Didn't own an Xbox but I watched footage of it on G4/ Tech TV and I really wanted to give it a try. Stunning game in its day.

still very mediocre to me, had it on PC

Haven't played it in years but I don't remember it being quite that jerky.

Granted, it was one of those miracle ports where the fact it ran at all was amazing considering the hardware fell way below the game's minimum specs.

I'm quite surprised every vote so far is for okay to great given how much of a backlash there was against the game back in the day.
I guess it's one of those games that's grown more liked over time.

What I really liked was the atmosphere it reminded me of being in a horror movie, but that didn't contrast to well with the badass space marine wiping out hell vibe of Doom.

Good shooter/horror game. Bad Doom.

Yeah that seems to be pretty much the consensus, that it's good for what it is, but what it is isn't what people want/expect from a Doom game.

As well as being crazy powerful for its time, the Xbox was also much closer to PC architecture than the PS2 and Gamecube were, which helped a lot. Doom 3 also plays into a lot of the console's strengths, leveraging shaders and per-pixel lighting over high polygon counts.

That Geforce 3/4 Hybrid chip in the OG Xbox really did push things along, makes me wonder what "could have been" if that console sold better and was on the market for a couple years longer.

I had a Radeon 9700Pro back in those days on the PC, so I was in camp Half Life 2 rather than Doom 3... Horror isn't really my genre anyway, but I was always impressed by the shadowing and lighting that game had on display, but less so than some of the texturing, shaders and physics which I thought Half Life 2 did better.

I guess maybe it could've been pushed a little further, but surely games like Conker, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Riddick, Halo 2, etc were pretty close to its limits? I mean, we're talking about a circa 2001 GPU with 64MB of RAM to work with. I never got the feeling that its install base stopped the devs behind games like those from pushing hard to maximise the hardware, they already looked almost unbelievably good for the specs they were running on. Plus they already seemed to be hitting hard walls with things like Half-Life's low framerate, Doom being divided into smallers areas separated by load screens, and Halo 2 being downgraded from its E3 showing.

Games like Doom 3, Half Life 2, Riddick were ultimately PC ports, they were never built for the hardware itself from the ground up.
We both know when a game is built from the bottom up for a platform... That developers can pull off some interesting things.

Halo 2 did push a heap of shader effects though, but ultimately it made a ton of cut backs due to development time.

Bungie for example could have taken Halo 2's engine significantly farther than they did and implemented techniques like Impostering, Baked shadows+lighting and pushed the visuals out even farther than they did.

Don't get me wrong, the visuals the Original Xbox was pushing out was the best of the generation, just could have been a little bit more.
Wasn't Kameo originally an OG Xbox game for example at one point? That might have made it one of the best looking games on the system if that ever happened.