Doom 3 for Mac... Still Coming

[7on]

I want to see a sort of "loader+ROM" for future games. That way, only the loader has to be ported. The loaders could be open source too, for more OSes to take advantage. It'll be much like Emulators and ROMs are done today on a far less "legal" scale. I do wish this would become a possibility. There could be like an ID loader, Blizzard loader, RockstarGames loader, etc. Or they could do it based on engine. I think this'd solve everyone's problems.

 

[zakee00]

I do not know what i am talking about? I'll give you my resumé

• I played Doom Alpha (640x480, dynamic shadows on, no compressed textures, No AA, No AF). I got 15fps average and it dropped to less than 1fps when an enemy appeared, probably due to the sound engine that couldn't cope because i have SDRAM. (PC: Athlon 1200mhz, geforce4200Ti, 256mb SDRAM)
• I have been visiting planetdoom.com regularly for a year now
• I daily visit tweakers.net (dutch hardwaresite) and read all messages about videocards
• i am a game developer (I recently made the same physics engine as DooM3 uses ( http://revaro.spymac.net/BInariesPE.zip ))

1. the doom alpha shows nothing at all about how the final will run, if you want to impress me with your resumè then i wouldn't have put that on there. and your low ram choked the proformance BAD.
2. so what...there has been almost no info on D3 in the past year anyway, up to now.
3. i daily visit tomshardware.com...and look at new video card benchmarks
4. i'm not a developer (i'm 14), but i downloaded your engine and that's pretty neat.

Now, I didn't make up the system requirements. The minimum 1.5Ghz pentium requirement is stated by PCGamer. See the posts I made on the thread: ( https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=936311#post936311 ). This is by the way a newspost I submitted, so if it wasn't for me you wouldn't even be on this post.
And your powerbook really only has the minimum specs for DooM3. It plays Warcraft3 and unreal2004 just at low setting. How do you expect DooM3 will play. The G4 processor in the powerbook clearly can't handle the need of the Radeon mobility. (See benchmarks on http://www.barefeats.com/al15b.html about the mobility radeon).

figure id puts in altivec support for the mac version (which they WILL, its obvious), i would expect a 250MHz improvement. So figure the min req. for D3 is a 1.25GHz G4. And GF3. My system meets/exceeds the min system req for D3. i'm not expecting to play it on high, i could if i wanted to though. my mobility radeon 9600 has the shaders built in, theres nothing preventing me from running it on high graphics. maybe the video ram. (64MB isn't very much for this game)

You will be able to play DooM3, but don't expect anything more than 640x480, low texture quality, low sound quality (<=especially low sound (unless you have a dual G4)). That's why i recommend to put much more focus on the G5. IBM's compliler saves J. Carmack a lot of work and enables altivec optmimization and 64 bit support in one go.

again, 640x480? no, but 800x600. thats fine with me. high texture quality, low sound quality. sound dosnt matter to me because my pb speakers arent great anyway. texture quality wont decrease proformance by much, it's the SHADOW quality that will murder proformance. i'd put that on med maybe. dont want low, and high would work like crap probably. i might need to put it on low in order to have good proformance, because i think the shadows use shaders and my pb dies with halo and pixel shaders on. but with pixel shaders off, everything on high halo works pretty good. and thats with bad code. if d3 has good code, then i expect med. settings all around on my system.

You are only laughing about your own foolishness. True that at this moment only intel has PCI-express. Your costs argument has nothing to do with it. Current PCI-express motherboards only costs about 20$ more than without PCI-express. And if apple wants to make an iMac design that will lasts 3 years, I wouldn't be suprised that they go for PCI-express (If they make the graphics card upgradable).

pci-express is a high-end option. it dosn't even increase graphics proformance right now (maybe in 2-3 years it will). it is NOT needed on a low end consumer system, aka imac. agp 8x graphics would be great for an imac. and this is all assuming that apple makes the graphics card upgradeable, which they probably won't. by the way, 20$? it's $20, with the dollar sign in FRONT of the number. and i'm a fool.

By the way:
ROFL = rolling on the floor laughing
POS = Point of Sale (A pay-desk is meant by this. Clearly you don't know what you are talking about)

hmmm...im sure POS means point of sale, but it means "piece of ****" as well. so don't say i don't know what i am talking about.

 

[Mav451]

To both of you...do not fully trust any SINGLE website. This goes especially to THG (Tom's Hardware Guide) readers. Tom is well known for skewing his testing results toward Intel--if I could find the link, he actually had a special "hate" page toward AMD-users (this was back in 2002 with the Bapco incident).

