getting slower

One of the partners is on holiday, which has made life in the office very slow for a change. That's all well and good until you find yourself with nothing to do. No worries though, today I remembered to take Doom 3 with me so I could see how it ran just for laughs. So, how did it do?

Firstly, here is a side-by-side comparison of the computer I use at work and this one here at home...

WORK
CPU - Pentium3 800MHz
RAM - 256MB PC133
GFX - nVidia GeForce2 MX 32MB

HOME
CPU - Pentium4 3000MHz Hyperthreaded
RAM - 1024MB PC3200 Dual Channel
GFX - nVidia GeForceFX5950 Ultra 256MB

...of course, other factors like me having SATA drives as opposed the old PATA drives the office computers use play a factor but keeping this to CPU, RAM and GFX just makes the comparison simpler. Mind you, if this strikes you as a wierd thing to be doing in the first place, you won't care and probably should stop reading now.

Here at home I'm able to run Doom3 at 60FPS with ULTRA quality and all the options on. When I clocked those figures, I was running the game at 1024x768. I tend to play the game in HIGH quality at 1280x1024 resolution. Not that I don't want to see the very best this game has to offer, however, the difference between high and ultra isn't all that noticeable when you're more concerned with playing the game than examine the effects of texture compression. Phh...

Work is another story. The computers there are well under the minimum requirements to play Doom 3. Running anything above LOW quality would have been rather silly and all the extra options had to be turned off. I pulled the console down and manually set the resolution to 400x300 because you can't set it that low in the menu. If you want to see the game at that resolution, just enter r_mode 1 and then vid_restart. Even at these low settings, the game struggled anything above 20FPS...not that it made the game unplayable for the most part. There are a lot of tight, dark coridors in Doom 3. It's in the larger areas that are well lit with a lot of geometry where the game stutters and chokes on the sub-minimum system. Needless to say, I won't be playing Doom 3 at work. Will be tinkering with the editor though ((I've already modelled my house as a level)).

Just to note that on a GeForce3 64MB, at LOW quality and 640x480 resolution, the game still looks and performs very well - I've tested it myself. Nothing beats the crispness of running it to it's full potential but it's nice to see iD going to such lengths to making the game playable on something half the minumum requirement...even if you have to turn off the bells and whistles...