I decided to pop in old Doom3 that I loaned from a friend to see what all the hype was about. It's a pretty cool game and the graphics are naturally the best ever but I expected my system to handle it a little better. Judging by the fps count I should be fine. It usually reads about 60fps at 800x600x32 on High quality. Which is excellent for me but for some reason when I open doors or turn corners (as well as other random instances) it skips and the frames drop to the single digits or to zero for a second or two. It's very annoying. I tried medium quality at 1280x1024 I believe and the problem was solved but It obviously didn't look as good so I was kind of bummed. Anyway, should I blame this on 512mb of generic ram or a not so awesome processor. And one more thing, I read that enabling triple buffering would make things look a little better but I can't for the life of me find where to do that in system preferences. What do you think? Thanks everyone. (I'm going to go try to download the latest video drivers to see if that helps)
D3 always ran slow for me, regardless of settings. I got the good FPS around 60, but whenever doors/new areas came up, then it lagged. The engine is bollocks really...Source is waaayy better..
I guess we're in the same boat man, glad someone knows what it's like. The thing that grinds my gears is I'm using a "D3 certified" 6800 and I expected things to scream. On medium quality the game runs great, but looks fairly bland and blurry in a lot of places, the textures often seem dull and washed out, the character models still rock though...
512mb of ddr pc3200 ram cant quite run the game perfectly. Upgrade by another 512mb's and it should run amazingly. Most game stutters like this are caused by the system ram and not the graphics card. Doom 3 recommends 384mb's of ram for minimum requirements. The high detail setting needs more. Windows xp alone can use up to around 100-150mb's leaving you only around 350mb's to run the game. This is most likely your problem. :good:
There's a special command that increases the heap size of RAM used by the game, the default is like 64mb, so if you have 512 you can safely set it to 256, 1gig - 512 etc etc. http://www.tweakguides.com/Doom3_1.html That should help.
Thanks everyone, I guess I just bite the bullet and buy another stick or two. Might as well do this the safe way.
If you add a stick of 512, you should be able to run the game at 10x7 high settings with no problems, just like me when I had a barton 2500+. Triple buffering does help a lot in this game. I have an ATI card so I can't tell you exactly where to go, but you can look in your OpenGL options. The reason high quality is so hard on the system is because it enables automatically 8xAF, as well as decompressing textures, therefore needing more memory. Since your card only has 128mb of memory, the game has to use your RAM and it probably runs out, then it has to go to virtual memory which is extremely slow, and that's when you experience pauses. (Basically everytime you change rooms right ?) You can also try to disable vsync.
Well, i just started playing Doom 3 on this linux box and I can run it at 1280x1024 (pretty sure. Its at least 1024x768) on Ultra, and get around 60fps normally, and the lowest I've seen is mid 20's. Is that pretty good, or nothing amazing?
A couple of things... first of all, after looking around a bit, I read that Doom 3 limits your fps' at 60. If anyone knows if that's true or not, please let me know... Secondly, I thought it was pretty interesting that Nvidia's 6800 GT and ultra are proclaimed the best cards for Doom 3... which means that both whooped up on Radeon's X800s Here for the press release
Yes, D3 does cap your frames @ 60. You can of course get rid of this by tweaking your .cfg, or creating an autoexec.cfg of your own. That guide I posted the link to tells you how. Oh yeh the nvidia thing - not surprising to me, it seems that the company that advertises the most of their product - nvidias "way its meant to be played", intels "intel inside, blade server" etc, microsoft msn search? all of their products tend to lose against those that dont - radeon, amd..linux?? see a pattern?
As we speak, there is absolutely no card that is supposed to be able to run Doom 3 at ultra settings always smoothly. ID recommends you have 512mb of video memory to run doom at these settings because the textures are not compressed, taking a huge amount of memory. As we all know, video memory stops at 256mb, for now. If you had 2gb of RAM, the game would run smoother at ultra. Run it at high settings. I'm pretty sure it will run much better without taking too much out of the graphics. As far as capping the FPS, whatever you do, you should always let vsync turned on, even if you decide to uncap your fps, as the tearing is pretty bad in this game, even if it's dark. Also, enable triple buffering if you haven't done it already. (through the drivers). One last thing. Keep in mind Doom enables AF and AA automatically at high/ultra settings, so you have to take that into account.
