From PC Gamer magazine, Doom3 review:
"Yeah, I was lucky enough to receive my copy today, so I'll share it with you guys.
1. 6800 is a tad faster than X800 cards. Both run it in full glory
2. The game has four render paths: NV10, NV20, R200, and ARB2. All paths look awesome, even down to a g4mx, but the ARB2 path is the "full package," and is used for the R300+ and Geforce FX+ cards. It does all it's fancy isht in one pass.
3. PCI Express enhances NOTHING.
4. The difference between a 128mb and 256mb card is that the former uses compressed textures whereas the latter only compresses diffuse and specualr maps. In another words, no big deal. However, a 500mb card is needed to run the game in Ultra Quality mode.
5. 512MB is the ideal system total memory. 384 is required, 1GB is nice, but the difference is negligible.
6. Nothing special is included for a 64-bit OS.
7. A 1.5 Ghz processor is the least recommended, but a 2Ghz and above will help since...
8...The sound engine is entirely CPU dependant. Therefore a cruppy soundcard works flawlessly. Not to worry, the enfine only uses a "small percentage of cycles, much less than if the engine relied on a soundcard.
9. The only reccommendation regarding faster framerates is to disable to "advanced special effects option." In other words, upgrade if you have problems.
10. They tie it up by providing three levels of "Doom lovin' PC's"
Low-End:
1.5GhzP4 or equivalent
512MB Ram
Geforce4 Ti 4800 or Radeon 9500
Mid-Range:
2.4GhzP4 or equivalent
1GB RAM
Geforce5950 or Radeon 9800 Pro/XT
High_End: Aka Hardware that doesn't exist, but best guess anyway
3.4GhzP4 or AMD equivalent
2GB RAM
GeForce 6800 Ultra or Radeon X800 XT PE.
In conclusion, the game will run well on a variety of hardware, and Rob Duffy, the lead programmer, says that the game looks real good no matter what, and that it will continue to look better as hardware improves. Like all previous id engines, we'll be playing games based on D3 for another five years down the road.
Enjoy everybody!"
I have been following the development of Doom3 closely for about a year, I've seen the alpha, I know I'm going to like it. I've studied all the info available about editing for the game, of which a fair amount exists because of the alpha leak. All I can say is, I'm ready to start editing for Doom3 as soon as I get my preordered copy, so I'm ready to build.
About the XP-M and the Asus N7N8X mobo, will the stock heatsink fit or would I have to find another model that will?
( edit - it told me me there was dirty words in there so I had to find them all and change them.)