#doscember
#doscember2022
In this video I would like to take a closer look at the hardware requirements for the game Doom from 1992 and share with you, which hardware I would need to enjoy Doom. For some people this game was a fast FPS for the others it was crawling like a slow RTS, click, wait, click, wait. Let’s see what it means in numbers.
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Interesting vid, but the title is a lie.
It ran smoothy on my old AMD 485-DX 40 as far as i remember, Had 8MB RAM and ran Windows 95 and ran a much newer Trident SVGA card it was built with the older board and alot of much newer componets I peaced togather from garage sales and trades and that was around 96/97.
As a side note, if im not mistaken the DX40 was essentialy a cacheless 486SXL core with a 386DX 20MHz FSB meant for budget performance laptops.
I recall people with 38640 CPUs playing the game with around two nudges below full screen with the toolbar (so some green background)… it wasn't as good as on a 486DX2 66, but it kind of worked.
Also, machines that had less than 8MB of RAM had issues with the last boos (not sure what the number was, but this was reported to me back then).
I first played Doom on a 486/25 with 4 MB of RAM (those are the only specs I can remember). It ran pretty well. We later upgraded to a whopping 8 MB of RAM.
Reminds me of Deus Ex: Machina; it feels like the blend of that level as well.
i remember running DOOM on my Amiga and it just about ran at 20fps ( on a maxed out 68060 (66mhz) ) , and at the time this was touted as faster than a 386 (this was very late 90's and early 2000's). Not sure if a 486sx could really cope but the DX was the hardware to have if I remember. We had 386 PC in work and trust me we tried to run DOOM but the graphics card was pants.
2:37 i thought 286 can access only 1Mb of RAM…
It’s possible kids were told they have a “286” by their parents, the parents upgraded to a 386 or 486 and just never told the kids.
First and foremost, you say you have 25,000 subscribers? Wrong. You have 25,001 subscribers because I'm signing up. This content is absolutely excellent and it's bringing back so many memories of my very first PC build (486DX2@66MHz). One thing I will say…no one was playing Doom on a 286. I have never seen a 386 run Doom properly before for that matter. If I remember correctly it was 386 were Wolfenstein 3D machines and 486's were for Doom. That Diamond graphics card was the stuff dreams were made of back in 1994. I would have thought it would have helped your 386SX machine push Doom to its 24FPS standard. For reference- My 486DX2@66MHz ran Doom without issue but I remember having some issues with Doom 2 but I can't remember what. It was Xcom that gave me the most issues overall..
Addendum- Doom was designed to run at 24FPS if I remember correctly. 😉
I didn't know the 386SX was really a 286! Wow, you learn something everyday!
frohe Weihnachten und guten Rutsch!
I remember playing wolf 3d on a 286 and it wasn't silky smooth. It was ok because I didn't know any better so when I saw it on my friend's fancy 486 I thought it was running too fast.
Doom ran GREAT on whatever hardware you had…
Until you had the opportunity to compare it to something else, which few people had the chance to do with multiple contemporary PCs side by side.
Hah! Same thing happened to a friend of mine! He bought what he was told was a 486DX4 100. A year or two later we were upgrading it and I noticed the CPU was actually a 486DX4 75! Super easy scam since they had a 'warranty void if opened' sticker on the case making it dicey to figure out, at the time.
What if we use 386DX 40 on motherboard with VLB bus?)
Oh, where was FastDOOM then I did play on 386SX 40 with 2 megs of RAM 😅
It interesting to make compare picture quality and size on different system then they give 15fps – I think 15fps is low playable speed for 90-s
I remember being extremely pissed of after being sold a 386sx without knowing what the sx really meant.
Years later I saved enough money to buy a 486DX
I never really regained trust in people who sold PC’s
Don’t worry I’m OK now 🤠
I was used to play Doom II in a 486 with 8mb ram
Magnifique vidéo, dommage que le narrateur n'ait pas fait l'effort de parler en français… l'allemand ça va deux minutes…
Ran good on my 486DX/33 8 MB with ISA graphics card. High detail was possible with slightly reduced screensize (maybe three steps from fullscreen), low details was possible with HUD shown. Some fanmade maps stuffed a few enemies too much onto the screen so it started to lag, but the official maps from the first three episodes were running good.
