Had an athlon 2600 and a radeon 9600 pro with 1 gig of ram. Played the game comfortably, spent nowhere near that amount.
I agree. Personally played it on an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton overclocked to 3200+, a 9700 pro and 1gb of ram and
I could max the game @ 1024x768 with a fairly stable 60fps or raise it at 1600x1200 for a mostly stable 30fps experience. Didn't spend that much money either, but truthfully I bought many used parts because retail price were pretty damn expensive.
Anyway, while the whole "
spend a shit ton of money while upgrading your drivers frequently" is a sentence that doesn't accurately reflect the reality of how it was back then, it is closer to the truth of how it was back then compared to how it is now. Nowadays, every single word of this sentence is absolutely false. Back then, in some region and depending on which hardware you bought, it could have been true. Here in canada, we were price gouged AF when it came to computer. $3000 standard computers were only starting to slowly disappear around that time.
Edit:
After looking at the benchmarks for Doom 3 from this epoch, there is no in hell I could run the game at 1024x768 maxed out at a stable 60fps with that setup. Thinking deeper about it, I'm pretty sure I was running the game instead with a mix of medium and very few high settings, at 1024x768 with an average around 35-45fps or closer to 60fps at 800x600. I also remember there were instances in the game where it would slow down into the 20s. I remember there was a debate as to whether you could actually run the game with ultra textures on a video card with anything less than 512mb of memory. Even if you enabled the option, the thory was that it wasn't really running at ultra, but instead ran at high settings. A couple of tricks were discovered while you could force the game to run at ultra texture with an edit of the .ini file but there never was a consensus regarding this.
I remember that while fiddling with the .ini file, I once ran the game on my 9700 pro with textures that were beyond anything I'ver ever seen during my 2 playthroughs of the game. The specific textures I'm thinking about are the textures inside the elevators, specifically the box in the middle with some air vent, which was drastically better and much more beautiful than anything I've managed to obtain out of a deep .ini file cutomization before. It happened once. The next time I restarted the game, I could never manage for the game to display those ever again and instead was condemned to use the medium/high setting textures.
