See DOOM run
ATI release in-game footage as "testimonial"
When id Software showed off the latest build of DOOM III at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles a couple of months back, it was something of a surprise that it was running on a graphics card supplied by ATI rather than NVIDIA. John Carmack uttered some typically incomprehensible technobabble about how "the R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine [as] it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations". Bless him. We now have a better idea of what that actually means in practice though, as ATI have released a video testimonial showing clips of Dungeon Siege, Asheron's Call 2 and DOOM III in action. Unfortunately the footage rapidly brought ATI's website to its knees and now seems to have vanished entirely, but the good news is that Czech gaming site Tiscali has mirrored the movie, providing both the full version and a 25 second clip showing just the DOOM footage. Despite the small file size it's all in fairly high quality DIVX format, and shows that the game does indeed look much more convincing in motion than it does in the rather unimpressive screenshots we've seen so far. Animations are lifelike, from the strained breathing of a zombie trooper to the way the demonic dog-like creature seen in one of the E3 screenshots crushes a barrier and nudges a corpse around on the floor of a bathroom as a light swings overhead, the shadows all moving believably in real time. It's very much a "don't blink or you'll miss it" affair and the footage had already appeared in the longer "Doom Legacy" video at E3, but this time the clips are clearer and run at a much smoother frame rate, so it's well worth a look. You can download the clip or the full testimonial video from Tiscali. Related Feature - We're all Doomed!
