Doom 3 Performance boost
 

I started this topic so it wouldn't get buried in the mess of other D III threads, plus it didnt' exactly fit in the screenshots thread


Mods if you need to merge by all means, but if you could at least wait a day or so? I think this info is helpful and I didn't want anyone to miss it.


Little tip I picked up elsewhere for increased performance:


In your DOOM 3 directory, find "DoomConfig.cfg" (x:\Program Files\Doom 3\base). Open DoomConfig.cfg in Notepad.

Find the line:

seta image_cacheMegs "32"

I changed 32 to 96.





Other in the thread changed it as high as 384 with a noticable difference, but said the jump to 512 didn't yield any major difference.





From here:


http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoo...33&tid=1438663



new tweak found:


tried this and Im now runnig at 1280x1024 compared to 800x600 at the same settings.

"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 **** 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 agian.

Now the game starts and runs mutch faster!!!


from here:


http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/gen...topic=15503352

it did work, i changed it fro "20" which was in my cfg file to 92 and there was a significant boost. I am running a 2.8 p4 with 800 FSB with only 512 megs of pc 4000 ram and a radeon 9800 pro. playing on high settings at 1024x768 and it runs very well with the boost. I am getting another 512 stick this week so it will be great since that is my bottleneck.

when i get the more ram i will up it to probably 256.

Man, that extra RAM is gonna make it play WAY better. :)

Glad to know the boost works. Thanks for the tip Holo!

-Lasereth

actually i hope it will because i still do see the frames drop sometimes. and who can argue with having a roomate that works at best buy and gets you a $200 stick of ram for $99.

Well, I know for sure that going from 512 MB of RAM to 768 MB of RAM on Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam made a HUGE increase. Going from 512 MB to 1 GB on Doom 3 should be amazing.

-Lasereth

thanks for the tip, helped a lot.

This one sounds shady, but it might help some peeps out. If you have an Nvidia or ATI card that supports multiple monitors, turn off Windows XP's multi-monitor support. Go to [Display Options]->[Settings]->[Extend my windows desktop onto this monitor]

Make sure it's turned off. This will help with other games, as well. Made a HUGE difference for me. (Geforce 4)

what I think this does is dedicates more ram to storing the images and textures and what not so as not to have to load the textures over and over again, at least thats what my friend told me. And thanks for the other tip.

I can never tell if you are being sarcastic, if you are not thanks for the boost of confidence that it will actually do something, if you are, you are making my head hurt. :)

ok i dont want to sound like a complete nerd and i know its completely off topic but,

while waiting for D3 to install, i read the licsense in the back of the manual. and in section 3 it lists a bunch of things you arent allowed to do.

One of these things is i. Reproduce or copy the software(except permitted by section 4)

the thing is, section 4 is about cheating, they meant section 5 which is about copying. obvious mistake,

I was hoping for some cool easter egg, but no, only a typo. but its something at least

Tried it and it made my game so much better, thank you for the tip :)

I'm sure I'll say something like "thank you for the tip!!!" after I go out and buy it.. I didn't put a pre-order down and thus I don't have it yet. ;)

I saw this earlier today, it definately works! I'm getting at least 15 FPS higher now and an all round more smoother Doom experience.

Guess I'm the only one who didnt get any boost from this... :(

Still get my 30-40 fps avg @ 1024x768 / medium on my GF4 Ti4600 / barton 2500+ / 1gig pc3200 corsair xms ll

I tried it. Are you supposed to put a "1" in the line above it instead of the "0" that's there? I haven't noticed a difference, except when I try to use it with a "1" in the line above the line you change from "32" to "whatever" the game crashes to desktop. What's the deal with that? I've got 786MB to work with.

I have an Athlon XP 1800, 786 MB RAM (PC2100), 60 gig 7200 RPM drive, and a Radeon 9600 Pro (128).

Using this performance boost (changed 20 to 128), I can now play it in 1024x768, Med Quality without any problems whatsoever where before, it was choppy at times in 800x600 Med Quality.

