DOOM 3 - It's Done.

Update: Isolated reports of Best Buy breaking the on-sale date of August 3rd were floating around this past weekend, but I can confirm that the Lynnwood Best Buy location is selling the game right now. Mine is pre-paid at GameStop, and as soon as they get their copies, they'll sell them, as long as the district office says that they can (and they usually do).

Buzz around the industry is that DOOM 3 is a near-perfect melding of the edge-of-your-seat paranoia that HalfLife brought to the game, and the shit-your-pants fear that the DOOM series is known for. PC Gamer has the World Exclusive first review (re-posted online if you can find it), and it got 96%. I think the next PC Gaming Renaissance is upon us. DOOM 3 should be out between August 3-5th in the US. HalfLife 2 should be out the following month, which I still have a free coupon for (thanks, ATI!)

Official System Requirements have been found. 1.5GHz Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon 1500 (or better), 384MB RAM, 2GB Hard Drive Space, nVidia GeForce 3 / ATI Radeon 8500 (or better). It still sounds like that's pushing the low end. You'll still want at least a 2GHz Processor equivalent, 512MB RAM, and a GeForce4 / Radeon 9500 class machine for reasonable performance.

HardOCP has posted the first ever high-end benchmarks for DOOM 3. While I'm not pleased that my ATI Radeon X800XT is performing less than I would have expected (due to a weak OpenGL driver), it's looking like just about everyone out there with a decent machine should see DOOM 3 as it was meant to be seen. Perhaps ATI will be able to make some driver tweaks to get things up to a more competitive level.

Team Radeon has some feedback from ATI regarding the DOOM 3 benchmark controversy, most notably a quote from Dave Orton, the new ATI CEO ...

We are confident we will do whatever is necessary to make our OGL driver the new industry standard for stability and performance.

I certainly hope so, because ATI's OpenGL drivers have been subpar for several years now. I put my faith in ATI because of their excellent Direct3D support, and the fact that their wicked-fast cards didn't need monster heatsinks or multiple slots to cool them. The X800XT PE has a huge clock speed advantage over the GeForce6800 Ultra. DOOM 3 will be the graphic engine that powers games for the next several years. The level of performance documented in the DOOM 3 benchmark is quite unacceptable, so if this doesn't kick their collective asses into high gear to get a decent OpenGL driver put together, then maybe the mass exodus of gamers back into the nVidia camp will.