well as a benchmark for you all the system im running is pretty good:

Athlon64 3800+
Radeon 9700Pro
1Gb Ocz Matched Pair Memory
Asus A8v

Blah,

Even lowest detail it doesnt run that nicely, even on 800x600 it doesnt run that nicely :S:S

ace

Mine is a P4 2.8 Ghz, Radeon 9700, 1Gb of ram and Doom3 runs at a constant 60 fps in 800x600 high quality (including in heavy areas with many fights), so i have honnestly no idea how it cannot run nicely on your config..

Y.

You should take a look at stats here:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

Granted, the numbers are skewed towards hardcore gamers, but we are looking at a very large sample nonetheless (>500K independent samples).

-cb

Quote: Original post by ace_lovegrove
well as a benchmark for you all the system im running is pretty good:

Athlon64 3800+
Radeon 9700Pro
1Gb Ocz Matched Pair Memory
Asus A8v

Blah,

Even lowest detail it doesnt run that nicely, even on 800x600 it doesnt run that nicely :S:S

ace

... I can't imagine what could go wrong to make performance problems on that machine. The game is playable at like 20fps on my XP2500, 512MB RAM, Geforce FX 5900se 128MB.. those 20fps are at Ultra High visual settings at 1024x768 and everthing set to max quality. The game is more than playable for me at 800x600 and medium quality.

I run doom3 on my Athlon XP 1700+ with a Radeon 9600 SE and 512 megabytes of ram with 2x antialiasing full detail at 640x480. It is very playable. Although I've never clocked it, the frame rate feels like 20 fps, occasionally dropping down to 15 or so.

Quote: Original post by GamerSg
320x240 is what the Playstation renders at.

XBox games are rendered at 640X480. I am pretty sure the XBox version will be scaled down greatly in terms of texture resolution(64MB Shared Ram)/polygon count, but it wont be noticed on a television because most people will be atleast 2-3 meteres away from screen unlike a monitor where the distance is 20-30cm.

Fillrate is one place consoles can save on big time, because they only need to render at a maximum of 640X480, unless Anti-Aliasing is used by consoles/games which support it.

I was actually suprised to learn that Chronicles of Riddick rendered at a lower resolution(480xsomthing?) and scaled up to save on fillrate. Caused a dire need of Anti-Aliasing, but still looked pretty good(as long as you weren't on like a 50" monster, and were a little back from the TV).

The marketing people at the publisher I used to work for always told me that most retail PC software games are bought by people who bought a computer in the last six months. When people buy a new computer, if they are interested in games, that is when they will buy them. After a while there computer is not so new, they already have lots of games to play on it, they are less inclined to buy.

So you probably shouldn't target retail games for computers more than a year old. Yeah, they can run on lower end computers, but usually they are made for a midlevel computer bought in the last year.

An unfortunate corollary is that as people replace their systems less frequently (as they now do) they buy less games.

Hardcore gamers and kids may buy games for an old system, but this is also the group that tends to pirate a lot instead of buy. When you are selling retail games you target the group that is interested in games but with enough disposable income to impulse purchase them -- college kids, twenty-something guys.

BTW, PS2 renders at 640 x 480 as well.

The biggest problem with Doom 3 was that it sucked.