Doom 3 tweak for ATI users

Deadwing

Not sure if anyone posted this before, i think someon might have, but i looked for it and couldnt find it.
Anywho, i just played doom 3 for the first time there, and even with these specs:
Radeon 9800 pro 128
AMD 2400
512 ram

I was till getting jittery play on 640x480!!

I read this on another forum, not taking the credit for it myself, but after your first run of doom, a file is created in you x:\program files\doom 3 folder called doomconfig.cfg.
Open the folder with notepad, and look for the line:

'seta_image cachemegs "20''
(in mine it said 20, yours might be different).

Anyway, i changed the 20 to 96, and now can play 800 x 600 medium detail (which still looks beautiful) with an excellent framerate that only drops slightly during big fights. This works really well, i encourage any ati owners playing doom to try it

rabid

Nice one man,

Will be cranking up D3 for the first time tonight at about 8pm hopefully, and only have a Radeon 9600 so that'll come in handy should I need it....

You using the 4.9 Cat's???

Am going to see how it goes with 4.7.....

Brainsssssssss!!!!!!! Suck on this zombie!!!!!!!!!!!

Its been a long week reading shizzle from the warez monkies...finally I get to lock and load.....and then drop my load.... :eek:

Deadwing

I installed the 4.9 beta cats last night, so i actually dont know how the game runs on the older drivers on my machine. Aswell, i think the more ram you have in your system, the more you can up the cachemegs value.

God damn this game is scary tho..cant wait to play it once it gets dark :eek:

Deadwing

Quick update, just tried it on high quality settings, and it still runs fine. God damn this game is good!!

BadCharlie

Yeah have changed my config to 512 as i have 1gig of ram. I play the game on ultra high on my sytem and i have to say it plays very very well. I dont get slow down but from time to time i do get a jerk or so but i think thats cause something just loaded.

Tis a good game very scary playing it on veteran also.

bizmark

My pc isnt copeing so well think i need a better g-card cooler to run it at anything over 800*600 med detail .....looks ****ing amazeing though

rabid

Installed it last night and straight off the bat was able to run it on medium detail, at 1024X768 and it was running fine so left it.....

Am downloading the Trent Reznor sounds as I thought some of the weapon sounds i.e. the pistol, and also the sound of your movement were a bit dull, tho thats prolly my mediocre sound card and sh*te speakers.....

Installed directX 9.0c last week, so will update to the 4.9cats and start playing with cache tweak...

BUT SO FAR am impressed - played for about 2/3 hours last night, couple of things made me squirm and fly back in the chair......they're right - ANTICIPATION is everything but ya still get scared sh*tless now and again...

Rock on...

dirtyharry1971

This aint an ATI specific fix. I'm running a 2.6 Athlon with 512 DDR RAM With an Nvidia Quadro. I initially had framerate troubles and this fix sorted out all my framerate problems. Can run on ultra but prefer the smoothness of play so am playing on high 800 X 600.

The fix simply increases the amount of cache stored in your RAM I don't know why it wasnt set higher by default but anyway I'm happy it works

Deadwing

Apparrently this tweak gives an almost 40% boost in fps and is ati specific.
From planetdoom forums:
http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/topic.asp?fid=5733&tid=1447473

"All you do is extract "glprogs" into the "base" folder of your doom 3 directly. (its also newer and doesn't have artifacts like the first versions in the first part of the thread)

If you want to remove it simply delete the "glprogs" folder and therefore do not need to modify anything."

http://esprit.campus.luth.se/~humus/temp/doom3PerformanceTweak.rar

Ive done this, and im running at 800x600, high detail, and only get slowdown when theres a load of monsters on the screen. and it has to be a LOAD of them.

:EDIT:
Youll need winrar to extract the performance tweak file!!

neXus9

Deadwing wrote:

Not sure if anyone posted this before, i think someon might have, but i looked for it and couldnt find it.
Anywho, i just played doom 3 for the first time there, and even with these specs:
Radeon 9800 pro 128
AMD 2400
512 ram

I was till getting jittery play on 640x480!!

I read this on another forum, not taking the credit for it myself, but after your first run of doom, a file is created in you x:\program files\doom 3 folder called doomconfig.cfg.
Open the folder with notepad, and look for the line:

'seta_image cachemegs "20''
(in mine it said 20, yours might be different).

