DOOM 3 BFG Edition - Remastered, Armour-mounted flashlights + DOOM 1 & 2 [360/PS3/PC]

[NRP]

I never felt like there was a problem with iD's technology (or art really). Rather, they need to hire better game designers, or at least give them more creative freedom. IMO, their gameplay design clearly lags behind that of their contemporaries.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I think John realizes this since he has pointed out that they can't afford to take 6 years to make a game anymore. It does seem like he underestimated how long it would take to develop iD tech 5, so now that their first game is out, they can apply their experience and what they have learned for their next project.

They were supposed to have learned that with Doom 3, too, which I'm pretty sure was originally intended for a 2003 release.

They need to stop announcing games before the tech is even close to ready for the game. Or be less ambitious with the first iteration of the tech. If DICE was run the way id is, Battlefield 3 would have been their first game using Frostbite.

 

[milk]

hm... They'd probably run out of memory or cut back further on textures. (IIRC, "High" needed 256MB VRAM back then).

Well, if you render one light at a time, you can reuse the same shadow map texture for every light - that is how the Killzone games did it this gen and both have tons of shadowcasting lights. The original doom already rendered each light individually and acumulated them afterwards anyways (in order to use only one stencil) so I think that could have been doable.

 

[Cyan]

First reviews of the game.

720p HD, 60 fps, Doom 3 and the expansion, plus brand new content, multiplayer AND Co-op. Yay! Ah yes, this version is a must have.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/doom-3-bfg-edition-revie/

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/doom-3-bfg-edition-revie/

Doom 3 BFG Edition review: It’s not Doom 4, but it is the next best thing

.




Included on the Doom 3 BFG disc are the original Doom, Doom 2, and Doom 3, including the original expansion pack Resurrection of Evil and a new offering called The Lost Mission. Along with HD graphics, Doom 3 also features competitive multiplayer, co-op support, and has been optimized for 3D.



The multiplayer maps and the co-op add a fair amount of novelty to the game, but heart of Doom has always been built around the single player joy of running at a demon and using a chainsaw on them. The multiplayer is fun, but it isn’t – and never was – what Doom was about.

Conclusion

Although there are some issues with the game including the same flawed controls and PC-first design decisions, and while the HD graphics aren’t going to fool anyone into thinking Doom 3 was suddenly rebuilt with a modern GPU in mind, the package is strong. Very strong.


I spent a good portion of this review going over the things I didn’t like, but I have saved the most important fact for last: Doom 3 was, and remains a great game. The HD graphics may not blow you away, but the original design was so good, they don’t need much to be immersive. The additional content, including Doom and Doom II is great, but the reason to buy this bundle is Doom 3 and the two expansions.


The Doom 3 BFG Edition isn’t the long awaited sequel we have been hoping for, but it offers enough to tide you over until id finally announced Doom 4.

Plus a 3 minutes video review, which praises the game in general and says, among other things, that it has much improved textures. : D

It's like I can almost see the 60 fps of this game when watching the video. Great stuff.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xu...ion-for-xbox-360-video-game-review_videogames

 

[assurdum]

Do you have the PS3 version yet?! Here in Europe the game didn't come out at the moment.

youtube ps3 walkthrough. Really, compared to 360 walkthrough the difference it's pretty evident. Tearing is really notable on ps3, on 360 hardly I noticed that.

 

[Kameradschaft]

First reviews of the game.

720p HD, 60 fps, Doom 3 and the expansion, plus brand new content, multiplayer AND Co-op. Yay! Ah yes, this version is a must have.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/doom-3-bfg-edition-revie/



Plus a 3 minutes video review, which praises the game in general and says, among other things, that it has much improved textures. : D

It's like I can almost see the 60 fps of this game when watching the video. Great stuff.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xu...ion-for-xbox-360-video-game-review_videogames

I was under the impression that Doom 3 co-op was not in the BFG Edition...hopefully someone will confirm that since I'm pretty sure I saw some guys on neogaf saying that there is no co-op support.

