When you think about it, this makes sense: Movies like Shrek or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within are entirely comprised of computer graphics (albeit pre-rendered) and, despite the fact that a DVD only has a resolution of 720×480, the DVDs of those movies look many times better than even the best modern game. It’s probably the best-looking game at 640×480 you can buy.

In general, Doom 3 stands up to low resolutions and lack of antialiasing remarkably well. You’re better off dropping resolution or main quality settings if you need a performance boost. Those are the only two settings that can be adjusted without seriously compromising the whole Doom 3 experience, making the game look a lot worse than intended. We recommend you leave these all enabled, save for vertical sync and antialiasing. There are several options in the Advanced video options menu, allowing you to disable bump maps, specular lighting, shadows, and so on. The default resolution here bumps up to 1024×768, and the 8x anisotropic filtering is automatically engaged as well. Don’t try this mode with anything but the very greatest hardware, and have 1GB or more of RAM. Some have reported that the multiplayer levels fit into a 256MB card on Ultra Quality mode, so it may be an option for those with really high-end hardware. Since no textures are compressed, many of the levels in the single-player game won’t fit into local video card memory unless you have a 512MB card, which aren’t on the market yet. Ultra Quality: This mode uses no compression at all for diffuse, normal, or specular maps. The default resolution for this mode kicks up to 800×600. For our tests that don’t use anisotropic filtering, we disable this with the console command image_anisotropy 1. It should be noted that this mode automatically enables 8x anisotropic filtering. This mode also uses the greatest variety of sound effects, making it appropriate only for those with lots of RAM, 768MB to 1GB or more. Normal maps are uncompressed, though specular and diffuse maps still are. High Quality: This mode makes several changes to improve quality for those with high-performance 256MB graphics cards. The default resolution for Medium is also 640×480. Though it doesn’t affect benchmarking, a greater variety of sounds is used in this mode, thus increasing the overall memory footprint for the game, making this mode appropriate for those with 512MB of memory or more. This means that the textures for single-player levels should fit on a 128MB graphics card. Medium Quality: Textures are all still compressed in this mode, but they are all used at their full size.

Doom 3 ultra settings