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System Requirements


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Just a follow up on this, in case anyone cares. I did end up picking up a machine with these specs on Ebay for $300:

 

HP Elitebook 8460w 14"

i7 Quad Core 2.2 Ghz

8 GB RAM/500 GB HD

AMD FIrepro 3900M GPU 1 GB

 

This has worked just about as good as I could have hoped for. Keep in mind, this is very much a secondary machine, I have a more powerful desktop that can run about anything. This laptop just gives me the occasional fix I'm looking for on the road once in a while.

 

It can pretty much run any Thief FM decent, including Keeper of Infinity and Death's Turbid Veil. I can get fps up into the 20s or more on those particular levels. Certain areas of King's Story are less than that.

 

I can also run just about any TDM mission, with some tweaking. Sometimes I'd have to drop down to 1280x720, and/or turn off vertical sync (which seems to help a lot). Probably the mission I had the hardest time with was The Rats Triumphant, it was tough to get the fps up out of the teens on that one.

 

Overall though, great little machine for my purposes. I couldn't really find anything used or refurbished with better specs on my budget, so this was the winner.

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  • 4 years later...

In anticipation of future questions about system specs.

Why aren't recommended system requirements shown somewhere on https://www.thedarkmod.com/downloads?

Not everyone searches on the wiki.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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6 hours ago, Anderson said:

In anticipation of future questions about system specs.

Why aren't recommended system requirements shown somewhere on https://www.thedarkmod.com/downloads?

Not everyone searches on the wiki.

We've had some high-end master race gamer come crying in the forums that their uber rig can't do 4K with 16xAA and SS maxed out

On the other hand Radeons 4000 theoretically must run TDM but give black screen practically.

Nvdia drivers can crash the app when a particular mission has used up too much VRAM.

How do you put that in system requirements? I think it's the mapper's duty above anyone else to suggest the PC speed level as mappers are not limited in that.

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im not a hardware guy, but if I give  a suggestion.
How about expanding the known D3 minimum requirements, with requirements that the new TDM features need?

====
doom 3 bfg
(source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/208200/Doom_3_BFG_Edition/)

** Minimum **
OS:Windows vista/ Windows 7
Processor:2.0 GHz dual core
Memory:3 GB RAM
Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT / ATI Radeon HD 5750, 512 MB video RAM
Hard Drive:11 GB
Sound:Windows compatible sound card

** Recommended **
OS:Windows Vista-64/ Windows 7-64
Processor:2.4 GHz dual core
Memory:3 GB system RAM
Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 / ATI Radeon HD 5850, 768 MB video RAM
Hard Drive:11 GB
Sound:Windows compatible sound card
Additional:3D Monitor + compatible glasses
====

And from the wiki:
TDM Known System Configurations


 

Edited by freyk
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For example, how i would calculate the required diskspace.
D3 bfg needs 11,0 GB
TDM (1.08 standard installation) needs 3,56 GB
But people want to store some more missions and savegames, so i would add +/- 3 GB more.

Edited by freyk
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Agreed.
and adding a  network-device to the requirments is also great.
And to make it more userfriendly, how about adding hardware requirements detector? (tried earlier to make one)

And we can add a linux distro to the OS list, like OpenSuse.
(Official OpenSuse build page for TDM)
 

Edited by freyk
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I recently upgraded my AMD graphics drivers and in the latest version of their configuration app, they are listing a couple of my installed games (which I have been happily playing for years) as "Minimum system requirements not met".

System "requirements" that aren't actually requirements, just guesses as to what sort of hardware would give best performance, are pretty much useless in my opinion. The only things which should be listed as requirements are actual hard requirements, like a GPU which supports OpenGL 3.0, a CPU which supports the AMD64 instruction set etc. I've never seen a game which would refuse to run if you didn't have enough CPU cores or a high enough clock speed.

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12 hours ago, duzenko said:

How do you put that in system requirements? I think it's the mapper's duty above anyone else to suggest the PC speed level as mappers are not limited in that.

Perhaps select the most performance intensive maps that can be created, including those which exist now and start from there. According to Murphy's law there will be a weakness caused by some PC component at all times.

I don't know if automatically detected optimized settings for each system is possible within TDM but it could also help.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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11 hours ago, Anderson said:

Perhaps select the most performance intensive maps that can be created, including those which exist now and start from there. According to Murphy's law there will be a weakness caused by some PC component at all times.

IMHO it defeats the purpose by making the false impression that to play _any_ mission your system must be able to play _all_.

But even then, it does not address the video settings, which by definition are intended to support the wide array of system specs.

And what is "playable"? A lot of people don't think 60 fps are mandatory. What about resolution? The more I think about it, the more I like the wiki to be the right place for this, along with per-mission forum threads.

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5 hours ago, duzenko said:

IMHO it defeats the purpose by making the false impression that to play _any_ mission your system must be able to play _all_.

But even then, it does not address the video settings, which by definition are intended to support the wide array of system specs.

And what is "playable"? A lot of people don't think 60 fps are mandatory. What about resolution? The more I think about it, the more I like the wiki to be the right place for this, along with per-mission forum threads.

With regard to false impressions - we know that it is possible to tweak the game, including by using the information on the wiki. Moreover it is possible to make the game run in 8 bit and such. It's ok. That's an option. But it's not how 90% of people play the game. What you are writing is true, but it is also true that these people are in the minority. That was the reason to drop support for older systems with the recent TDM update.

We simply mean that there is a necessity to provide some orientation. There must be an average standard which can be considered an optimal experience. 60 FPS is very much desirable for many games! Sure, this is not a shooter where the more FPS there is, the merrier. But there still are platforming sequences in certain FM's, where good FPS helps a lot.

I don't know how giving recommended settings on the home page of TDM can do harm. If anything, it will help to provide the most optimized experience. It also must show how different the system configuration can be from vanilla Doom 3 recommended settings.

Finally, TDM also had a Benchmark Demo that I really liked. It is a supplementary tool that may help to give a rough idea of average impact on FPS. The training mission was a good place to start:

 

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Since every mapper has different attitude and technical skills when it comes to performance, having hardware requirements per FM is IMO much better idea than having one general set of system specs. It would be great if mappers had target hardware and fps included in release topics for their missions.

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General system requirements are a difficult thing anyway... there are even vendor dependent differences. And, as peter_spy wrote, there are vast differences in different missions as well. About any mission which is done these days is much more demanding than a mission from 2010 or so.

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