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.
