Problems with gfx speed

RonanH

Hi,

I have what I would consider to be a fairly nippy system, apart from a mid range gfx card. P4 3.4, 512Mb 5400 DDR2 Corsair RAM, X700Pro 256 Mb gfx card, on a AA8 925X mobo. Unfortunately I can't seem to get DOOM 3 to run at a decent frame rate, regardless of the res I play at. When I run the auto detect settings gizmo in the Doom options window it selects 1024x768, high quality. But it skips frames all the time. I reduced the frame rate to 640x480, turned ALL the advanced options off and it is still skipping. The strange thing is if I run the timedemo I get 50-60fps, at 1024x768, but it jumps like crazy as it does it!!! Has anyone here had simililar problems, and any idea what I can do to fix it???

Ronan...

petes

Have you updated your graphics card drivers?

RonanH

Have the Catalyst 5.4 drivers installed... should have mentioned that, sorry.

jessy

do you here your hard-drive working a lot/more than usual when playing?
512mb is not really enough to play Doom3 at decent frame rates at medium/high quality.

I’ve heard that there can be up to 512mb of texture maps in a single level of Doom3.

stevenmu

Sounds memory related alright, if you run the timedemo, and then run it again straight away does it run better the second time ?

Take a look at TweakXP , they have a few articles on tweaking XP for games, look at their memory tweaks aswell (some apply to win2000 aswell if that's what you have). Also if you have SP2 look here for how to disable DEP which can cause bad performance, especially with low memory (use the boot.ini method).

RonanH

Yeah, budget was tight when I built the system, had to cut half the RAM. But even at 640x480 it is still jerky as hell. 512Mb should be enough at that. And I turned off all the other options too... pi$$ing me off! Guess I'll have to shell out on more RAM, and it'll have to be 2x512Mb this time, that's €260 that I don't have ... anyone giving away DDR2 Ram???

Khannie

Jesus...you gave me an awful fright with your ram price estimate. Value ram on Komplett....2x512 for €113.

That would bump you up to 1.5gigs if you have the spare room in your PC. (if not, you could sell your current 512 in the for sale forum). That would mean you have plenty for any game. The X700pro is around the same as a 9800 pro iirc, so it should be /ok/ for doom 3.

RonanH

Well I have Corsair Twin2X 5400 Ram installed, Twin2X DDR2 it'd be a shame to put cheapo ram beside it Probably get the same again, pity only get half the ram for the same money though . I have expensive taste! Would it make any difference to the system??? I have OC'd to almost 4Ghz, but in general I run at stock speeds. My gfx card won't oc anyhow, and that seems to be the slowest part of the system...

BloodBath

Ok why on earth would you buy pc5400 ram and only 512mb of it at that? I struggle to get my pc4000 running at full speed with my 3.2 p4. Have the fsb at 245atm. How have you got that ram running at full speed? You would have been far better off with 1gb of pc3200.

Anywho why get 2x512? Just get 512 of the same stuff and your sorted. That is unless you have 2 x 256 in it.


BloodBath

RonanH

I just went for the best DDR2 memory I could get at the time. In hindsight I would have been better off buying more slower memory... but I'm stuck with it now! Board only supports DDR2. I've been looking on Komplett and have to make a choice between Twin2X 5400 and Value PC4200. I'll get a gig of the 4200 for the same price as 512Mb of 5400... Guess it's a no-brainer really, forget about overclocking and have 1.5Gigs of RAM!!! My only worry with that would be that they wouldn't be compatible, but they are both corsair so I guess they will. Thanks for the help, I'll post my findings as soon as I get the new mem.

Horsefumbler

1gb of ram will deffo sort the problem out.

btw if the ram sticks hav different timings, which they very well might, and the mobo doesn't support ram of different timings the nyou might have a problem.

BloodBath

Afaik it will just use the lower timings on all of the ram. You don't need 1.5gb of ram tbh. If you have one 512 stick in it now and you get 2 more 512's you will lose dual channel cabilitys which will drop potential performance. Get 512mb of the same ram and you won't have any problems.


BloodBath

vishal

in the video detail in doom 3, turn it to low. it should run smooth then. also there is very little loss in video quality when you use low, but you must force your graphics card to use 8x anistropic detail in your ati control panel. you sould be able to run smooth at 10*7 with 2x antialising on as well then.

trust me when i say there is almost no loss in detail.

all doom does when you change the detail levels is that it uncommpresses some of the textures (using high also turns AF to 8x), so if you dont have a lot of graphics memory then it will not be smooth. you can compensate for this by having more system memory but why should you have to when doom 3 has such poor quality textures anyway.

don't upgrade your ram just yet, not for doom anyway.