Very interesting!
The video title alone was enough to have youtube not recommend the channel anymore, and the video substance wasn't even related. 🙁
I am keenly aware of Doom's system requirements because I was stuck on an 8 MHz 286 when it came out, and was not able to play it at home as a result. Instead, my first Doom experiences were on computers at my dad's office, where I sometimes played LAN co-op with my brother on weekends.
We later got a used 386DX-33 and then built a 486DX4-120, so those were the two machines I played Doom on at home in the 1990s.
My memory is that the 386 was fairly playable – but only in low-detail mode, and maybe down a notch or two in viewport size (which I was used to having to do to make Wolfenstein 3-D playable on the 286).
Someone send this good guy a Box o' Doom. I'd, but I don't have any.
Necroware, I really enjoy your videos. Keep up the great work, and thank you. I've gotten lots of helpful hints and tricks that aid my own repairs. One question. Do you have a Cyrix (CX-486DRX2) chip that you can drop in your 386 for benchmarking at 33 and 40Mhz levels?
Back in the days i upgraded my pc to a 486DX/50 and a V7 Mercury P-64 with 2 MB RAM and this game runs as smooth as butter😎
Too bad you didn't also benchmark a PCI 486 setup. My PCI DX4 100 is a killer Doom machine. Great video regardless.
I totally agree with frame rate being a rose tinted(faulty) memory from the past, older gamers remember it being smoother, younger gamers call it "unplayable" even when at 15-30fps lol.
That still holds true today, there are many retro FPS games before Doom that can't escape looking dated including Wolf3D. While ROTT, CyClones, and ShadowCaster advanced raycasting in their own excellent ways Doom eclipses everything before it because it took such a huge leap forward.
While locking frame rates was less common in the past I think 15fps is actually tolerable if it never drops below that. 24fps was a benchmark for quite a while since 30fps just couldn't be maintained by most hardware for a long time at any screen resolution. Despite the minimum requirements listed it didn't get good until 486 for Doom, I remember my buddy upgrading and it was night and day for many games.
In hindsight the Detail setting of Doom could have had a wider gradient of High(1:1X), Medium(2:1X), and Low(2X). Also it's possible to split the detail rendering for Walls and Floor & Ceiling to be different from each other where Walls are typically set higher as the main FPS focal point.
Having tried many handheld 3D games I'd say a 256×192 window reduction is satisfactory based on DS examples, even the small drop to 240×160 like GBA 3D was less enjoyable than 192p imo. So the postage stamp experience wasn't much fun, maybe 240×180 minimum if I had to play that way again.
A racing game
I played the floppy Version on n 386 with monochrome monitor .it was HORRIBLE .
Had to set window size to 3 or 4 and then I got playable 15 fps
Dude, it's been 30 years since I thought about the hardware I was using to play Doom and that was JUST prior to me getting into hardware … I can't freakin' remember what kind of chip I had. I don't even remember what amount of RAM I had. I do know that it ran bretty gud with two notches down from the screen size you were using in this demo. I can't remember if it was High or Low detail – probably low. It ran fast at that speed with that screen size.
We had a 486 25mhz sx and it was a slide show (packard bell legend). But we upgraded with one of those 586 Kingston drop in chips and it ran like a dream after that. We also upgraded the ram to 16 mb and put in a sb 16. Even with an Isa graphics card, the 586 drop in made it run smooth as a pentium. I wish I still had that ol rig.
there is a port of Wolf 3D floating around that will let you "run" it as low as 8086/8088 processor. i've had it going on an NEC V20 at ~9Mhz and it works but i wouldn't call it playable. i've also played commander keen 4 on a tandy 1400LT with xtide but you have to find the CGA port of it as stock executable is VGA only. it is very playable once the graphics are sorted.
