Doom 3 (2002 Alpha Demo): How it runs on a 2002 PC — Pentium 4 2.4 GHz / nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600
5REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Whether you're familiar with it or not, you might wonder how the leaked 2002 alpha build of Doom 3 (id Software/Activision, 2004) runs on a relatively speedy machine from the time. This video tries to answer that potential question with some footage straight from a Pentium 4 Northwood 2.4 GHz + GeForce4 Ti 4600 computer.
Just like with the final retail version, the 2002 prototype goes fairly hard on GPUs from the early 2000s even at lower resolutions. The ATi Radeon 9700 was the pre-production GPU used during the E3 demonstration (which this build is based on but it looks to be compiled a couple of months after E3 2002), which I guess makes R300 the target hardware. It will naturally run a lot faster on a 9700 than a GF4 but it won’t look any different, if the final product is anything to go by. Still, you can't go wrong with any shader language/programmable pixel & vertex shader card from that time for this demo, including the Radeon 8500 probably.
- HOW IT RUNS - -
Regardless, even the snappy GeForce4 gets a little sweaty from increased scene complexity (geometry + stencil shadows + self-shadowing on said geometry etc.) and this is only when using the default 640x480 resolution! It does run OK in the 800x600 and 1024x768 modes too, just somewhat less so in the more strenuous shots (drops to 10fps in the opening up-close shot of the player character and below 10fps in the beam-emitter room etc.). This is to be expected, as is the case in the retail edition, but there are naturally clear signs of this being a very much work-in-progress build, which shows in how it performs in ordinary gameplay. It would seem (and correct me if I'm wrong) that possibly due to bullet-based collision detection that the 2002 build can slow down tremendously when laying down some rapid (or buckshot) fire on enemies in general. This happens to both animated and ragdoll physics corpses. Some enemies being shot cause disproportionately more slow-down than others (like the Pinky demon in the e3_2 level) but it seems to be a constant throughout the whole demo. Outside of this, performance is generally not a problem and the E3 demo is more than controllable otherwise.
- GAME SETTINGS - -
Everything is kept pretty much as-is, untouched, except for the 'com_drawFPS' indicator being enabled. Again, this is drawn in 640x480 pixels, which might seem pretty low for such a GPU in 2002, until you realize that this was pretty much a required resolution for most Shader Model/Pixel Shader 1.1+ games that made heavy use of specular Normal Mapping and unified lighting/shadowing in 2003/2004 if you wanted smoother performance and/or higher texture detail. Of course, with 128 MBs of DDR video RAM the texture detail part is less of a problem but the Ti 4600 still struggles to draw frames quickly enough with all the extra filling and multi-texture drawing needed at 800x600 and above.
- SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS - -
Operating system used: Microsoft Windows XP SP3.
Drivers used for GeForce4 Ti4600: nVidia Detonator 29.42 (compiled in mid-May 2002, released in June 2002).
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Audigy: original retail CD-ROM drivers (July 2001).
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Intel D850MV motherboard and chipset (board manufactured week 6 2002; has "D850MV/D850EMV2" silk-screened on it)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor; Northwood, 400 MHz FSB (S-spec: SL65R, manufactured week 4 2002 according to heatspreader)
nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 (128 MB) display adapter/graphics card (board manufactured week 7 2002)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy (SB0090) sound card; early variant that has "Creative Audigy" sticker on the EMU10K2 integrated circuit (manufactured around August 2001)
1024 MBs (1 GB) Samsung PC800-45 800 MHz Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) (4x256MB; one pair manufactured week 44 2001, the other week 10 2002)
The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card. A DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable from the sound card of the vintage computer to the capture system’s on-board line in connector. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - e3_1.map
1:31 - e3_2.map
4:24 - e3_3.map
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