I'm playing Doom III now, I was one of the geeks hanging out at Fry's waiting for it to open this morning, and now I realize I need a new video card, plain and simple. My rig consists of a P-IV HT@3.6Ghz w/512MB DDR400 on a IC7-MAX platform. The video card is a GForce Ti4400.
Now, at 800x600 at medium quality, the game actually plays fine, quite pretty. But from my experience with the gameplay and from what I have read on the [H], I need a card with 256MB of RAM or upgrade isn't really worth it. The game won't even default to "Ultra Quality" unless the local VRAM is at least 512MB!
The issue is texture and lightsource loading. When a door opens exposing a different room for instance, the game needs to pull new textures'n lights to build the room. Since my card only has 128MB of RAM, the card needs to fetch the extra data from main memory through AGP, and then decompress it into the VRAM before displaying it. This makes the game momentarily freeze while this goes on. In the example listed above, it is particularly annoying as the game designers have a penchant for having baddies lunge at you when a door is opened. But it happens whenever you change scenery really. Aside from that, Doom III plays fine combined with the silicon in my rig.
What sucks about this is that no matter what video GPU you have, this problem will be prevalent unless you have at least 256MB of VRAM. No overclocking can solve the problem of too little physical memory on the card. More than anything, physical VRAM seems to be the bottleneck in my system, even running just a Ti4400 GPU. Now, for Ultra Quality at 16 by 12, well, I don't think they make a 512MB 6800 Ultra do they? If they do, that will be one spendy little piece of refined sand!
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