Hmm

[gh0st]

OK I need a little help, ok so I bought Doom 3(dont worry this is hardware-relevant), and for some reason there is an incredible amount of slow-down, especially when I shoot. Now this is my computer:

Pentium 4 2.6Ghz CPU (2 CPUs)
1Gig DDR RAM
ASUS P4S800 Main Board
80 Gig HD
ATI 9600 Pro (128M)
15" FP547 monitor by BENQ

Now to me it looks all good, like it could at least run it on the minimum requirements and run ok, but even at the lowest requirements there is a ton of slowdown, especially when I shoot, or move around when there is something besides me in teh room. Is something wrong? My graphics driver is up-to-date aswell, did the store I bought the computer from (completely new) rip me off or soemthing? Do I have some virus thats screwing it up? (Ad-aware always picks up CWS, and ive heard taht does some pretty gay stuff to your computer. Also will my computer run halflife 2 good? And what should I upgrade next? Please help me out, this sucks, thanks.

 

[koldapu]

what do you mean by 2 cpus?

also, what kind of RAM do you have? valueram or performance ram?

and i think doom require at lesat a 9800pro or something like that . . . like 256mb could really help

 

[koldapu]

i really think that its your vid card . . . you may wanna think about upgrading it . . .

do you have a budget or anything for an upgrade?

 

[U-Toast]

ok, the 9600 is pushing it a lil but, it should work, i dont c y. You can change the imgcash in the config, and also something that makes the game much smoother, but u wont be able to play on line, is to unrare the pak-000/004 files directly into ur base folder. What this does is decompress the files, so that they are not compressed in game, making the transaction from place to place smoother. As for the cash, heres what u want to put in the config
seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "256"--> 1/4 of your ram so 1024/4=256
seta image_cacheMinK "3072"--> u can pout this higher, but too high wont be good like 4096 is ok.

That should help also

 

[gh0st]

I really dont know what (2 CPUs) means, it just says taht in my dxdiag. could taht have anything to do with it? Also is there any way to make it so that when the computer starts up, the only programs taht run are windows required processes (so when you press ctrl+alt+dlt only like 5 programs are running instead of like 20?

 

[Nubius]

well the card should be sufficient. I read a big detailed article about how doom3 was made to look good even on low settings and was made to be fairly playable on cards as low as the geforce4ti but honestly I don't know too much about ATI's cards. In the tests they conducted the geforce6800 handled doom3 much smoother and easier than the ATI's X800 so the fact you have an older ATI card could have something to do with it. Your card is running in 4 or 8x agp mode right? Have you looked at your graphics card settings to make sure its not accidentally in PCI mode or something cause I"ve had that happen and it makes gameplay impossible. Check AGP Aperture size in the BIOS stuff like that

 

[killians45]

Doom3 is optimized for NVidia chipset. I ran doom on 640 480 with high details with only a NVIdia 5200 and 256 memory and runs somewhat smooth, just a few lags everyonce in awhile and usually only when the levels have freshly cached but once into the level smooths out. you have a higher gen card. you can go into startup and remove uneeded items. or just cntrl alt del and end processes. another thing to do is launch doom, cntrl alt del, goto processes and set doom3 priority to high. I'm guessing this is not just a 'slight' lag as in a quick stutter... also AGP aperture size like nubius said is a good start. check defrag, how fragged is you HDD... you may think that a simple thing, but if its fragged doom 3 will run SLOW.

 

[koldapu]

start - run - 'msconfig' - startup

 

[U-Toast]

i run doom 3 on high on 1024x768 at 30-40 fps and 60 on 800x600

 

[killians45]

yeah, but my system is older. I have 1.6 PIV, NVidia 5200 (BFG Asylum), 256 DDR, 20Gig HDD that not even at 7200!!!! Sooo, yeah I'm surpised my system runs it at all, let alone with high settings at 640x480. 'bout to upgrade system memory and vid card when I get around to not being so lazy Then eventually MBD/Processor so I can get dual channel, hell may even splurge for PCI-e. didn't put start-run-msconfig because I dont know what version of ms he's running. win2000 doesn't use msconfig.