RonanH

Have 2x256 sticks in at the moment. Dont want to fill all my slots with 256mb sticks and have to throw two out when 1.5 or 2gigs becomes "entry level". ( have sad memories of 8x1Mb sticks in an old pc) 512Mb was considered plenty 6-9 months ago :rolleyes: Think I've settled on the Value ram, can't afford a gig of the 5400 and I dont want to put in a single stick. Maybe dual channel doesn't give much of a performance boost but I'm out for all I can get

RonanH

To be completely honest I don't particularly like Doom anyhow, but it's really annoying me that it won't run without dropping frames! What settings should I set in the ATI control centre to get the best performance. I thought that 8x anisotropic would really slow things down. I had anti-aliasing turned off in the doom options and was still dropping frames... Is there somewhere that explains all the graphics options in the control centre in a bit more detail, not like the online help "this turns on and off anisotropic filtering", that much I can guess but what the hell is anisotropic filtering and what effect will I notice in game, if any...

vishal

AF allows the graphics to do more filtering on textures to reduce the bluriness of textures at distance.

just as a matter of interest, please try what i posted above just to see how it works out for you.

vishal

for best performance turn of aa and af and set to aplication preference. you can also lower some other things if you hit custom settings.

RonanH

Am at work, but I'll try it this evening, post results in the morning... hopefully it'll solve the problems, but I think I'll probably have to cough up for more RAM before long anyhow Thanks for all the advice guys

vishal

i forgot to mention that you need to enable af 8x under open gl for doom 3 and not direct 3d

RonanH

OK, here's what I did. I set all doom's advanced settings to off, set the detail level to low and set the ati control panel settings to "best performance". The result is awful! the menu screen in doom is so blurred that I can barely read it, and the game itself is blocky and has no atmosphere. Stretching a 640x480 res on a 19" screen really sucks!!! On the plus side it's not dropping frames, but I think at these settings it'd run on a PII!!! I didn't have the time last night to start increasing the detail settings one by one to see what works best, but I think I'll have to up the RAM to make it playable at decent quality. Guess I'll be breaking open the kids piggybanks and splashing out on the RAM. Thanks again for the help

R :cool:

vishal

ok here is the deal.

i can run doom 3 smoothly with a 1800+ xp processor, 512 mb of slow pc2100 ram and a 9800 pro. i am not overclocking anything. i run on low but have all the advanced features on and even aa at 2x and af at 8x.

i will post a screenshot of how it looks later.

why is that you with your config can not get it to run smooth?

ok here is 1 http://img246.echo.cx/img246/2079/shot000016ig.jpg
here is 2 http://img246.echo.cx/img246/977/shot000039nc.jpg

julius

Right then,

I have run Doom3 on two systems so far.

system1:
P4@1.7GHz,640MB RAM(pc2100 512,128) and a Geforce 5200 with 256MB RAM.
Got 640x480 and medium detail with no jerkyness or anything.

and system2:
AMD64 3000+@1800MHz(939), 1GByte RAM(pc3200 2x512) and Geforce 6600 with 256MB RAM.
Got 1024x768 and High detail and very smooth to run.

Honestly if I got it to run on system1 above...you should have little problem with yours.
Try this tweak out though:

Look for the file C:\Program Files\Doom 3\base\Doomconfig.cfg and open it in a text editor.

Look for the line: seta image_cacheMegs "20"

(mine said 20, yours may have a different number)

This configuration line tells Doom 3 how much of your RAM to use to store image files (such as monsters, walls etc), and when there isn't room for a file in there it has to be loaded from disk.

I changed it from 20 to 512 (leaving the other half of my RAM for XP and the Doom game to use... if you only have 512mb RAM try changing the number to 128 or 256), and saved the file.

After restarting Doom 3 I was able to run Doom 3 at 1280x1024 ersolution and high graphics with no slowdowns! (averaging 25 frames/second and going as high as 60).

RonanH

Hehe! That's why I posted!! I can't figure out why it won't run smoothly either....

R

RonanH

Thanks Julius, I'll give it a go, that's the kind of info I'm looking for, it MUST be some silly config setting not set properly. If others can get it to run on kit that is less powerful than mine then it should run fine on mine too... It's one of those really annoying things that has been peeving me for quite a while. I have the game since Christmas and haven't gotten past the second level because it is sooo unplayable. I just gave up trying.

stevenmu

Actually thinking about it, I was able to run it fine on a P4 1.6 with 512MB of slow DDR with a Geforce 3 ti200 so you definitely shouldn't be having problems. Did you try any of the memory tweaks from tweakxp ? When you boot up the pc, if you press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to bring up the task manager what does it show your mem usage (I think it calls it commit charge in XP) as ?

RonanH

OK!! We're making progress
I edited the .cfg file and changed the setting to 256. Made a huge difference!!! I ran it last night at 800x600 on medium detail, all advanced options on, except for the first one, and 2x af. It ran at about 60fps most of the time, occasionally dropped a frame as I opened doors to new areas but on the whole it was a massive improvement

Thanks to all of you for the help, I still think I'll upgrade my RAM though, I'm feeling a bit underpowered with 512Mb :rolleyes: 1.5Gigs will make me feel sooo much better!