Id Tech 7's main selling point has been that it has "10 times the geometric detail" of the predecessor.
I don't know about 3d engines, but arbitrarily increasing the number of poligons is something any engine can do; if they refer to speed instead, I'm very skeptical that it can render 10 times as much polygons in the same amount of time.
Does anybody have a wild guess about what this could mean? Or is it marketing garbage?
If I had to take a wild guess, then going by those entries mentioned on wikipedia:
I would assume that if they have better LODs and culling on a triangle-basis, maybe that can allow them to have those 10x more geometric detail, as in the end the count of renderer triangles would stay about the same? Potentially at least.
I guess it's 1. about pushing more geometry from CPU to GPU with better multithreading, and 2. carefully limiting visible triangle counts by occlusion, which is a matter of level design.
Playing Doom Eternal, i have noticed there never are any hickups from streaming. I don't know if they use streaming at all, but worlds are pretty large, and we can see at least how textures load sometimes.
But framerate is always high and smooth as butter. I assume they have robust and good MT streaming system, which puts other games like recent Star Wars to shame.
Also, the visible triangle count is always low. Outdoors, we see low poly facedes at the distance, and not much detailed level geometry. It also seems they use no LOD for static world at all like most games, and there is no foliage or other expensive stuff.
While traversing through the level, interior comes into sight with detailed stuff. But we did not see any of this while being outdoors - it is cleverly hidden by design so there is no need to render it.
With this practice, it is quite easy to get “2 x larger levels”, or “10 more triangles per level”, and yep, it's a bit of marketing blah if you ask me.,
Still, it's impressive technology and very good work.
Personally i do not really like the glory kill mechanic because it turns too much from shooter to melee. Also the jump puzzles feel more annoying than the relaxing (but boring) exploration and search for key or path to progress in the original older shooters.
And i really hate the power fantasy story elements - at least the german voice acting really sounds like some dumbest anime for kids.
But i love how they adapt music to gameplay at runtime - we rarely get this. It's how games should utilize music and it's really done very well here. Outstanding.
Also, at the second half of the game the fighting really becomes tense and satisfying. Very impressive game design - did not feel like this for years. (Except with Amid Evil, which really is the perfect old school shooter for me)
I find Doom eternal very interesting. I totally hated it initially, but after giving it a chance i really like it.
