As the Doom 3 launch
approaches, the news about the highly anticipated title keeps coming in fast and thick. The
latest interesting bit of information regarding iDs blockbuster has to do with a feature
supported by the game but which has no hardware support for the time being.
According
to the information then, when Doom 3 is finally released, it will be able to utilize a card
with 512MB of memory. The game, it is rumoured, will have ultra graphics performance
settings which will use larger uncompressed textures when a 512 Mb board is detected. It is
unlikely that any use for this feature will be possible for a while but it seems that the
only card that could, potentially, support this feature is a 3Dlabs workstation card, one
which is unlikely to be a part of a gamer's setup.
iD programmer Robert A. Duffy
comments on the Ultra setting, 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 given 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.
Interestingly enough, the Inquirer mentions Ultra textures and the
possibility that iD may have chosen to ignore ATIs 3Dc texture compression feature, possibly
due to contractual obligations to a certain ATI rival. We would be interested to see if the
game will use any ATI specific features but believe it is unlikely as is any comment from
John Carmack on why that is the case.
