Here's my personal experiences with Doom III following about 8 hours of play/tinkering. Before any haters pleasure us with their pearls of wisdom, I do have the game on preorder. Fact is: so long as iD get my pennies I'll have their product any way I choose. So here's the game as it is for me, hope it's of use.
The Graphics
The main issue for most, I'd imagine. The problems I had here were entirely down to my 19 inch TFT and its curious treatment of gamma and contrast. I'm not using a DVI cable, so it took several restarts and tinkerings with my catalyst drivers to get things looking right. The game seems immune to Powerstrip and generally hates background processes; best idea is to give it your machine's undivided attention.
One major issue I discovered very quickly was that Doom III really takes it to your graphics card. Within minutes of play my 9800 Pro was running so hot that I had speckles all over the game's characters. No, I don't overclock or anything of the sort - I run a quiet PC with only moderate cooling, and that aint something Doom III appreciates. Once I was at medium settings, everything was peachy.
My TFT means I have to run at the single native resolution of 1280x1024. At this res the game runs incredibly smoothly on Medium settings, so-so on High. The peculiar thing with Doom is that, whatever the LOD, the game looks awesome. The attention to detail is on a different level to anything offered by any game ever - fact. Individual texture resolution is the main variant between presets; the difference, however, isn't nearly as bad as it is with most other games. At Medium the game is jawdropping - that's enough for me. Just make sure you have all the advanced effects turned on because they make a helluva lot of difference.
Whatever you do, give Doom III application preference in your driver settings. The effects when I tried to force lower anisotropic filtering levels were unpleasant to say the least.
Doom III doesn't feature a wealth of new special effects and doesn't exploit convenient technical gimmicks. What it achieves is far more impressive - depth and atmosphere. I've been particularly wowed by the integration of video screens, keypads and VDUs into the game world. Whereas in most games you intereact with these items in a separate popup, in Doom III they're fully rendered in their natural context. Moreover, the operation of these items is seamlessly integrated into your general navigation of the environment - you move the mouse over a screen or keypad and the crosshair becomes a cursor. It's best seen in action, but trust me - it's consistently impressive stuff.
In most cutting-edge FPS games (Far Cry, for one) you expect a performance hit when you encounter a special effect. Nothing major, perhaps, but you concede that there's a small price to pay for eye-candy. Doom III excels by almost entirely removing this drop in FPS. The framerate is remarkably consistent for a high-end PC title.
As predicted, Doom III is the greatest looking video game ever. Some may say otherwise because they value statistics and quantitative technical proficiency; there is more to this game than that - there is genuine artistic and creative genius at work.
Sound
My personal experience with the sound in Doom III has been impressive but not without issues. The 5.1 sound is awesome; this is the first game where you can precisely locate enemies entirely through their position in a 3D soundscape. Voice acting is superb and the general soundtrack is both effective and inspiring.
I'd even go as far as to say that if you don't have a 5.1/Dolby Digital setup for your PC then don't play Doom III. The experience is that much worse without it.
The issue I had was that, through my system, the centre channel sounded unusually tinny and prone to distortion. It's a barely perceptible problem, though, and doesn't distract from the otherwise great experience. What was more annoying, however, was that on occasion the sound would cut out entirely. A simply return to the settings screen was enough to restore it, but it's a notable problem. Whether the game's issue was with my Nvidia Soundstorm chipset or my redist DX9c installation, I couldn't say.
The Game
Doom fans should know to expect little from the series in terms of puzzles and complexity; this outing is no exception. The game is brutally simple and achieves its depth almost entirely from atmosphere and aesthetics. There is a Half-Life style opening and there are innumerable log entries and email messages to pad out the story, but this is a good-looking, straightforward shooter and little else.
In terms of fear, Doom III is (after about 6 hours of play) surprisingly tame. There is little suspense beyond the first 'level' and very few jumpy moments. Though many enemies dwell in the shadows and leap out at you, the game is so relentlessly dark that you become desensitised to its brand of terror within a matter of minutes. What the game excels at more is science fiction - there are plenty of nods to various movies (Total Recall, especially) and the production design of the whole experience is incredible.
Things may well change as the game progresses, but my current opinion is that this is a jawdropping experience that's nonetheless a very simple one. Doom III also embraces quick-saves to a disappointing degree; there's barely enough incentive to repeat from a distant checkpoint, so the game becomes yet another stop-start exercise in trial and error. I wouldn't personally say that I prefer Far Cry as a visual experience; at this point, however, it's certainly proving a superior game.
---
Here's the specs I'm running Doom III on, btw. I'm not including fraps scores or anything because, as far as I'm concerned, framerate whores are better off wanking over 3DMark than playing video games. The game runs fine - end of story.