Anyway, i changed the 20 to 96, and now can play 800 x 600 medium detail (which still looks beautiful) with an excellent framerate that only drops slightly during big fights. This works really well, i encourage any ati owners playing doom to try it

Yeah, I posted that same tweak on the doom 3 first impressions thread. Works very well, much smoother. I put mine up to 128 (I have a gig of ram).

shinzon

Surprisingly, that tweak works lol, put that file into my base folder and its upped my frame rate considerably, so much so ive upped the graphics to high and its the same frame rate as i got in medium lol


running on high detail

1024X768
optimal settings in cat 4.9's
70-80 FPS drops to 30 if its busy

oh happy days
Shin

chrismon

will this work for my (stop laughing!)
ge-force 4 64 mg card?

shinzon

chrismon wrote:

will this work for my (stop laughing!)
ge-force 4 64 mg card?

i dunno the tweak i tried was ati specific but you could try the cfg tweak, but tbh with 64 megs it wouldnt make that much of a difference

shin

j0e9o

which is better for doom3 thou 4.8 or 4.9?

tman

j0e9o wrote:

which is better for doom3 thou 4.8 or 4.9?

i think the 4.9's only make a difference if you've got an x800 range card.
i stand to be corrected though

Stephen

The 4.9's made a *small* difference for me (9800 pro). Nothing near the difference made by applying these tweaks though

LoBo

cat 4.x's are what exactly?

leeroybrown

LoBo wrote:

cat 4.x's are what exactly?

ATI's Catalyst Drivers.

shinzon

to be honest all these tweaks here in concert with the cat 4.9's and direct x 9.0c drastically improve performance on doom 3 with ati cards

shin

Giblet

Ok there are new offical Cats out. 4.8 increases all OpenGL by a few percent, with Doom3 improving nearly 15% on some configurations.

Deadwing

Excellent stuff giblet, i take it theyre on ati.com?

RuggieBear

Here's another tweak guide. Apologies if this has been posted before but i didn't see it!


http://www.nvnews.net/tweaks/doom3/index.shtml

rabid

Am running on Dx9.0c
Cat 4.8
upped the image_cache tweak to "128"

And am able to run on High at 1028 X 768 with only occassional slowdown...
And only have a AMD 2200+ 1.8Ghz, 512mb PC2700 333mhz, Connect3d Radeon 9600 Pro

Each time I load up D3 I last about 2 hours before I have to call it a night - the tension just kills me, know alot of it is just shock tactics but the level of detail, lighting and production values are the highest I've seen in a game to date...and in terms of stability iD are out on their own again...

My 2 nickels anyways...

Deadwing

Cool, i still have mine set to 96, i might try upping it to 128 myself, seeing as how im still playing in 800x600.

Deadwing

Okay guys, just got this tweak here, and i have to say, now i think im fully tweaked out, im getting a totally sweet fps, barely any slowdown, and the loading between rooms is cut down a shedload. This just elaborates on the first tweak, it may look like im just posting the same sh!t, but read it and youll see for yourself.
Taken from http://www.tweakguides.com/Doom3_8.html

"The following commands control the image cache, which if enabled and set correctly can help smooth FPS and may also boost performance:

image_useCache [0,1] - If set to 1, uses background loading to cache image information. This may not necessarily improve framerate performance, but it does assist in smoothing out frame rates and reducing loading pauses. Note that the image_cacheMinK (see below) size must be raised from its default otherwise the game will crash when using this setting. Once this setting is enabled, the actual cache value is set in the image_cacheMegs setting below.

image_cacheMegs [Megabytes] - Determines the maximum amount of system memory to allocate to temporary loading of full-sized precompressed images if the cache is enabled by setting image_useCache to 1. Note that since this caching only applies to precompressed images, using the Ultra Quality setting will render this setting useless, since at Ultra quality no texture compression is used. Since a cache is only a temporary holding area, and not the place where the entire game is meant to reside, do not raise this value to something extremely high as that will simply reduce the available memory for the rest of Doom 3. Try a value of 128MB for those with 512MB of system RAM, and if you have more than 1GB of RAM, you can try a higher value like 196MB or 256MB for example. Do not set this to half your system RAM or some other monstrous amount.

image_cacheMinK [KiloBytes] - This setting determines the minimum size in KB for precompressed image files to be loaded into the cache. To make sure most image files can be loaded, and to also prevent a system crash when enabling caching, select a value like 3072 to start with. Raising this setting may improve caching, but it may also hinder caching if most textures are below the size you specify, so don't just raise this value for the hell of it."

So now my config reads:
image_usecache="1"
image_cachemegs="128"
image_cacheMinK="3072"
Thats with 512 ram, and its playing veeeery smoothly. Just be sure when you set usecache to 1, you up the value of cachemink from the default '200', otherwise the game will crash when you load up.
Hope this helps