Doom 3

Garyi

I have been thinking of giving D3 a whirl on my P.Book (1.5Ghz/1Gb Ram/128Mb VRAM) and although it (just) meets the system spec I'm doubtful. I can run Halo OK, but ramp up any of the shaders/detail etc and it's crap!

What spec Mac are you running it on and what sort of quality/speed are you getting?

Ta

D

I have a 1.6 G5 with 1.2 gigs of ram, and I guess importantly ATI Radeon 9800pro with 256 megs of ram.

I havn't done a Frame rate test yet but running at full screen in mid resolution on a 23inch screen it runs just fine. Not as quick as UT2004 but doable.

If I let the game make the recommedations based on my system, I only get medium quality though so I am a long way off the best lol.

Apparently Doom 3 does not support dual processors though, so there is not a lot more I could do barring more ram I guess.

2.5 dualey? That'd speed it up a bit (even if, as you say, one proc is idling).

I've heard of people running two games simultaneously at full quality on a 2.5 dualey and 30" monitor - why you'd want to do that is anyone's guess, but it's cool that it can be done.

I'm itching to get my PowerMac and I have the green light on the 30" LCD - but not this year. Mac this year, monitor next. Still, it *will* be mine.

And Tiger looks like it might be officially announced today...

John

garyi,

1.6gigs of RAM?

That's a serious amount of memory - is that standard these days?

It makes my 256megs in my iBook seem pretty paltry by comparison.

Jon

Gary

Have you seen or used SimCity 4 on a Mac?

I get some strange results

Hi Derek, I am more of an action man lol (well slaughtered easily bloke anyhow) so don't do the sims, what problems do you get?

Jon, the 1.6 is the processor the 1.2gigs is the ram.

Its a bit easier with four slots to put them in, but ram is so bloody cheap nower days its rude not to really. I notice it has got even cheaper of late, 1 gig can be had for about 90 quid now, that gives me an idea...

check out crucial.com goto the uK site and find your apple model its really easy to do, then it gives you the options. If you choose to go with tiger when its released then 256megs will be a struggle.

Cheers gary. Actually I think it's struggling already with 256mb!

I think a shiny new iMac is in prospect when Tiger comes out

There is a degree of slow up when the game gets gory. I would guess without knowing about 25fps, this is at 1028/678 so I might have a play around.

Its is awsome though, mabye a bit too bloody dark, because you can have the spotlight or a weapon it gets a bit difficult lol.

Gary - when I scroll across the landscape the generated buildings do not move in sync with the landscape after a while they then reposition themselves but it takes quite a while.

What graphics card do you have Derek? if its ATI their website has a prefs pane that you can specify programmes specific prefs. For instance on Doom I have it set for max performance.

Gary

In the About the Mac screen it says

ATY,R350:

Type: display
Bus: AGP
Slot: SLOT-1
VRAM (Total): 128 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x4e48
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-A14401-116

Display:

Type: display
Display Type: LCD
VRAM (In Use): 128 MB
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
Depth: 32-bit Color
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes

Damn...I only have a PBook 550Mhz with 512Mb RAM (and ATI Radeon thingy).
Has served me very well for the past three years or so.

Am Itching to get hold of the new PBook G5 when it comes out this summer (rumoured to be 2 or 2.1 Ghz processor speed....once they've sorted out the heat dissipation problem, it'll be MINE...ALL MINE (sorry, just been watching LOTR).

The last doom I played was on a pc oh so many years ago...DOOM II, then Quake, then Quake II.....and have been cold turkey ever since

Derek it seems you have a reasonable graphics card, not particuarly clear which one, but it has 128megs of Vram, so perhaps the recent ATI OEM one, is you mac less than a year old?

The best thing to try for a start is create a new user in the users prefs and load it up, try running the game from there, this will clear up any possibilities of an issue with installed bits and bobs in your main account.
Then try different resolutions. ONe thing is for certain the lowest dosn't appear to mean the fastest. I have settled on mid resolution in Doom 3

Lastly check out macupdate.com incase any updates came out for the game, they usually do after a while to clean up any bugs.

Gaffer, Annoying as it is I don't think Doom will even start on yours, get yourself an new imac, its only money lol.

You can get quake and doom originals for the mac if you hunt around.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
Derek it seems you have a reasonable graphics card, not particuarly clear which one, but it has 128megs of Vram, so perhaps the recent ATI OEM one, is you mac less than a year old?

The ROM revision indicates that it's probably an ATi Radeon 9800. If it is then I would have expected it to easily cope with Doom 3.