This is why I don't trust his site anymore. If you extrapolate results from sites such as Xbit, [H]ardOCP, Anandtech, ExtremeTech, etc. together and then make your own judgement on what you have learned then you will get a far less biased point of view.

This is not saying to STOP reading THG--just be more careful of treating it as "facts". They are an informational site, I'll admit, but I'll never fully place much, if any faith in that site ever again.

 

[AidenShaw]

"needing" PCIe isn't part of the equation

pci-express is a high-end option. it dosn't even increase graphics proformance right now (maybe in 2-3 years it will). it is NOT needed on a low end consumer system, aka imac.

If your definition of "high end" is $877, for sure. (Dell GX280)


I don't disagree with you completely - however the "buzz" in high end graphics now is PCIe.

It's a moot point that maybe the good graphics cards don't really need PCIe - moot because they'll only be built in PCIe configs. Moot because you won't be able to buy an AGP card in that class....

I've seen lots of new bus technologies show up (BI, EISA, TURBOchannel, PCI, AGP {1,2,4,8}X, PCI-X, HT, PCIe, ....), but the tsunami associated with PCIe is truly unique in the way that I/O adaptors are available at the beginning of the techology ramp up.

• major hype about the cool technology
• systems, motherboards and chipsets supporting the bus
• major graphics hype (check ATI and nVidia homepages for PCI Express news)
• other I/O support (see Mellanox and Topspin InfiniBand adaptors, Broadcom GigE adaptors, Emulex and QLogic Fibre Channel, 10 GbE, ....)

Usually it takes several quarters to get everything lined up - but PCIe has lots of good cards ready at the get-go!

Have you tried to buy a good PCI graphics card lately? Sad state of affairs - mostly older crap being sold for a hefty price.

It's going to be the same for AGP graphics far sooner than you imagine. All of the hot cards with the features you want will be PCIe-only. If you want AGP - settle for second tier chips with third tier specs - at above second tier prices

 

[cb911]

yay! it's still coming to Mac!

it ought to be great... just not on my PB...

and about buying a PC for gaming, why not just use your Mac and support Mac games industry? i know i dont' want any more computers than i need. if i can do everything on my PB, then great. however if i can't play Doom 3 on my PB that just means i'm going to have to wait until the PowerBook G5s come out.

although PCs do have lots more games, yes. so i guess it's really up to you, and this post hasn't said anything really important at all.

 

[cb911]

o major hype about the cool technology
o systems, motherboards and chipsets supporting the bus
o major graphics hype (check ATI and nVidia homepages for PCI Express news)
o other I/O support (see Mellanox and Topspin InfiniBand adaptors, Broadcom GigE adaptors, ....)

if you're wondering how to do bullet points... try option+8 (on OS X at least...)

•

for those of you on Win or other systems and don't know how to do bullet points, i give you a stock bullet point. feel free to use it royalty free in any of your posts.

 

[AidenShaw]

if you're wondering how to do bullet points...

If I can't type <ul><li></li><li></li></ul> I'd just as soon use a lower case OH !

 

[oingoboingo]

What the hell are you talking about? Warcraft 3 and Unreal 2k4 play at FULL graphics and resolution on my powerbook.

Warcraft 3 never goes less than 60 and Unreal only when I have 16 characters on screen.

And as I previously said, Doom3 was planned to have an FPS limiter so it can't go past 30fps. So in that respect, my 40fps in Unreal is quite adequate.

Can you post some system configuration details, game settings and actual FPS scores, using a benchmarking tool like Santa Toolpak please? On my 1.33GHz 12" PowerBook, I rarely see the UT2004 FPS counter exceed 20 FPS at 1024x768, and it's usually well below 20 FPS. Even on my 1.6GHz G5/Radeon 9600 Pro system, it is rare to see UT2004 FPS scores rise too far above 30 FPS with high-level graphics detail settings. I'd be interested to see how you have your system and software configured to achieve a solid 40 FPS in UT2004 on a PowerBook.

 

[isgoed]

pci-express is a high-end option. it dosn't even increase graphics proformance right now (maybe in 2-3 years it will). it is NOT needed on a low end consumer system, aka imac. agp 8x graphics would be great for an imac. and this is all assuming that apple makes the graphics card upgradeable, which they probably won't. by the way, 20$? it's $20, with the dollar sign in FRONT of the number. and i'm a fool.

hmmm...im sure POS means point of sale, but it means "piece of ****" as well. so don't say i don't know what i am talking about.

