Pretty picle for you all.(Doom 3 related Oh no!)

[paradidle]

I have a problem. Its not medical. I have sent this question to activision.

My specs:

Pentium M 1.7 Gha (~P4 2.2Ghz)
ATI 9600PRO TURBO 128 MB
512 333mhz RAM

Now I know my ram is slightly under the "not exactly 1 gig mark" But I have recently placed an order to correct this Also, u may find that RAM may hve nothing to do with the problem. But Im not saying anything.

Now then. My problem starts here. During gameplay on the 1st level, on absolute minimum video settings (i.e. 640x480, no adv opt.), my framerate struggles to reach 11fps+. Now if that wasnt enough to annoy someone this next bit will.

When it comes to cut scenes (this is where it gets funny), my framerate likes to take a ride up to 50fps+. Now I dont know how doom3 was made, but I do not see any difference between gameplay graphics and cutscene graphics. Maybe someone can explain.

Here are my screenies:

CUTSCENE:



gameplay:



Cheers!

[Knoxville]

may seem a stupid question but do you have the latest Cats installed? If you have it may be worth a quick google for some config file tweaks that may improve things for you as even on top systems it can take a bit of messing to get it running well.

[paradidle]

Well, I may resort bck to Dells original drivers for their laptop. ATM Im using The latest Omega drivers on my latop (4.8). I like the temporal AA switch .

Ive gone through some tweaks and altered a few things in the .config file. But nothing too drastic has changed. Is their a difference between the cut scenes and gameplay? According to my screen shots their must be. Is there a big enough nerd on here to spot it?

[daniel_owen_uk]

There will be a huge difference between cut scene and in game, in game is rendered by your gfx card as you playing it (because obviously the movement is defined by you). Cut scene can be pre rendered and thus there will be big differences in fps.

[yamangman]

No, the cutscenes arn't prerendered in DOOM III. Surely a driver issue? The quick and easy way to solve this problem, format your HDD and start over .

[dkmech]

How can people call formatting hdd a quick and easy way? Even with an image handy i wouldn't want to reinstall and reconfigure most of the stuff i have. I used to reinstall windows 98 regularly enough, but i did not enjoy it and it was a last resort.

Oh, and before i get flamed for not noticing a smily at the end of the post - i did notice it, but some people still format with remarkable ease. I hoard so many documents and savegames and stuff that working out what to back up and what to get rid of turns into a nightmare...

[Kezzer]

Looks like there's a serious lack of shader model support there

The cutscenes would probably run faster as they're scripted. When you're running about don't forget that your system has to calculate your position, your speed, the gravity, the time within a frame, the time it takes for you to travel a certain distance. This is all needed for collision detection and since it is all done on the fly it causes the frame rate to drop due to the immense amount of load on the processor.

I wouldn't worry about it to be honest although your frame rate does seem a little low. I think it's probably because of the system setup.

[daniel_owen_uk]

Kezzer didn't you just describe pre rendered?

[yamangman]

Nope, they are rendered in real-time.

10 FPS seems very low, even for that system. When you say you like temporal AA, do you have that on? Turn it off. Try using cat's 4.8. Use driver cleaner 3 before you install the new drivers perhaps.

[paradidle]

iam using cats 4.8. with the omega driver, remember im using a dell 8600 here, dell's official drivers for my laptop are years old. and they havent updated them. I installed the driver on a clean install of windows. I have all AA + AS off. All advanced options off. Minimum settings. And Activision havent yet got back to me.

[pre]

I would try 4.9 beta hotfix for Doom 3. They give better D3 performance even more so than the 4.8 official released after it.

Have you tried the D3 "patch" for ATi cards? If you drop me a pm with your email I'll send it you my cfg + the patch which might help improve performance.

[Richdog]

Using minimum settings 640*480 causes worse performance than using higher settings at 800*600 because it's not fully utilizing your graphics card therefore putting more load on your CPU as it has to do all the work... and let's face it a 2.2Gh P4 mobile equivalent isn't up to too much, especially with the lower bandwidth it has compared to a desktop chip.

Increase the graphics settings a bit and you may notice a bit of an increase in performance. I could be wrong, just an idea. And installing the 4.9's will definately improve things a bit too.

[Kezzer]

Kezzer didn't you just describe pre rendered?

No, they're scripted which means all the movements of the characters are known in advance yet it is done on the fly.

[paradidle]

Well, I have found the source of my problem. It had nothing to do with drivers, it had nothing to do with my processor speed, it had nothing to do with my ati card, it had nothing to do with how doom 3 was made. My problem was to do with my processor design and technology. Because my processor is a Pentium M, it has a feature called Speedstep. Basically it allows u to adjust processor speed depending on what kind of program u had running. However, to my bad luck, in my BIOS it was switched to Disable. Which meant no mtter what i did on windows, my speed would never go above 600Mhz. Even tho it was capable of reaching 1700Mhz. So i switched this to enable. My Doom 3 problems dissapeared.

[pre]

lol. surprised you didnt notice it was hella slow in anything else. glad you sorted it though!

[paradidle]

heheh yea....unless you have two batteries, like me


Im such a mobile harcore gamer...