CastleGrayskull

Here's what I'm running Doom 3 on:

Pentium 4 2.53 GHz
512 MB
128 graphics card

It looks OK, not great, but my problem really is that it's rather choppy. Whenever I come to a new door and enter a room, or when I fire my shotgun at an Imp, it gets very choppy - like there's frames of animation missing.

Is this a graphics card problem or a memory problem?

Thanks for any advice.

edstein

Check to see if Anti-Aliasing is turned on. That will drop your frame rates quite a bit. The setting is under the advanced tab on the video settings page. Also, the "ultra" textures option requires 512 Mb system memory, you should stick with "high" textures. Never hurts to defrag your hard drive. Check your frame rates using this command:

CTRL+ALT+~

then type

timedemo demo1

Run this 2 or 3 times with the same settings to get an average.

I am getting 30 FPS with 800x600, ultra textures, AA off, everything else on.

My system:

2.6 GHz
1 Gig Ram
Geforce 5600 Ultra, 128mb

flashburn

Or better yet, run 'timedemo demo1 1' so you don't need to throw away that first run.

wmansir

Processor and memory look fine, unless your running crazy high settings. Can you be more specific on what graphic card you have?

The stuttering when doors open is a very common problem. One possible solution is to uncompress the .pk4 files in your doom3/base directory (then move the .pk4 files to a different folder). This will allow the game to load textures faster since it doesn't have to decompress them from the files. There are a couple of downsides. 1. It takes 3Gigs of HD space to uncompress them all and 2. You'll have to copy the .pk4 files back if you want to play multi-player online because Doom3 checks the files to make sure they haven't been tampered with.


There is also a tweak for ATI cards in the Beyond3d.com forum (Humus's tweak) which is said to increase performance 10-30%. It involves editing a text file that changes how the game is rendered, but should look exactly the same. It was just discovered this weekend and is still being debated (even Carmack is weighing in). Applying this tweak may also break mutliplay since files will be changed.

msdmoney

Yeah whats your graphic card. 128 mb means nothing in terms of whether it will run doom 3 at a decent frame rate need to know the gpu.

joeblow69

You didn't say what resolution you're trying to run at. I have a similar system (with a Radeon 9800 pro) and it's runs very well at 800x600 at medium quality. It even seems ok to me if I but up the resolution to the next level.

One thing you can do, is increase your image cache. The default is to use 20 (or 32) megs. I increased mine to 128, and things run quite a bit smoother. The setting is in one of the .cfg files in your base directory (sorry, I'm at work, and can't check the file name).

DVD Polizei

Definitely would like to know what card you are using, the OS, and how many other programs in the background are running (anti-virus software off I hope).

fumanstan

512 Mb of video memory, not system. And technically, a 128 meg video card is recommended to run on Medium quality, although i can run on High with my Radeon 9700 decently.

edstein

I just upgraded from 512 to 1 G. When I had 512, I got a warning when selecting the ultra setting that I need 512 for textures. After the upgrade, this warning went away. I therefore thought it must have been the system memory that caused the message.

JaxComet

I didn't notice any slowdown when switching from 800x600 Medium quality to 800x600 High quality. My set-up only consists of 1.8Ghz P4, 512 RAM, Nvidia Geforce4 Ti 4600......

shaun3000

I found that turning off shadows improves frame rates quiet a bit.

DravenCFH

Two things here, which video card? If it is a 128mb fx5200 or a 128mb 6800, well those 2 cards are night and day.

Secondly, adding another 512mb of ram would help overall computer performance.

There are tweaks all over the web on how to improve Doom 3, what to turn on/off what file to edit, uncompressing the rar files.....just got to hunt around and find one that works. The only thing you may need to do is bring the resolution down and/or the image quality down a notch for the game to be playable. Which reminds me, what are the settings you are using?

nickdawgy

I am running it on my girlfriends computer...she has a Athlon 2800+ with 512 RAM and a 128 mb Radeon 9200 (I think) card. Runs fine at normal, no shadows. No choppiness at all. I was quite surprised.

Oh and I run it at 800x600 as I do all my games.