Glad that you agree that it is possible to run it on minimum spec. You point out some area's where you think medium spec is possible. Well it is pointless to argue about that. We will see it when it comes out. (I don't think there will be an option for 'medium shadows', it is either on or off. And hopefully you won't be able to turn it off (as in the alpha demo)). As for PCI-express; I think the other people in this thread already showed what is right.

Now i only have two advices for you:

• Stop the attitude: "I am a powerbook übermensch and no one else diserves good hardware". Don't brag about your powerbook, use it!
• Explaining to me the meaning of POS really doesn't make you smarter. It just shows that you can't appreciate macintoshes.

 

[army_guy]

It will come, but not for a long time and dont expect the performance of the PC version also amount of bugs etc.. DOOM3 is purely focused for the PC now as its one of the games (also HL2 etc..) that will revive the PC industry (due to H/W sales) and video cards (NVIDIA/ATI).

 

[supergod]

Is anyone even going to be able to play this game at a decent frame rate? From what I've heard this thing is just ridiculous in the power it needs; I have a 1.6 G5, Radeon 9600, 512 mb of ram (probably soon to be 1gb) and I really want to run this game but not if I have to sacrifice quality. Anyone think this is going to be a possibility?

 

[benjrobb]

should a dual 867 powermac with 768 mb ram and geforce mx w/ 32 mb vram be able to play this with a at least descent settings? I cant imagine that id would make the game unplayable for anyone w/o a g5. I would seriously consider upgrading to a refurb g5 1.6 from apple if i knew i couldnt play this sweet game on my comp, even though i just bought it off ebay.

 

[blueBomber]

should a dual 867 powermac with 768 mb ram and geforce mx w/ 32 mb vram be able to play this with a at least descent settings? I cant imagine that id would make the game unplayable for anyone w/o a g5. I would seriously consider upgrading to a refurb g5 1.6 from apple if i knew i couldnt play this sweet game on my comp, even though i just bought it off ebay.

Nobody can really say for sure what performance you will get, but considering that the 867, and the GeforceMX fall below what ID is saying minimum spec, I would say a sacrifice in quality will have to apply. The posted specs recommend at least a GeForce3, and even higher if you can, considering they also recommend 128 megs of video ram.

Edit: the specs posted are for the PC, so the Mac may gain some room in how low a processor it supports when it is ported. But videocard specs will more than likely stay the same.

 

[oingoboingo]

Is anyone even going to be able to play this game at a decent frame rate? From what I've heard this thing is just ridiculous in the power it needs; I have a 1.6 G5, Radeon 9600, 512 mb of ram (probably soon to be 1gb) and I really want to run this game but not if I have to sacrifice quality. Anyone think this is going to be a possibility?

I sure hope so, because that's almost exactly the system I have I don't think we'll be able to play at the highest detail settings, but from the minimum system specs I have read (P4 1.5GHz/Athlon 1500, GeForce3/Radeon 8500, 384MB RAM), I'm hoping that we should be able to get reasonable performance out of the game at medium-type settings. The only thing you might need to do is increase the amount of RAM you have (which you are planning to do anyway).

If the Radeon 9600 Pro doesn't pack enough punch, then I guess a Radeon 9800 Mac Edition might have to be on the cards some time in the future. Ahhh...sweet, sweet upgradable video...

 

[zakee00]

To both of you...do not fully trust any SINGLE website. This goes especially to THG (Tom's Hardware Guide) readers. Tom is well known for skewing his testing results toward Intel--if I could find the link, he actually had a special "hate" page toward AMD-users (this was back in 2002 with the Bapco incident).

This is why I don't trust his site anymore. If you extrapolate results from sites such as Xbit, [H]ardOCP, Anandtech, ExtremeTech, etc. together and then make your own judgement on what you have learned then you will get a far less biased point of view.

This is not saying to STOP reading THG--just be more careful of treating it as "facts". They are an informational site, I'll admit, but I'll never fully place much, if any faith in that site ever again.

thanks for the heads-up, i'll check out some of those other sites. btw, i apoligize for being kind of a prick back there, that was pretty dumb. i really hope that they have different shadow levels, because that is going to be the biggest drain on proformance. i guess i'm just really hoping it works good on my PB, in reality it probably won't, but thats what PC's are for . i would hope that a new G5 with a Radeon 9600 Pro could handle it (D3) pretty good, especially with 64 bit optimizations
EDIT: "Boycott the iPod and iPod mini! Listen to the masses Steve! POWER PC 970 IN THE IPOD NOW!!!!" hehhe i like that

 

