Final Doom3 benches at HardOCP

???

 

Eh, I really don't think it's a stretch. Especially if there is a thriving mod community.

 

It's asking a bit much of a single player game though, even taking multiplayer mods into consideration.

 

Yes its a strech. A long, long, long strech. The "Myst" titles will hold the crown for the best selling game, well so far they do. If you look at just FPS then HL was right up there. If your talking about on-line, then HL (thanks to CS) pawns everything. Has for 2.5 years now. From what I have seen there are some limitations to the Doom3 mod scene that other games dont have.

However with all of that said, I am sure Doom3 will sell very very very well.

 

I think you overestimate the FPS/geek/uber enthusiast crowd. Sure, this'll sell a bucket load of graphics cards but I find it hard to believe that this'll topple the likes of the Sims et al. When you remove effective multiplayer (unless being limited to 4 characters is will make for good MP) and the extreme style of the content (shock / horror) that's not necessarily going to be everyones cup of tea, then you add the fairly stringent system requirements and you lop of a large section of casual gamers as well.

By any stretch of the imagination I don't believe this will be "unsucessful", but I don't think it will be able to move the casual gamer games, and with the number of PS2's out there I would say there would be much more successful console games out there.

 

It's Doom. The name alone will sell the game. It's like Episode I. It may have sucked, it may have had serious flaws, but people still flocked to it because it was Star Wars.

 

I know at least 10 people who can't play D3 on their computers (but want to), and less than half of them will be getting it on the xbox (no point in everyone getting a copy of a single player game ).

 

RotFL!!! Tell that to Will Wright! I think The Sims and its various expansions has outdone the entire Doom series combined even with Doom 3's projected sales.

 

If HL2 doesn't outsell D3 I'll be surprised. Counterstrike shifted god only knows how many copies of the original, and if a source version is at all successful, the same will happen again.

 

Not to pick on your good sir as I have usally agreed with you in the past. But HB did have some points.

JC said that NV has gotten their drivers up to speed on the ARB2 path so he canned the NV30 path. Then in HardOCP benches we have this statement from JC "On the other hand, the Nvidia drivers have been tuned for Doom's primary light/surface interaction fragment program, and innocuous code changes can "fall off the fast path" and cause significant performance impacts, especially on NV30 class cards."

So it sounds like some legal shader replacement was done and possible use of _pp hints. Again this is all fine and dandy, but the end result is a speed increase.

Ultrashadow is a plus for NV in doom3. Not trying to cry foul, or complain. Just that its there to help and from what little I know seems to help very well.


So I feel that while HB is a die hard ATI fan, sometimes his post contain vaild points.

 

Eh, okay, maybe I'm TOTALLY INSANE with regards to Doom 3's sales. We'll see. (Plus, I wonder how well the new Intel integrated chip runs the game...)

Now, as for the _pp stuff, Chalnoth stated that arb_fragment_program (or whatever it actually is) supports some form of partial precision hint. Is this not the case? I had guessed that JC had implemented this hint, which caused the ARB2 path to run nearly as well as the NV30 path (since, if I recall correctly, the big difference between ARB2 and the NV30 path was the use of nv_fragment_shader instead of arb_fragment_shader, which allowed partial precision--in his interview with B3D from while ago about the different paths, when all of the hubbub started, he said that ARB2 was full precision all the time). I may very well be wrong here, so if there is no partial-precision hint, yeah, it's shader replacement. I stand corrected if so.

And Ultrashadow, judging from that thread, is an advantage, sure, but I doubt it's Der Uberadvantage that people are making it out to be. We'll see, though, once the game comes out and we can disable UltraShadow.

 

But, Baron, it all adds up....DoomIII was made to play at its best on Nvidia cards, and nVidia cards were designed with DoomIII heavily in mind. Put it all together and it's obvious why it runs better on Nvidia. No suprises, at all. Fact of matter is, ATI never had a chance here. Even IF ATI was fully SM 3.0. compatable, it would have made minimum difference...... JC and nVidia kinda stacked the cards here......

 

I don't think JC had anything to do with stacking the cards. I think NVIDIA knew that in this generation, Doom 3 is one of a few games that are definitive benchamrks, so they made a card (actually two, because it seems that they anticipated Doom 3 coming out last gen) that is designed specifically to win D3 benches.

 

Well, nobody is going to argue against you here!

 

I doubt Doom3 will do so well. Id is not known for a great storyline. Nor known for its gameplay, or interesting areas. They're strong on technology, but not so much on the artistic side of things.

Now, that wasn't a problem in the old days. When the first Doom arrived, a FPS was something really new. It had enormous improvements on wolvenstein. Technology alone made a new form of game possible. Nobody cared about storyline, or interesting area. Just the idea to be wolking around in a 3D world was enough.

When Doom2 arrived, FPS was still relativily special, without too much competition, and again it introduced big improvements. IIRC First time the wall didn't always intersect at 90 degree angles, but could be placed at any angle. Also the first time levels were several stories high I think?

Again, new technology gave enormous improvement, so that even badly designed levels were ten times more beautifull than before.

In both cases, a great game engine, made an otherwise mediocre game, and into a great game.

But what does the engine improve on this time? Well... eh... dynamic shadows.... Well, that's not quite the same leap, as being able to put walls in any angle, is it? For the rest, I haven't seen anything in the game engine that for example FarCry doesn't have too. Or UT2K4 for that matter...

Now, for a game like thief, I can imagine that a highly advanced shadowing system would make for enourmous gameplay improvement. But for a shoot 'm up like Doom? Don't think so...

So I'm afraid people are going to be disappointed. This time, technology simple isn't going to be enough to raise the game to glorious heights.

 

Errr, the engine usage is really nothing to do with shader capabilities – in terms of shaders we already know that its was pretty much PS1.4 for one pass in the lighting model – SM3.0 makes not a jot of difference.

The problem is that, technologically, one of the main engine features is a 3D blind alley. I can’t think of the number of times I’ve had dev’s and others point out that that there is little future in stencil shadowing (I even think that if you push JC he’d admit that) – look at the number of preview engines we’ve seen recently and how many of them adopt stencil shadowing?

While I know we will see more future architectures with double pumped Z/Stencil, I don’t think you’ll see the IHV’s dedicating too many transistors to stencil rendering performance, as it wouldn’t surprise me if its heyday is the Doom3 engine.

 

You speak like you've actually played the game...

 

That sounds like it's something of the last year... I think NVidia and JC sat around the table allready before any work on the NV30 started. Leading hardware and software developers discussing what was lacking in games, and what hardware was needed to solve that.
And they came up with: shadows. And then they set out together to make the hard en software to solve that problem.


And both forgot that the competition might have other plans...

 

Hey Dave,

Got a few question(s) for ya. What videocard is in your primary gaming machine? If it is the ATi X800 Pro or XT PE, do you plan on changing it to a nVidia 6800 GT or Ultra when Doom 3 is released? Do you even plan on playing Doom 3?

Thank you for you input, your participation is greatly appreciated.

 

They didn't have much work to do, as the numbers really speak for themselves.

Speaking of sales, I know both D3 and HL2 will do very well, but I'm very curious which will sell better, and whether system requirements or HL2 very public delay will affect things.