Either way the whole package looks pretty good and I'll definitely get the 360 version next week.

 

[Cyan]

youtube ps3 walkthrough. Really, compared to 360 walkthrough the difference it's pretty evident. Tearing is really notable on ps3, on 360 hardly I noticed that.

Total guess, but best wait for an in-depth analysis from Digital Foundry or ps360, because I have watched some youtube videos where tearing was present but then playing that game myself it seemed that the tearing was light years away because I couldn't see it.

Kameradschaft, the more options the merrier, but I also wonder the same because I remember we mentioned here co-op was apparently removed. However, as of currently I just want to get the game in my postbox, and all is well in my world.

 

[assurdum]

Total guess, but best wait for an in-depth analysis from Digital Foundry or ps360, because I have watched some youtube videos where tearing was present but then playing that game myself it seemed that the tearing was light years away because I couldn't see it.

Kameradschaft, the more options the merrier, but I also wonder the same because I remember we mentioned here co-op was apparently removed. However, as of currently I just want to get the game in my postbox, and all is well in my world.

I'm not sure to have understand what do you want to say here. You said to have tried the ps3 version & you haven't noticed tearing at all but from youtube tearing is more notable? Is it correct? Just to understand.

 

[Cyan]

I'm not sure to have understand what do you want to say here. You said to have tried the ps3 version & you haven't noticed tearing at all but from youtube tearing is more notable? Is it correct? Just to understand.

There are many examples of this and I meant that this kinda reminds me how some people complained about tearing in a particular game after watching a video on Youtube, but when they played the actual game on their TV they realized that the tearing was nowhere to be seen. It's not the first time it happens.

Also if you take into account that Doom 3 performed spectacularly on nVidia graphics cards running under OpenGL, you can imagine the PS3 should literally fly instead of running and tearing most probably won't be present.

 

[almighty]

Also if you take into account that Doom 3 performed spectacularly on nVidia graphics cards running under OpenGL, you can imagine the PS3 should literally fly instead of running and tearing most probably won't be present.

It didn't half!! You had the mid-range Nvidia cards of the time keeping up with ATI top end cards in Doom 3.

Was a role reversal though when it cam to Half Life 2

 

[Blazkowicz]

Doom 3 was the only game where a FX 5800 ultra made sense (apart from noise)
Then the FX 5900 competed with radeon 9600 pro, or maybe "fake 9600 pro" (a lot of cards had memory running at 200MHz instead of 300Mhz. rip off!)

Maybe PS3 has trouble because of its CPU. The PS3 CPU is a single core!, with two threads. So doing normal multithreading nets you with much less gain as with Xbox 360.

 

[Cyan]

Doom 3 was the only game where a FX 5800 ultra made sense (apart from noise)
Then the FX 5900 competed with radeon 9600 pro, or maybe "fake 9600 pro" (a lot of cards had memory running at 200MHz instead of 300Mhz. rip off!)

Maybe PS3 has trouble because of its CPU. The PS3 CPU is a single core!, with two threads. So doing normal multithreading nets you with much less gain as with Xbox 360.

Interesting... We will know exactly when the game is released worldwide and technical articles or reviews come out.

Funny that you mention those graphics cards, but I found this video created by swaaye -is the author of the video the same fellow B3D forumer?- :smile:

And he says this, literally, "NV35 has special hardware for stencil shadows and there likely are NV shader replacements". I didn't know that.

He runs the game at 1280x720 and AAx2, high quality, and it could be a good benchmark to compare with consoles.

I wonder if the console versions have AA and what amount.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Stencil shadows is fixed function stuff you will find even on a Voodoo2 and similar old cards, the proper term would be "stencil buffer".
What NV30 and NV35 had is double pumped "Z fillrate". Z and stencil operations go hand in hand (sorry for not having Carmack eloquence on this).

It was carried over on 6800GT and thus PS3 I think.

