the more complex optimizations that Visual Studio can on the PC. Especially when inlining small functions, the PC has an advantage. Add to this that the PowerPC has a higher overhead for functional calls, and not having as much inlining drops frame rates another few percentage points.
3. More robust and modern OpenGL implementation on OS X. The fact that OpenGL is engineered from the ground up on OS X to be accessible from many applications at once is wonderful for the rest of the world, but does have a performance hit for games. Sharing GL with the rest of the system invokes a small overhead that Windows doesn't have, since Windows can basically assume GL is just in use for one application.
4. OpenGL framework/drivers split on OS X. On Windows, ATI and nVidia are responsible for the OpenGL code all the way from the hardware to the game. On the Mac, Apple handles the top layers of OpenGL and then hands data off to the video card drivers. On Windows this allows the video card manufacturers to do some more direct optimizations that make sure data gets passed to the card as fast as possible. The Mac can't short circuit that process, since there is a fairly well defined boundary between GL and the video card drivers. This is complicated by the more modern GL implementation on OS X as well- Apple can't just put in a bunch of hacks to shove data around the wall and into the cards, just for the game.
5. And the last, but definitely most important factor: Amount of time Apple/ATI/nVidia have had to optimize specifically for Doom 3. On Windows, ATI/NVIDIA spent multiple programmer years tuning their OpenGL implementations for Doom 3, starting back over a year ago while the game was still in development. Apple/ATi/NVIDIA have done an immense amount of work on OS X's GL in the last 3-4 months, but there is no way they could get as much done as the dozens of Windows engineers working on the problem for over a year. 10.3.8 includes a huge number of GL optimizations that make a big difference in Doom 3, and the game wouldn't have been in any shape to ship without these. One of the biggest things ATi & nVidia do on the PC for Doom 3 is have application specific OpenGL optimizations just for the game. They can detect Doom3 is the application using GL, and even which shaders it is downloading -- then they can shift to a mode that is highly optimized just for those cases."
I'm just glad that future me has sent a PowerMac G6 back in time just so I can play this game. The 2 gigs of VRAM should bump up the framerate to 50 or so. That's assuming that the G6 can even run 10 year old software.
Doom 3 Benchmark study.
Please note, these resukts are not meant to be a scientific standard, but more of an approach for the average hobbyist and playing the game. All tests were run 3 times and scores are an average. All tests were done using timedemo using demo1.
Dual 2.0 G5, 512 RAM, nVidia FX 5200.
Low Quality 800x600 = 37.9 FPS
High Quality 800 x 600 = 21.29 FPS
Dual G5, 1.5 gigs of RAM, nVidia FX 5200
Low Quality 640 x 480 = 40.4
Low Quality 800 x 600 = 37.5
Low Quality 1024 x 768 = 22.9
High Quality 640 x 480 = 26.2
High Quality 800 x 600 = 19.6
High Quality 1024 x 7687 = 13.6
Dual 2.0 G5, 1.5 RAM Radeon 9800 Pro Special edition
UltraQuality, 8X Antialias 1024 x 768 = 20.6 FPS
Ultra Qualitu NO AA, 1024 x 768 = 29.9 FPS
High Quality 1024 x 768, NO AA = 36.8 FPS
iMac G5 512 RAM
Low Quality 800 x 600 = 29.9
Dual 1.25 G4 overclocked to 1.42 nVidia GeForce Ti, 2 gigs RAM
Low 800 x 600 = 28.5
High 800 x 600 = 20.6
Low 1024 x 768 = 18.2
High 1024 x 768 = 14.2
Overall, its playable at lower screen resolution with older Macs. The game play is smooth in many cases. Any MDD or newer G4 should be able to choke it down.
EDIT:
10.3.8 fully up to date was used on all Macs tested.
Please note, these resukts are not meant to be a scientific standard, but more of an approach for the average hobbyist and playing the game. All tests were run 3 times and scores are an average. All tests were done using timedemo using demo1.
