I had picked up a 5$ copy of yesteryears’ best game - Bioshock - one which had the same bloodline as one of my all time fav games System Shock 2.

Simultaneously, I had tried out a demo of Doom3 - a game which sadly I had never bought. I have a decently respectably Core2Duo 1.8G, 2.5G RAM, nVidia Go7400 card.

Doom ran spectacularly - at 1280 X 800 - my laptop’s native resolution. I had a lot of graphics eyecandy turned on. Mouse movement was fluid. The story, of course, sucks - but Doom/Quake has never been about the story anyway. It’s the experience.

Bioshock was how 20,000 leagues under the sea would have looked, done in a 1940’s styling. The story and the plot was fabulous.

The engine, however, crawled. I used all the latest patches from Direct2Drive - but it still crawled. The Unreal engine has been no stranger to controversy regarding it’s quality - however a lot of games still use it. As I was reading wikipedia about ID Tech 4 (as Doom3’s engine is known), I found out that most game creators did not use it because of it’s early lack of expansive views (a la Farcry ). However, ID soon released the MegaTexture technology.

The ID Tech 4 engine costs about 250,000$ - I am not sure if that is a factor. However, playing both the engines side by side, showed which one was more forgiving on older hardware.

Which means Rage (with Virtual Texturing) gets my vote - although I may end up buying it for my PS3.