[zakee00]

should a dual 867 powermac with 768 mb ram and geforce mx w/ 32 mb vram be able to play this with a at least descent settings? I cant imagine that id would make the game unplayable for anyone w/o a g5. I would seriously consider upgrading to a refurb g5 1.6 from apple if i knew i couldnt play this sweet game on my comp, even though i just bought it off ebay.

i seriously doubt it, MAYBE lowest settings. BTW, i just remembered something...we are arguing over what res. this game will be playable at, but if i remember right, when id previewed D3 multiplayer at some quakecon thing or something, it was rumored that D3 was being run on highest settings, 640x480. and judging from pics of the event and word of mouth, D3 looked amazing at 640x480. i really hope this is true...or else i might end up running it at 640x480 anyway

 

[army_guy]

The big game software companies I dont think can be bought especially the ones that thier main revenue is PC games. Remember PC games more or less drive the PC industry, games such as DOOM3 and HL 2 will kick it into high gear.

 

[sirzacolot]

benchmarks released

Benchmarks were officially released today they can be found [H]ardOCP

Here is a quote from the first page of the article.

"For those of you that think you are not going to have the hardware that you need to play DOOM 3, the fact of the matter is that many of you will be just fine, although an upgrade may still be in your future. As of this afternoon we were playing DOOM 3 on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 4 MX440 video card and having a surprisingly good gaming experience. Even a subtle jump to an AMD 2500+ with a GeForce 3 video card that is two years old will deliver a solid gaming experience that will let you enjoy the game the way id Software designed it to be. That fact alone should let many of you know that you will not be left behind in experiencing DOOM 3. "


It looks like many fears of Doom 3 being unplayable at the minimum configurations are somewhat unfounded. They do not give benchmark numbers for the lower end cards but a "surprisingly good gaming experience" from that kind of rig is good enough for me.

Now I only need to decide to buy it for windows or wait to play it on my PB, either way I will have a great time.

sirzacolot


*******************************
PB 12" 1.33 768mb
*******************************
XP1900+ Gf4Ti4400 512mb 30+30+20+5 gb
*******************************

 

[isgoed]

Benchmarks were officially released today they can be found [H]ardOCP

Wow! Amazing framerates on 1600x1200. But then again this is just a fly-by demo. It is common for a botmatch to get the fps halfed. As [Hard] OCP puts it:

One thing that you really must keep in mind when looking at timedemo results such as these, is that DOOM 3’s AI and physics engine are not being used as they would in a real-world gaming experience. That considered, we would guess our average framerates shown here to be a bit higher than if you were actually playing the game.

If you would have told me a year ago that I could play DOOM 3 on a GeForce 3 64MB video card and 1.8GHz AthlonXP and have a good gaming experience, I would have called you crazy, but that is exactly what we are seeing. Certainly we will have much more information on this in the coming weeks with the DOOM 3 [H]ardware Guide. At that time we will take a look at a much wider array of CPUs, Video Cards, and Motherboards and what overall gaming experience they can deliver.

Playable on a 64mb graphics card? this is gonna make a lot of mac users happy. I am very curious about their hardware guide. to see some real scores of 'low end' hardware.

Now I only need to decide to buy it for windows or wait to play it on my PB, either way I will have a great time.

I think the idea is that you buy the PC version and download the mac binaries. So you can buy the PC version anyway (even before the mac version is out)

 

[zakee00]

well, i'm praying that i can play d3 good on my pb ...those benchmarks didn't really tell me much, i knew that nvidia's would out-perform the ati's because d3 was made for nvidia cards, as hl2 was made for ati's. i think imma be screwed with my ati mobility radeon 9600 ...gotta wait till christmas to upgrade my pc it will be intresting to see how lower end hardware performs with d3...also how well the mac version performs.
must....have....doom...iii......
man i'm already dreaming about this game, seriously it's sad

thanks for the benchmarks though, thats cool...imma check back after d3 comes out to see how lower end hardware performs.

 

[isgoed]

Still a comment from [H]ardOCP:

NVIDIA has told us more than once that the 6800 series was “designed to play DOOM 3,” and the truth of that statement is now glaringly obvious.

I think the 2.5Ghz powermac with the geForce 6800 will perform amazingly on DooM3. probably 60FPS on 1600x1200 (or equivalent widescreen) noAA, 8xAF, high quality textures.

