As all of you who allready have this game recognized the game is very slow even on new Computers.
I found out the reason for this and the solution to fix this problem.
As you already know after installation the game consits only of the doom3.exe and some .PK4 files. Those PK4 files includes the entire game (sounds, videos, textures etc.) in high compressed form.
Normally those files were decompresse during the game.
But this exactly is the problem. Even new CPUs are not able to decompress those files while running the game with good peformance and therfore the game runs very slow also on new computers. I don't know if the develpers of ID-Soft was just too stupid to think about this or if they have an agreement with some hardware manufacturing firms.
How to get around this problem:
It is very simple. Go to your Doom 3 installation directoy and get inside the folder "Base". There are some .PK4 files you have to open each of them with WinRAR 3.3 and extract their entire contents to the Base dir in you Doom 3 installation folder (replace all files if they are any duplicates). Now you have to delete all .PK4 files in the Base folder to prevent the game to use those compressed files again.
Now the game starts and runs mutch faster!!!
Have fun playing Doom 3!!!
----------------------------------------------------
On gaming.stny.com forum:
Killmas
Big performance tweak in Doom 3
ok before i tell what i did, ill tell my current system specs just to show how much my comp sucks
Amd Thunderbird 1.0 ghz
ATI Radeon 9700 pro 4.7 cats
Abit Kt-7 (im not sure cause its that old)
Audigy x-gamer
512 mbs sdram
as you can see im well below minimum specs expecially in the processor department. however with a couple of tweaks i tried i run at around 35-40 fps in medium quality at 1280x1024
other than the unpacking tweak everything i do is in the doom cofig file located in the base folder.
in that .cfg file i noticed that even at low quality, trilinear filitiring was used. this is why i set this
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
to this
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST"
which uses bilinear filitiring, sacrificing better quality to alot better performance
the next tweak was not discovered by me but someone else
then next thing you want to look at is the
seta image_useCache
seta image_cacheMegs
seta image_cacheMinK
originally these were set at 0, 20, and 200 respectivly (sp?). when i originally changed the seta image_useCache to 1 and seta image_cacheMegs to 128, the game would crash. i then guessed that maybe the seta image_cacheMegs and seta image_cacheMinK values would scale. so when i increased the seta image_cacheMegs to 128, i effectivly increased it 6.4 times. i then multiplied the 200 by 6.4 to get 1280 which i then repleced the 200 with. this seemed to smooth things out significantly while playing allowing me to bump it up from low quality to medium.
i will be looking at other settings later so maybe i will find something else to help framerates.
----------------------------------------------
Doom 3: CATALYST 4.9 BETA
ATI is providing an early version of CATALYST 4.9 to users interested in increasing performance of Doom 3.
Click Here
---------------------------------------------
I found out the reason for this and the solution to fix this problem.
As you already know after installation the game consits only of the doom3.exe and some .PK4 files. Those PK4 files includes the entire game (sounds, videos, textures etc.) in high compressed form.
Normally those files were decompresse during the game.
But this exactly is the problem. Even new CPUs are not able to decompress those files while running the game with good peformance and therfore the game runs very slow also on new computers. I don't know if the develpers of ID-Soft was just too stupid to think about this or if they have an agreement with some hardware manufacturing firms.
How to get around this problem:
It is very simple. Go to your Doom 3 installation directoy and get inside the folder "Base". There are some .PK4 files you have to open each of them with WinRAR 3.3 and extract their entire contents to the Base dir in you Doom 3 installation folder (replace all files if they are any duplicates). Now you have to delete all .PK4 files in the Base folder to prevent the game to use those compressed files again.
Now the game starts and runs mutch faster!!!
Have fun playing Doom 3!!!
----------------------------------------------------
On gaming.stny.com forum:
Killmas
Big performance tweak in Doom 3
ok before i tell what i did, ill tell my current system specs just to show how much my comp sucks
Amd Thunderbird 1.0 ghz
ATI Radeon 9700 pro 4.7 cats
Abit Kt-7 (im not sure cause its that old)
Audigy x-gamer
512 mbs sdram
as you can see im well below minimum specs expecially in the processor department. however with a couple of tweaks i tried i run at around 35-40 fps in medium quality at 1280x1024
other than the unpacking tweak everything i do is in the doom cofig file located in the base folder.
in that .cfg file i noticed that even at low quality, trilinear filitiring was used. this is why i set this
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
to this
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST"
which uses bilinear filitiring, sacrificing better quality to alot better performance
the next tweak was not discovered by me but someone else
then next thing you want to look at is the
seta image_useCache
seta image_cacheMegs
seta image_cacheMinK
originally these were set at 0, 20, and 200 respectivly (sp?). when i originally changed the seta image_useCache to 1 and seta image_cacheMegs to 128, the game would crash. i then guessed that maybe the seta image_cacheMegs and seta image_cacheMinK values would scale. so when i increased the seta image_cacheMegs to 128, i effectivly increased it 6.4 times. i then multiplied the 200 by 6.4 to get 1280 which i then repleced the 200 with. this seemed to smooth things out significantly while playing allowing me to bump it up from low quality to medium.
i will be looking at other settings later so maybe i will find something else to help framerates.
----------------------------------------------
Doom 3: CATALYST 4.9 BETA
ATI is providing an early version of CATALYST 4.9 to users interested in increasing performance of Doom 3.
Click Here
---------------------------------------------
