D0oM IiI ThErAd!1!

[Solver]

vsync is vertical sync. With it off, you may notice "tearing" in the screen -- that is, part of the screen is at a different frame than the other. What vsync does is prevents that from happening, it'll only draw a new frame if it's fully rendered.

It looks a lot better with vsync on, I dunno why it's off by default.

Sort of how interlaced screens had that terrible blinking like pre-1994? But you know, I don't see any difference in monitor refresh rates up until 42 Hz, so...

Oh...I've been wondering about something....why is there no water at all in Doom 3?

Where should there be? It's a Mars base.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Solver
You talking about this?

//	"mtr_light_shader"			""
//	"light_color"				"0 0 0.8"
//	"light_radius"				"160"
//	"light_offset"				"-8 0 0"

//	"mtr_explode_light_shader"	"muzzleflash"
//	"explode_light_color"		"0 0 1"
//	"explode_light_radius"		"160"
//	"explode_light_fadetime"	"0.25"

Yeah. If you remove all of the comment lines (the "//" part), it should enable lights.

Why would that be? If a light of, say, fireball, illuminates area in radius of 50 pixels, would it not need to recalculate ~7800 pixels only?

Because of how the engines are set up, "shiny" objects set up to reflect parts of light. Like if the walls are metal-ish, a fireball will reflect on that somehow, even if the fireball is only 50 pixels large in radius.

There are ways to "block" it out so its only re-rendering certain parts...but the problem there is that videocards work by rendering "passes". It needs to determine which pixels on the screen it needs to block out anyway, which doesn't make too much difference. "Blocking out" means it basically puts an invisible boundary around objects to stop them from reflecting.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Solver
Sort of how interlaced screens had that terrible blinking like pre-1994? But you know, I don't see any difference in monitor refresh rates up until 42 Hz, so...

It's not really like that, that has more to do with how often the eyes can detect luminance changes.

It's just that if a card is rendering something a bit too fast, it renders part of the screen and displays it while the other is being redrawn. Vsync will lower the technical framerate, because it'll only display full frames, not partial.

[Apocalypse]

There was in Doom. I'm pretty sure. I'd think they'd just find a way to put it in if only to show of how it looks in the engine, but now, I have no clue what liquid looks like in the Doom 3 engine.

[pg]

the original dooms didn't really have water. all it was was basically regular floors/walls with different textures that were animated iirc. i imagine doom3's lighting and water might not work out too well.

[Apocalypse]

Yeah, but it would be interesting to see. It was the only thing really missing aside from the Spidermind.

[Maquiladora]

It looks a lot better with vsync on, I dunno why it's off by default.

Because its a whole lot faster. I personally never noticed this tearing in any games ive played, and i have vsync off by default in my graphics cards options. It used to give me +5 to 10fps with half-life, back when i had a 32mb graphics card.

[vee4473]

for all of you who seem to know...is the video card and the amount of ram it has the most important factor for this game?

I have an AMD athlon XP 2200+ with an Nvidia geforce 4mx440 64 MB card and 512 MB system ram.

medium is as high as I can go without choppiness, and even then it can ghet hairy with alot of creatures.


Could I move higher if I got a better card and more system ram? or is the system ram a waste of time here?

[DrSpike]

Well you want a better graphics card and another 512MB RAM really. Probably the graphics card upgrade would give you more bang for your buck.

[Asher]

Originally posted by vee4473
for all of you who seem to know...is the video card and the amount of ram it has the most important factor for this game?

I have an AMD athlon XP 2200+ with an Nvidia geforce 4mx440 64 MB card and 512 MB system ram.

medium is as high as I can go without choppiness, and even then it can ghet hairy with alot of creatures.

Could I move higher if I got a better card and more system ram? or is the system ram a waste of time here?

Check this out: http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2156

Video card comparison: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2146

CPU comparison: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2149

[vee4473]

I just saw that best buy is selling an nvidia geforce 6800 ultra, which seems to be their top of the line, for $500!!!!

ouch....medium isn't so bad...ha

[Apocalypse]

Yeah, I'm fine with playing Medium for now. I still play the original Doom every now and then, so I'll know I'll stil have this game when I evertually get a better computer in three years after colllege.

[MattH]

Well, with the Megs optimization (set to 128) I get 32 fps on demo1. The game still gives me a headache like some FPSs and I don't know if its the framerate or something else. What are acceptable ranges for you guys?

Also, with all the advancements in graphics technology the people still have points or ridges on the top of their heads. Why why why?

[MattH]

Addendum: Game is very playable with this hardware:
- 2700+
- 768MB
- R 9600 AIW
High settings
The game turned off AA and I've yet to see the effects on fps with 2x or 4x.

[Asher]

Because with per-vertex lightning like DOOM3 has, more vertexes = more calculations = slower.