Doom3 Performance

[KillerShots]

OK... It would appear that D3 isn't quite doing what I'd expected. Here's my initial results (using my laptop):

• Medium Quality
• All advanced options enables (except VSync)
• 2x FSAA
• 800x600 res
• No sound acceleration

Hardware:

• Pentium IV 3.06 GHz w/ HT
• 512M DDR
• 4200 RPM hard drive (It's a laptop)
• GeForce FX 5600 (64M)

Results:

Generally... it plays... can't really say much more than that. Not too pleased with the performance. If I try and crank anything slightly beyond that, it starts to get really choppy. I get the impression that it's doing a lot of swapping, so perhaps a RAM upgrade is in order (or it could be a VRAM issue, seeing as I only have 64M)

Desktop machine
Settings

• High quality
• All advanced options enabled (except VSYNC)
• FSAA disabled (for now, haven't been screwing with it too much yet)
• 3D Audio accelerated
• Surround speakers enabled

Hardware

• Dual Athlon MP 2000+ (I don't think the dual meant anything here)
• 512M DDR
• 10k RPM IDE HD (ATA 166)
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128M)

Results

This is quite a bit more acceptable. Still smooth... I can push it up to ultra high quality at 640x480, though I appear to go into "swap thrash" mode and get a few seconds of beautiful smoothness followed by a few seconds of "waiting to load." Feels like it's "Almost there." Again, I may be able to add more RAM... but if it's a VRAM issue, I'm not sure I care to go much further. I don't think that increasing the speed of my CPUs is going to help (I can go up to 2800... but I'd need 2 of em to make it work right). As an amusing side-note, I was a bit thrilled (and rather quickly confused) when I convinced it to run at 1600x1200 w/ 16x FSAA... and it worked perfectly smoothly. Looked like crap, though. Then I realized that the quality setting actually meant something .

Summary

I think I need more than 512M RAM to get this running smoothly with ultra-high detail. The laptop may be SOL due to video... but it didn't offer 1440x900 anyways so it would look bad no matter what I did.

[Noxious Ninja]

Ultra-high is entirely a VRAM thing. 256 MB cards (at least my friend's 9800XT) will be acceptable, but will still suffer a bit of thrashing.

EDIT: Oh, you can do custom resolutions.

Create a file C:\Program Files\Doom 3\base\autoexec.cfg in Notepad or smth, and add

seta r_customWidth "x"
seta r_customHeight "y"

Where X and Y are the width and height.

[Kane]

It's most likely a vRam thing, or as far as the CPUs are concerned, a cache/memory b/w thing.
Ultra High is for 512Mb cards
High is for 256, Medium is for 128 and low is for 64Mb and below IIRC. I can use high on mine, but as it's only a geForce 3, most of the special effects are missing and the framerate is very poor (10FPS on average) as the textures are constantly being thrown to and from main memory (AGP Texturing)

[hushypushy]

well it's not THAT dependent on VRAM,kane... "high" mode is also dependent on stuff like PS2.0 and things like that. i know a lot of people with radeon 9xxx running High settings and 128 mb Vram, only because of the PS2.0 and such

[Kane]

I can run high settings, but it will automaticaly disable the features my card can't do: thus for me it's entirely dependant on vRam