AthlonXP 3200+
1 gig dual channel DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro w/ 128mb
120 Samsung 7200RPM drive w/ 8mb cache for OS
WD 10000RPM Raptor drive for swapfile and games
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo with 5.1 Soundstorm AC97 sound
The Graphics
The main issue for most, I'd imagine. The problems I had here were entirely down to my 19 inch TFT and its curious treatment of gamma and contrast. I'm not using a DVI cable, so it took several restarts and tinkerings with my catalyst drivers to get things looking right. The game seems immune to Powerstrip and generally hates background processes; best idea is to give it your machine's undivided attention.
One major issue I discovered very quickly was that Doom III really takes it to your graphics card. Within minutes of play my 9800 Pro was running so hot that I had speckles all over the game's characters. No, I don't overclock or anything of the sort - I run a quiet PC with only moderate cooling, and that aint something Doom III appreciates. Once I was at medium settings, everything was peachy.
My TFT means I have to run at the single native resolution of 1280x1024. At this res the game runs incredibly smoothly on Medium settings, so-so on High. The peculiar thing with Doom is that, whatever the LOD, the game looks awesome. The attention to detail is on a different level to anything offered by any game ever - fact. Individual texture resolution is the main variant between presets; the difference, however, isn't nearly as bad as it is with most other games. At Medium the game is jawdropping - that's enough for me. Just make sure you have all the advanced effects turned on because they make a helluva lot of difference.
Whatever you do, give Doom III application preference in your driver settings. The effects when I tried to force lower anisotropic filtering levels were unpleasant to say the least.
Doom III doesn't feature a wealth of new special effects and doesn't exploit convenient technical gimmicks. What it achieves is far more impressive - depth and atmosphere. I've been particularly wowed by the integration of video screens, keypads and VDUs into the game world. Whereas in most games you intereact with these items in a separate popup, in Doom III they're fully rendered in their natural context. Moreover, the operation of these items is seamlessly integrated into your general navigation of the environment - you move the mouse over a screen or keypad and the crosshair becomes a cursor. It's best seen in action, but trust me - it's consistently impressive stuff.
In most cutting-edge FPS games (Far Cry, for one) you expect a performance hit when you encounter a special effect. Nothing major, perhaps, but you concede that there's a small price to pay for eye-candy. Doom III excels by almost entirely removing this drop in FPS. The framerate is remarkably consistent for a high-end PC title.
As predicted, Doom III is the greatest looking video game ever. Some may say otherwise because they value statistics and quantitative technical proficiency; there is more to this game than that - there is genuine artistic and creative genius at work.
Sound
My personal experience with the sound in Doom III has been impressive but not without issues. The 5.1 sound is awesome; this is the first game where you can precisely locate enemies entirely through their position in a 3D soundscape. Voice acting is superb and the general soundtrack is both effective and inspiring.
I'd even go as far as to say that if you don't have a 5.1/Dolby Digital setup for your PC then don't play Doom III. The experience is that much worse without it.
The issue I had was that, through my system, the centre channel sounded unusually tinny and prone to distortion. It's a barely perceptible problem, though, and doesn't distract from the otherwise great experience. What was more annoying, however, was that on occasion the sound would cut out entirely. A simply return to the settings screen was enough to restore it, but it's a notable problem. Whether the game's issue was with my Nvidia Soundstorm chipset or my redist DX9c installation, I couldn't say.
The Game
Doom fans should know to expect little from the series in terms of puzzles and complexity; this outing is no exception. The game is brutally simple and achieves its depth almost entirely from atmosphere and aesthetics. There is a Half-Life style opening and there are innumerable log entries and email messages to pad out the story, but this is a good-looking, straightforward shooter and little else.
In terms of fear, Doom III is (after about 6 hours of play) surprisingly tame. There is little suspense beyond the first 'level' and very few jumpy moments. Though many enemies dwell in the shadows and leap out at you, the game is so relentlessly dark that you become desensitised to its brand of terror within a matter of minutes. What the game excels at more is science fiction - there are plenty of nods to various movies (Total Recall, especially) and the production design of the whole experience is incredible.
Things may well change as the game progresses, but my current opinion is that this is a jawdropping experience that's nonetheless a very simple one. Doom III also embraces quick-saves to a disappointing degree; there's barely enough incentive to repeat from a distant checkpoint, so the game becomes yet another stop-start exercise in trial and error. I wouldn't personally say that I prefer Far Cry as a visual experience; at this point, however, it's certainly proving a superior game.
---
Here's the specs I'm running Doom III on, btw. I'm not including fraps scores or anything because, as far as I'm concerned, framerate whores are better off wanking over 3DMark than playing video games. The game runs fine - end of story.
AthlonXP 3200+
1 gig dual channel DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro w/ 128mb
120 Samsung 7200RPM drive w/ 8mb cache for OS
WD 10000RPM Raptor drive for swapfile and games
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo with 5.1 Soundstorm AC97 sound
Hopefully that will go up to ultra when I get my x800 XT 
Comment