Xbox Doom 3 shaping up nicely?

[Ug Lee]

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Some scans of the latest Gamepro mag, of most interest to this forum is the following little snippet -

"Port" is a four-letter word

Doom 3 for the PC has been in development since the fall of 2000, while the Xbox edition started in earnest in July 2003. The Xbox version is being programmed by Vicarious Visions, which is in simultaneous development with id. And that's "Xbox version," not "Xbox port", because Doom 3 is being sculpted--and in some cases rewritten--specifically for its console debut. "Everything's there," says Stratton. "You've got the full physics system, the lighting and shadows, all the rendering passes, although done a bit differently. It's tough to tell the difference sometimes between this and the PC version."

The Vicarious programmers have leveraged every possible hardware exploit to make the Xbox edition of the game as efficient as possible--including a few that weren't even documented. "There were some back-door hacks that gave an opening with the Nvidia chip that's particular to the Xbox, and a couple of hidden instructions that are particular to that chip," reveals Karthik Bala, CEO of Vicarious Visions. "That was a big surprise and a big performance improvement as a result." One major coup: By writing custom pixel shaders for the Xbox hardware, the Vicarious team reduced the number of rendering stages from seven to four without losing any acuity. Translation: killer looks, no problemo. "That was a tremendous help there that you couldn't have done on the PC," says Tim Stellmach, Vicarious Visions' design group manager. "We know exactly what hardware we're running on and can code for it."

The screenshots shown in the Gamepro article look considerably better than the first muddy slop that was uploaded a few weeks ago.

Looks like we might be in store for a decent PC>Console conversion? I've read previously about some extra goodness Nvidia packed into the Xbox's version of DX. Wouldn't be too surprised to see this running at a solid 30fps. Level segmentation is obviously on the cards, but at 480p it should look quite nice as far as console FPS fare goes.

As always, comments are appreciated.

 

[PiNkY]

If nv2a should not be able to produce 30 fps @480p , i'd begin to wonder how r300 and nv30 are supposed to provide a playable experience at 1024*768 and beyond since this engine is heavy on per-pixel effects.

 

[London Geezer]

If nv2a should not be able to produce 30 fps @480p , i'd begin to wonder how r300 and nv30 are supposed to provide a playable experience at 1024*768 and beyond since this engine is heavy on per-pixel effects.

Well, u know, a Geforce1 will run this game just fine at 640x480

 

[Clashman]

A couple of comments:

If this title is directly coding to NV2a, how is it at all possible that XBoxNext will be XBox compatible? Does anyone think R500 will be powerful enough to emulate it? I have my doubts.

Also, there seemed to be a fair amount of hyping for XBox's HD. Anyone else think this might be ID trying to say to MS "Don't even think about removing that next gen if you want our support"? Just some thoughts.

 

[rabidrabbit]

What support has there been from ID for xbox??? (before D3, which is not even coded by ID)

I'm starting to worry that Doom3 will be another case like Deux Ex: Invisible War, where the game was simultaneously coded for xb and PC. The final game did not live up to it's hype, and the game was simplified too much to fit inside xbox, from the original plans when it was for PC's.

On the other hand, Doom3 is supposed to be a straightforward, room based shooter, so maybe there will not be too many compromises.

 

[Guden Oden]

If nv2a should not be able to produce 30 fps @480p , i'd begin to wonder how r300 and nv30 are supposed to provide a playable experience at 1024*768 and beyond since this engine is heavy on per-pixel effects.

The per-pixel effects in D3 are SO SIMPLE compared to HL2 it's really not comparable. Hell, you don't even need pixel shaders at all to do the lightning algorithm D3 uses, though it requires a silly amount of rendering passes on non-shading hardware, which is why it runs so gosh-darned slow on GF1/2 cards.

Still, D3 does 3 passes minimum on pixel shader 1.1-class hardware, PER LIGHT, and I would think it's pretty safe to say there would be at least 3 lights per room on average. That's not including stencil shadows by the way... This title is definitely going to hit the bandwidth ceiling on the poor box with this many passes per pixel.

 

[London Geezer]

The per-pixel effects in D3 are SO SIMPLE compared to HL2 it's really not comparable.

Ok... But who's talking about HL2 anyway?

Hell, you don't even need pixel shaders at all to do the lightning algorithm D3 uses, though it requires a silly amount of rendering passes on non-shading hardware, which is why it runs so gosh-darned slow on GF1/2 cards.