There are no shader replacement I think. Back then Carmack would comment about how nvidia's OpenGL shader compiler had improved and he didn't even have to use "partial precision", sparing him a special NV30 path. (the shader compiler was a critical part into getting useful performance, with the flexible but very weak pixel shader hardware.)

So I believe doom 3 uses FP32 pixel shaders without cheating, this all works because while shaders are used all over the place, in an "orthogonal" way, they are very lightweight actually. So they didn't suffer from register pressure.

Also in dishonesty nvidia pretended the geforce FX had 8 pixel pipelines because of the doubled Z rate, many websites would point out it really had four, and would sometimes say it's a 4x2 / 8x0 configuration.

Shader replacement certainly existed in order to "cheat" (sometimes being an acceptable compromise) ; nvidia did crazy shit back then, I believe they were the ones caught doing special purpose polygon culling in 3dmark03, discarding the scene where the camera wasn't looking.

 

[nightshade]

youtube ps3 walkthrough. Really, compared to 360 walkthrough the difference it's pretty evident. Tearing is really notable on ps3, on 360 hardly I noticed that.

Tearing in streaming videos isn't representative of the ingame quality because for one they stay on screen for twice as long, and sometimes it's just the video and not the actual game that has tearing.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Good that you're pointing that, because I thought I had read actual witnessings (?) of tearing on the PS3.

 

[swaaye]

I would be surprised to see a G7x derivative with specs supposedly similar to a 7800 have a problem with Doom3 at 720p...

 

[AlNom]

Stencil shadows is fixed function stuff you will find even on a Voodoo2 and similar old cards, the proper term would be "stencil buffer".
What NV30 and NV35 had is double pumped "Z fillrate". Z and stencil operations go hand in hand (sorry for not having Carmack eloquence on this).

It could have been a reference to nVidia's Ultrashadow.

Anyways, the bandwidth requirements are pretty hefty anyway, so it's not surprising the 360 would have an easier time here. Adding the extra transparency effects (during fights) on top of that is probably where we're seeing the main drops in the game (not sure if they bothered switching to low-res transparencies either).

It was carried over on 6800GT and thus PS3 I think.

Yeah, double-Z was basically from NV2A/NV30 to G7x. G80 had quad, and then maybe GT200 introduced 8Z per ROP per clock.

RV530 and Xenos were the first double-Z parts from ATi.

Maybe PS3 has trouble because of its CPU. The PS3 CPU is a single core!, with two threads. So doing normal multithreading nets you with much less gain as with Xbox 360.

Richard touched upon this earlier in the thread. I brought it up again the other day too. The PPCs, as we all know, have pretty garbage performance per thread, which is not going to be nice for volume extrusion. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the benchmarks being thrown around are using high end K7s, but we should be looking at relatively lower clocked P4's for single-threaded performance. I know Capcom mentioned the P4D 3.2GHz for SMT against Xenon's 6 cores, but their per-core comparison was basically 2/3rds.

Pretty massive difference on the same GPU (just to illustrate CPU dependency):
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1419/7

 

[almighty]

Surely the engine would now be slightly threaded?

ID added multi-threaded support to the engine with the release of Quake 4 and with BFG Edition also having parts of ID5 it should be a lot better at CPU thread utilisation compared to the original release.

 

[AlNom]

Well, you'll have your unrelated tasks (audio/physics etc) spun off, but you're still ultimately limited on how fast you can do the shadow volume extrusion calculations.

IIRC, the Quake IV multi-threaded patch just split-off the rendering thread.

Even so, you can still observe a huge disparity in performance depending on CPU:

 

[djskribbles]

I'm not sure to have understand what do you want to say here. You said to have tried the ps3 version & you haven't noticed tearing at all but from youtube tearing is more notable? Is it correct? Just to understand.

Every ps3 owner on GAF is saying the tearing is minimal and that there's parts with noticeable tearing on both versions. I'll take their word over a youtube video. And FWIW, the YT video I saw didn't have much tearing.