Guess what was released last nite...
Half-Life 2 Engine Benchmark Demo; it was at GDC, but one of the guy who has taken my place (to give a talk on Shader 3.0) has emailed me it.
The 180 MB demo is pretty cool too, you don't get any control over it; but it does give you a better understanding of how th game'll perform.
Unfortunately what screws up the speed in HL2, is the physics in this new engine. The Graphics have been cut back a bit, they're not *as* amazing; that said my GeForceFX 5900 Ultra now peforms almost identically to my Radeon 9800 XT... which suggests to me that the Shader system is no longer ATi Bias.
You get taken through 3 sections of the game.
When they say it'll run on a P3-700MHz what they mean to say is that, it will run reasonably on this; provided you have a monster of a graphics card and run in fixxed-function mode.
As for Doom3; the physics in Doom3 are pretty good. I mean they're not uber-realistic, but they're fast and they do what they're suppose to. They used ODE as a base (or so goes the current rumour), which when you play the game you notice that physics has been thought about... but you can also tell that alot more attention has been put into the gameplay rather than the fancy features. Graphically, it looks good, but what'll keep you wanting to play it is the sheer fun factor, playbility and speed.
Even will full graphics my 1.2GHz P4-M w.GeForceFX 5200Go! is capable of pushing it at 60fps (the capped rate) at the 640x480 setting.
So in terms of speed and sheer polished gameplay Doom3 is a must when it is released next month
personally i'm gonna get it just for the T-Rex hehee
(i've had a glimpse of it in the beta but currently only have chapter 1 of the game)
Athlon64 FX-51 | 1.5Gb DDR2 PC3400 | GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 56.60 | DirectX9.1 SDK | Audigy2 | Windows XP 64-Bit