Still, D3 does 3 passes minimum on pixel shader 1.1-class hardware, PER LIGHT, and I would think it's pretty safe to say there would be at least 3 lights per room on average. That's not including stencil shadows by the way... This title is definitely going to hit the bandwidth ceiling on the poor box with this many passes per pixel

Tell that to the people saying Doom3 will be perfectly playable at 640x480 on a Geforce1 without taking out many of the effects... :|

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Tell that to the people saying Doom3 will be perfectly playable at 640x480 on a Geforce1 without taking out many of the effects... :|

Who's claiming that, btw?

 

[Guden Oden]

Ok... But who's talking about HL2 anyway?

Uh... I am? It's called "making a reference", in this case to a title using heavy pixel shading effects which might run the risk of running a bit slow at higher resolutions. Like I said, D3's pixel shading effects aren't nearly as complicated in comparison, and would thusly not risk hurting framerates to such a degree either.

Tell that to the people saying Doom3 will be perfectly playable at 640x480 on a Geforce1 without taking out many of the effects... :|

Well, I believe I just did.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what id does with the general artwork of D3. From what I've seen in shots from the exhibition demos they've had and the leaked alpha, environments look an almost monochromatic shiny/dull metal grey, relying on lights to add color. Hopefully that will not be the major theme throughout the game or it will get boring really quickly.

 

[London Geezer]

And i wanna see how open are the open areas, IF there really are any...


EDIT: and see how the lighting works in open areas too....

 

[arhra]

Still, D3 does 3 passes minimum on pixel shader 1.1-class hardware, PER LIGHT, and I would think it's pretty safe to say there would be at least 3 lights per room on average. That's not including stencil shadows by the way... This title is definitely going to hit the bandwidth ceiling on the poor box with this many passes per pixel

Well, according to the article, Vicarious Visions have been able to reduce the number of passes needed for some of the shaders since they only have to work on a single piece of hardware (hardware that exposes a few capabilities that go beyond the basic spec, at that). I believe the specific example given was a 7-pass shader that they managed to reduce to 4 passes. If they've managed similar improvements in other areas, then it should do quite a bit to reduce the bandwidth requirements.

 

[Panajev2001a]

From some of the pictures the number of lights have seen a hit ( they also seem not to have the same attenuation drop-off that the PC DOOM III shots showed ).

 

[Lazy8s]

I haven't seen any PC shots of that build at 640x480 not supersampled to clearly judge, but this version looks rather indistinguishable from what I see.

 

[London Geezer]

From those shots, compared to the (admittedly higher resolution) PC shots, the Xbox version looks VERY downgraded... the specular maps (for one) are totally not there or are just less visible...

 

[London Geezer]

And let's not even start with the textures by themselves... If you think that's indistingushable from the PC version, then go back and have a look...

 

[jvd]

Judging from the shots this may be the most visualy stunning console game of this gen.

Its a shame it wont come on all the systems.

I would have liked to have a copy of it on my cube that sits in the car .

 

[Lazy8s]

london-boy:

...go back and have a look...

Ok.

(compiled by border)

 

[Guden Oden]

I believe the specific example given was a 7-pass shader that they managed to reduce to 4 passes.

The article said STAGES, not PASSES. Besides, from what I've read, the max no. of passes needed to do a light with PS1.2 is 5 (max 9 needed with just basic DX7-class hardware), so it doesn't really fit there.

Besides, I doubt very much there are any extra PS instructions in xgpu that could take even a single pass away from the rendering process. On the PC, it took PS1.4 with the Radeon 8500 to get a change in # of passes, PS1.3 in GF4 didn't make one bit of difference.

 

[Tagrineth]

I'm starting to worry that Doom3 will be another case like Deux Ex: Invisible War, where the game was simultaneously coded for xb and PC. The final game did not live up to it's hype, and the game was simplified too much to fit inside xbox, from the original plans when it was for PC's.

Doom 3 for the PC has been in development since the fall of 2000, while the Xbox edition started in earnest in July 2003.

And that's "Xbox version," not "Xbox port", because Doom 3 is being sculpted--and in some cases rewritten--specifically for its console debut. "Everything's there," says Stratton. "You've got the full physics system, the lighting and shadows, all the rendering passes, although done a bit differently. It's tough to tell the difference sometimes between this and the PC version."

I somehow DOUBT they have 'simultaneous' development going on.

 

[_phil_]

THe more obvious in these screens:

They dropped down to one light source casting shadows.
Lower texture res ,and not everything is normalmapped (a low res normal map would show too much pixelisation ,so it's often better not to have it.)
And 4x fsaa....