Doom ran in protected mode. It couldn't possibly have run on a 286, the CPU didn't support it.
I remember when I was a kid I had a 386 and it could just barely run Doom but it wasn't an experience that I would describe as playable. It ran Wolfenstein 3D just fine though.
I first played Doom on a 40MHz 386DX with 4MB of RAM, i.e. a nearly identical system to the second PC you showed here, but with less memory. It was choppy but playable in high detail mode but ran very smoothly in low detail mode, and I completed the shareware episode several times. I'm not sure what you did wrong with your 386, but it wasn't representative of systems of the time.
I have played Doom on a 286 but needed to reduce the screensize down to something close to a postage stamp. 😂 It was still playable though and if you were desperate enough at uni to play a game on their crappy computers, your only option.
I remember playing Doom on my 386 with 2MB of RAM. I had to use some DOS4GW command to trick game to run and recognize 4 MB of RAM. Additional 2 MB was swapped from HDD. Performance was even lower that in you charts so propably less then 1fps. I was happy anyways.
So, I'm pretty sure that the howl sound effect from the very beginning of the video is pitched down and used at the beginning of "Nightcall" by Kavinsky. Did anybody else notice this? (There are two howles layered on top of each other. It is the lower one.)
When you said that people were running Doom on a 286 I thought I must have too stupid as a kid because I was quite sure it wouldn't have worked, I found it to be running nice on a 486-DX4 and acceptable on the far more popular DX2-66 with visible HUD. I had a PCI graphics card.
I think while you're droping to a min of 15fps it's fine.
PCChips was always a bit scummy. On later 486 boards they often had fake cache installed.
I can confirm system requirements-386SX/DX was an absolute minimum to play Doom, I remember that I didn't even try it on my 386SX 33MHz with 2MB of RAM and in 1995 my parents bought me Cyrix 486DLC 40Mhz with 4MB of ram and it could run both Doom 1&2.
The first time I played Doom was on a 386DX/33. To me it was a lot of fun and an insane improvement to Wolfenstein 3D. The reason it was so much fun even though it was running poor(I now remember the gun moving from left to right slowly while walking) is probably the era and age(I think it was 1993 so I was 13). PCs were very scarce and I didnt know of many games with smooth framerates on our Atari ST.And then seeing such a graphic monster like Doom made us enjoy it as much as possible while forgetting about framerates😂
I was maybe 5 when dad brought home second laptop from his coworker so that we can coop Doom over laplink.
But even then I realized he took one for the team by plating on the 386.
I think i did have e 386 wit a socket 7? with socket 5 cpu? 33mhz? Still have in the attic. But Doom did run Great! No problem and the few times it did lag it was speeded up and to normal back then again. but this was when there was like 30 monster or more in 1 room. I did Run it in DOS. Was using win 3.1. Blood? was playable in Windows but it did have some problems.
I wonder how the 386DX would benefit from the VLB
Thank you! When DOOM came out, I only had a 386SX20 with 6Mb of RAM. And I could, with some tweaking, get it to run, but it was pretty much unplayable. Ran OK on a friend's DX2/66 but best on a 486DX4/100 or Pentium for sure! So my memories on this are fairly sound after all.
Hell, it was fun. 1998, small post-Soviet town, AM386SX33 "powerhouse" stolen from work by dad. First "big" PC after Radio86 and Spectrum. Even equipped with a Sound Blaster!
It was a ton of fun, inclusing, yes, the legendary Doom. Which was running quite well on this config… As long as the image was matchbox sized…
But this was also not a problem, thanks to the old lens from Soviet KVN TV, which was able to "unfold" it back to decent size:)
Great times, really.
I still love how AMD's logo never really changed.
Nice video, my first PC was a 386DX40, I put the motherboard in the trash about 20 years ago and wish I hadn't now. I had a Tseng ET4000 too, that must have got sold as some point as I upgraded over the years.