Doom 3 for the Mac

Coming to a G5 near you.

I'm sure you heard by now that Aspyr has finally published their release date for the upcoming Mac port of Doom 3 (March 13th) and you have seen the MacWorld article which benchmarks the game using the latest Apple hardware, but what I wanted to note was the system requirements needed to run the game.

Minimum System Requirements

Doom 3 runs on any iMac G5, or any Mac that meets the requirements below
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.8 or later
CPU Processor: PowerPC G4/G5 or later
CPU Speed: 1.5GHz or faster
Memory: 512 MB or higher
Hard Disk Space: 2.0GB free disk space
Video Card (ATI): Radeon 9600 or better
Video Card (NVidia): GeForce FX5200 or better
Video Memory (VRam): 64 MB
Media Required: DVD Drive

Recommended System Requirements

Doom 3 runs best on a Power Mac G5 2.0 GHz or faster
CPU Processor:PowerPC G5
CPU Speed:2.0GHz or faster
Video RAM:128MB

While its good that Aspyr lowered the processor requirements from a G5 only to also include a G4, it's the minimum MHz of 1.5GHz that will exclude many Mac owners from being able to play the game. Only the very latest Mac's released recently have processors that run that high. What's disappointing to me and a whole bunch of other Mac gamers is the above mentioned article which shows a dual 2.5GHZ G5 paired with the top of the line ATI Radeon card getting mediocre frame rates. Hopefully there will be some demo released so I can see if it runs decently on my G5 with "only" an ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB video card. I would also be curious to see if it supports true widescreen modes.

This whole thing makes me glad I followed Kruddler's advice and got another PC for gaming.