Doom 3 System Requirements - or - Why the h@$# doesn't it run on the system it was demoed on?!?

[Anonymous Freak]

Finally have a line on a GeForce 3 for my G4 Cube. Figured I'd run Doom 3 on it, since Doom 3 was the "launch game" for the GeForce 3 - demoed on stage on a GeForce 3 on a G4 by Doom 3 programmer John Carmack himself, on a pre-10.0 copy of Mac OS X.

Yet the minimum requirements are a G5, GeForce 5200FX, and 10.3.9+.

I suppose the fact that it took three more years to finish after the MacWorld demo have something to do with it; but I had never looked at the system requirements on Mac before. I ran it on PC at the time it was new.

Anyone know of any other "it should have run on system x, but actually requires system 3x to run" games/applications? (Other than Halo - the massive lag between its original "Mac only" announcement and its actual Mac release - with the stint on the Xbox in between - is obvious.)

 

[Greene]

iirc, and I probably don't, it had something to do with the OpenGL improvements found in the late stages of panther.

Unless someone knows this off the top of their head, it would take some hardcore googling to retrace this

 

[jerwin]

Inside Mac Games said

To put it all in perspective, I can run DOOM 3 at 640x480 screen resolution and low quality settings on the following systems with a frame-rate of at least 22 frames per second: Powerbook Al 1.24 G4, 64 MB of video RAM; 1.25 single G4, Radeon 8600 with 64 MB video RAM. On a dual 2.0 GHz G5, with 1.5 GB of RAM, and a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, I got the following results using the timedemo feature: 640x480 low quality = 40.4 FPS; high quality = 28.25 FPS. 800x600 low = 32.0 FPS; high = 20.6 FPS. 1024x768 low = 20.4 FPS, high = 14.5 FPS. At all but the highest resolution, the game is very playable. At the highest of resolutions, the frame rate in the demo is slow, yet in many cases the gameplay was acceptable, while obviously slow at times.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=564&Page=1

A GeForce FX is technically capable of what Microsoft calls PixelShader 2.0 (floating point shaders), while a GeForce 3 is not. I don't know what the OpenGl equivalent is.