Dual 2.0 G5, 512 RAM, nVidia FX 5200.
Low Quality 800x600 = 37.9 FPS
High Quality 800 x 600 = 21.29 FPS
Dual G5, 1.5 gigs of RAM, nVidia FX 5200
Low Quality 640 x 480 = 40.4
Low Quality 800 x 600 = 37.5
Low Quality 1024 x 768 = 22.9
High Quality 640 x 480 = 26.2
High Quality 800 x 600 = 19.6
High Quality 1024 x 7687 = 13.6
Dual 2.0 G5, 1.5 RAM Radeon 9800 Pro Special edition
UltraQuality, 8X Antialias 1024 x 768 = 20.6 FPS
Ultra Qualitu NO AA, 1024 x 768 = 29.9 FPS
High Quality 1024 x 768, NO AA = 36.8 FPS
iMac G5 512 RAM
Low Quality 800 x 600 = 29.9
Dual 1.25 G4 overclocked to 1.42 nVidia GeForce Ti, 2 gigs RAM
Low 800 x 600 = 28.5
High 800 x 600 = 20.6
Low 1024 x 768 = 18.2
High 1024 x 768 = 14.2
Overall, its playable at lower screen resolution with older Macs. The game play is smooth in many cases. Any MDD or newer G4 should be able to choke it down.
EDIT:
10.3.8 fully up to date was used on all Macs tested.
DTphonehome said:
Is the PowerBook G6 out in the future yet? I'm not buying a PowerBook G5 when the PowerBook G6 will be just around the corner!!!! WAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
That's funny.SPUY767 said:
The reason could be because Mac users know they can't do much gaming on a Mac, and have never bothered trying. So its not a matter of the desire to get work done. Rather, its acceptance of poor gaming on their Mac. Actually, Don't Hurt Me is "more" correct than you are about why Doom 3 won't run well on Macs. Don't you think that one of the worst video cards still sold on the market is the problem for most Mac users? Apple gave us one of the worst they could get with that Nvidia 5200. Its so bad that I'm surprised Apple actually found a card that's worse to put into the iBook, because there are very few brand new cards on the market that are worse.
If Apple were nicer in the past and gave people better video cards, a 1.33GHz G4 Powerbook would run Doom 3. If Apple spent $20 more on a Video card, I'd pay an extra $50 on a new system, maybe more.
*sigh* I feel the same way, but about every component. I'd pay an extra $300+ for a higher resolution screen if Apple only spend an extra $200. Same goes for video card. Bleh.Abstract said:
PS: So many of seamuskrat's framerates seem so strange to me. Sometimes the system with poorer specs get higher framerates.
Either way, it doesn't look good with that Nvidia 5200.
Either way, it doesn't look good with that Nvidia 5200.
seamuskrat said:
Thanks for these benchmarks. One useful thing that these benchmarks show is that game performance is not really improved by increasing RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB (assuming that the dual G5 system you used with 1.5GB RAM was the same 2GHz system as the one you used with 512MB).
"Add more RAM!" seems to be a bit of a knee-jerk response to many queries from people seeking to improve performance of various applications, and there is sometimes little (or no) evidence provided as to why adding more RAM might help.
From these early results of yours, at least we can say that in your test enviroment, a relatively modest amount of RAM (512MB) is sufficient to not be the limiting factor.
oingoboingo said:
The placebo effect can be a powerful one.
Really though, what else can anyone with $100 and a screw driver easily upgrade on a mac?
io_burn said:The placebo effect can be a powerful one.
Really though, what else can anyone with $100 and a screw driver easily upgrade on a mac?
get a wicked fast boot drive like a WD raptor 10k sata drive.
if you have a 5200 you can get a 9600 from OWC for $100
Dont Hurt Me said:Thats right but that 2nd cpu's is good for taking that pressure off the 1 cpu and in turn it can crank out a few more of those ever needed frames.
