Doom III: Geek info overload
Developer fills slow news day with technical type stuff
John Carmack - Robert's boss
It’s a slow news day today. We looked high and low for a set of award nominees/winners but with no luck. We searched for soundtrack listings for obscure Japanese shooters but nothing was found.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, a huge chunk of text talking about media assets and successive map loads form id Software’s programmer Robert Duffy, currently of the Doom III team.
“...most production levels in DOOM 3 contain more media assets than all of Quake 3: Arena. When we started working on the memory foot print, our goal was a 256MB system. In most cases loading up an area of the game on a 256MB system works fine, the problems arise when you start to transition from one area to the next ( successive map loads ). Memory fragmentation starts to really work against us and it ultimately made it just not feasible for a reasonable play experience to support 256MB."
Duffy continues, "In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic :-) and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically."
Cool. Sounds like Doom III will be great, thanks Robert!
And then, like a bolt from the blue, a huge chunk of text talking about media assets and successive map loads form id Software’s programmer Robert Duffy, currently of the Doom III team.
“...most production levels in DOOM 3 contain more media assets than all of Quake 3: Arena. When we started working on the memory foot print, our goal was a 256MB system. In most cases loading up an area of the game on a 256MB system works fine, the problems arise when you start to transition from one area to the next ( successive map loads ). Memory fragmentation starts to really work against us and it ultimately made it just not feasible for a reasonable play experience to support 256MB."
Duffy continues, "In Ultra quality, we load each texture; diffuse, specular, normal map at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around a whopping 500MB of texture data. This will run on current hardware but obviously we cannot fit 500MB of texture data onto a 256MB card and the amount of texture data referenced in a give scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50MB+. This can cause some choppiness as a lot of memory bandwidth is being consumed. It does however look fantastic :-) and it is certainly playable on high end systems but due to the hitching that can occur we chose to require a 512MB Video card before setting this automatically."
Cool. Sounds like Doom III will be great, thanks Robert!
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Comments
Joji 27 Jul 2004 12:31
1/1
Oh whatever, now cut the jibe talk and hurry up a give us the game. We have waited long enough. Less talk, more action.