 

[zakee00]

Still a comment from [H]ardOCP:

I think the 2.5Ghz powermac with the geForce 6800 will perform amazingly on DooM3. probably 60FPS on 1600x1200 (or equivalent widescreen) noAA, 8xAF, high quality textures.

yuppers, but i'm really curious to see how it would proform on a pb... or imac g5.i figure a pm g5 with 6800 ultra will scream...imagine, d3 with a 30" display...running at it's native res

 

[AidenShaw]

I don't know very much about 64 bit architecture, other than it allows you to address more than 4GB of ram.

On the contrary - you know almost everything about 64-bit - it allows a single program to use more than 4 GiB of RAM.

You don't need 64-bit to put more than 4 GiB of RAM in a computer. Intel's 32-bit chips have supported up to 64 GiB of RAM for a long time. A single program can only use 4 GiB of course, but the system could run many 4 GiB programs at once.

The G4 chip could also support up to 64 GiB of RAM, but Apple never put it in a system that could support more than 2 GiB.

However, I know it does/allows for much more that just that.

Not really. The only other thing 64-bit does is that is supports native 64-bit integers, rather than depending on the compiler to use a couple of 32-bit integer operations to work on 64-bit integers. If your program depends on 64-bit integers in performance critical areas, this aspect of 64-bit CPUs might be an advantage.

The rest of the "G5 optimizations" are there to better utilize the architecture of the PPC970 chip. These can give a good speedup, but they're independent of whether you use 64-bit addressing (which of course OS X applications can not) or 64-bit integers.

 

[Trekkie]

On the contrary - you know almost everything about 64-bit - it allows a single program to use more than 4 GiB of RAM.

You don't need 64-bit to put more than 4 GiB of RAM in a computer. Intel's 32-bit chips have supported up to 64 GiB of RAM for a long time. A single program can only use 4 GiB of course, but the system could run many 4 GiB programs at once.

Just a point of order here, but just because you could put 64GB of RAM in an server or desktop doesn't mean it was supported efficiently. 4GB was still a barrier.

To cross 4GB a few different emplementations exist that are reminiscent of crossing the 640KB 'barrier' of days of old. The big one being PAE. PAE 'pages' memory in and out above 4GB in 4MB pages (instead of 4K pages above 1024MB) and is very processor intensive and causes all sorts of latency doing this.

the '64 bit extension' technology introduced in the G5, Opteron, and now the updates to the IA32 architecture called EM64T were built to try and address this problem while not requiring 'all new' things like the IPF family does with the new EPIC architecture, etc.

So the G5, Opteron, and EM64T enabled IA32 chips can now have a new set of registers which allows the applications/operating systems to run in 64-bit mode but also allow you to install your original operating systems on them. Opteron and EM64T (really AMD64 and EM64T) are binary compatible and won't require a seperate operating system for each one. The G5 being a 64 bit processor (again in the same way, new registers to address memory only) will slowly move to a 64 bit OS once device drivers, etc are updated. Until then 10.3 and everything that isn't 64-bit enabled will function just fine.

The G4 chip could also support up to 64 GiB of RAM, but Apple never put it in a system that could support more than 2 GiB.

not without doing something similar to PAE it wouldn't...

Not really. The only other thing 64-bit does is that is supports native 64-bit integers, rather than depending on the compiler to use a couple of 32-bit integer operations to work on 64-bit integers. If your program depends on 64-bit integers in performance critical areas, this aspect of 64-bit CPUs might be an advantage.

No program is going to 'depend on' 64-bit integers other than someone doing some crazy math. This is actually a draw back to a pure 64-bit implementation is now you have 'program bloat' in that to store the number '2' in memory you now need 2x as much RAM as you did before because the space set aside is now a 64 bit int instead of a 32 bit int. That's why the memory extension technology in the G5/Opteron/Intel Xeon is so beneficial is that you can still use 32 bit integers and not have to go full bore 64-bit.

 

[Raidiant]

Buying a console doesn't solve anything, I wish I could play SWG, or Horizons are some of the better and more unique RPGs out there. Also this just sucks its already bad enough that macs suffer from incompatibility and hard to upgrade issues, games are also ridiculously limited, I hate to have to wait 1 year just to play doom 3. I have an XBOX so its alright, but recently I realised that macs can only work with webcams with $80 and above which completely sucks considering the windows $20-30 webcam options.

anyway I don't see why people can't just have a PC to play games, hell its cheap and hell thats what its only good for.

you know macs have an edge in software, but apple needs to improve a hell lot fast in the software department, because windows is beggining to really cut it close, most people wouldn't even consider a mac nowadays cos modern pcs are so convenient.

Its sad to see that china is being eaten away by windows, such a big market apple didn't even take a glance at.