I'm sorry, but not in Doom 3. It hits the video subsystem so hard, the CPU is almost bored. When they turned off the video processing, the game ran at 120 or so frames a second. And the sort of game logic they are using is really pretty simple. That's why they didn't add dual CPU support, the only dual that will give you any better performance is SLI.
io_burn said:The placebo effect can be a powerful one.
Really though, what else can anyone with $100 and a screw driver easily upgrade on a mac?
Umm...you can attach a $100 bill to the side of your Mac with a screw and legitimately claim you've added "$100 worth of improvement".
But yeah...apart from adding/swapping a hard drive, optical drive or maybe something like a USB/FireWire PCI card, $100 doesn't get you a whole lot apart from RAM. Actually, wasn't Other World Computing selling OEM Radeon 9600 Pro cards for $99 a while back? That would probably be the best upgrade that a lot of FX5200 owning PowerMac G5 users could ever do. Would be interesting to see how a 'mid range' card like the 9600 Pro/XT would do on Doom 3...that BTO option when ordering a G5 PowerMac is definitely money well spent.
EDIT: Oops, just realised I've repeated Hector's comment on the $99 Radeon 9600 upgrade.
this will not run on my Powerbook. ho hum, still got the PC version but without a graphics card to run it (well i have one but it dosnt like TFT).
tis a good game IMO, anyone who can run it will either love it or hate it. i love it because its old-skool but actually scary (NO game has ever made me jump before, cept this baby).
tis a good game IMO, anyone who can run it will either love it or hate it. i love it because its old-skool but actually scary (NO game has ever made me jump before, cept this baby).
seamuskrat said:
I think i 'll buy the game.But i want to try it first in a demo.
This is the first benchmark i see on a MDD
I have an overclocked MDD running at 1,5 Ghz with 2GigaBytes RAM and a GeForce4 Ti 4600.I see a lot of reviews with FX 5200 cards and i read a lot of negative stuff about that card (low end ,only 64MB VRAM etc.) . These are the supported cards for the game :
ATI® RadeonTM 8500
ATI® RadeonTM 9000
ATI® RadeonTM 9200
ATI® RadeonTM 9500
ATI® RadeonTM 9600
ATI® RadeonTM 9700
ATI® RadeonTM 9800
All nVidia® GeForceTM 3/Ti series
All nVidia® GeForceTM 4MX series
All nVidia® GeForceTM 4/Ti series
(128MB VRAM)All nVidia® GeForceTM FX series
nVidia® GeForceTM 6800
If you look at the console-commands from Doom3 , you can tune the game for your Mac-system.You can adjust a lot of things that will help run the game smoothly with no pauses or framedrops , even on a 1,5 G4 system.
There are parameters for cache , which is usefull if you have a lot of RAM.
There are parameters for your graphics-card which you can adjust and a lot more.
I think we have to waite untill the game is a few months out and a lot of Mac-users have tested it , and tuned it!!!
Hell, there will be for sure updates in the future which will improve the framerates!
Just look at the linux reviews of the game and you will found out that there is a lot of tuning you can do without much loss of quality in graphics!
Take a look at http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/12/1725246&mode=thread and http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=54
I am happy the game is not only for G5-owners and that G4-PowerMacs will be able to run the game , eventual , with a bit of tuning and with good framerates.
Yeah maybe with not all the special effects , but still with nice graphics and framerates. Maybe we (G4-owners) even can kick some PC-ass in multiplayer.
I have a dream , Graem Divine optimise that game for the Mac
!!! Maybe in the future , he will share his expertise for a good port of Doom3...Like he did with the Quake3-engine ...
"An Apple a day , keeps Windows away"
P.S.: Sorry for my poor english , i speek only dutch and french
SPUY767 said:
There are so many false assumptions, incorrect conclusions and outright lies in that statement that I don't even know where to start.
Do you work for id? Aspyr? Have you seen the code for Doom 3 and performed your own analysis? Did you profile the code using Apple's OpenGL tools? Or Shark?
With what facts do you base your statement on?
My guess is that you're just repeating the same drivel you've seen others spout.
Bryan