Now that I've been playing in a higher resolution, it really looks no different than 800x600!

i've noticed that the resolutions look higher than they actually are, 800x600 does not look like 800x600

I shit you not! RAM makes a huge difference in games. Some people like to say that 512 MB is enough...yeah, it's enough, but adding more will boost your frame rate big time.

-Lasereth

From what I have heard that number is the size of the texture decompression, so the larger the number the more decompressed the textures are on your hard drive. The reason i thinking it runs faster is that it doesnt have to decompress as many textures while running the game. Check and see how large the folder is after doing this. I'm at work and can't check it. Plus I may just be completely wrong about this whole thing.

Am I the only one wanting to know what this does before jumping in? Performance gains dont just come out of nowhere, this has to be doing something pretty beefy--and I would like to know what it is before I jump in.

check out my post above, if my source is correct, there's your answer

Whats the source? ;)

well it looks like I was misinformed, I asked about it and got this link

http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoo...33&tid=1440520

thanks man!

I think you're changing the variable in the wrong line, there are two "Cache" lines, make sure you're edited the correct one.

I bumped mine up to 256 and I've got a Gig of Ram, might try 512 later :D

I tried the performance boost and it helped out a good bit. The game is way less jittery. It's running really good now on my GeForce 4 TI4200 128 MB.

-Lasereth

Word. I corrected that, Mr. D. I also wasn't allowing for enough cache to be free. It's default at 200 (k?), or something like that, so I jacked it up to around 10000 (k?). That fixed it.

Thread updated above with new tweak.


Make sure you read a few pages of the thread I linked with the new tweak as it has some cautions.

Thanks man. I tried out the first tip you gave, except instead of starting at 32 it started at 20... But anyway it seems to be running better!

Ok, it started at 20, I'm running on a 9200 ATI radeon 128mb what should I set it as?

Thanks for the 2nd teak man..doing it as I type this.

Watch out for that new tweak, the decompressing one--I dont believe you will be able to play online like that.

Benchmarking
1) Load Doom3 using the shortcut that enables the console
2) Open the console using the ~ key below ESC or press CTRL ALT ~
3) Enter the command timedemo demo1
4) Wait until demo has finished and note your FPS
5) Adjust your settings/tweaks and repeat steps 2 to 4 until you find the settings with the best average FPS.

Repeat steps 2-5 with the other Doom 3 benchmark

benchmark

To test your FPS while online type "com_showfps 1" at the console

Please make sure that you read the Display and Rendering Tweak Notes at the foot of this page. The lowest system specification I have here is a 1.8 GHZ AMD Athlon XP, Geforce4 ti4200/128/8x with 512 megabytes of system ram. Tweaks are based on best compromise / quality in the single player game for that system.

Make sure that you do a writeconfig DoomConfig.cfg followed by a vid_restart after setting the cvars.



Main Menu Options

Ultra
Each texture (diffuse, specular, normal) will be at full resolution with no compression. In a typical DOOM 3 level, this can hover around 500 megabyte of texture data. This will run on current hardware but will not fit onto a 256MB card, causing texture thrashing. The amount of texture referenced in a given scene per frame ( 60 times a second ) can easily be 50 megabytes+. This is ideal for 512 megabyte video cards.

High quality
Uses hardware compression ( DXT1,3,5 ) for specular and diffuse textures and no compression for normal textures. This looks very very close to Ultra quality but the compression does cause some loss in quality. This is ideal for 256 megabyte video cards.

Medium quality
Uses hardware compression for all textures (specular, diffuse and normal). While this still looks good, compressing the normal maps can produce a few artifacts especially on hard angled or round edges. This is ideal for 128 megabyte cards.

Low quality
Uses hardware compression for all textures (specular, diffuse and normal) and automatically resizes diffuse and normal textures to no more than 256x256 and specular texture maps to no more than 64x64. This is ideal for 64 megabyte video cards.





Best Visual / FPS Compromise Config
Create a file called autoexec.cfg in your Doom3 'Base' directory and add the relevant config
64 Megabyte Video Cards
seta image_downSizeLimit "256"
seta image_ignoreHighQuality "1"
seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "256"
seta image_downSizeSpecularLimit "64"
seta image_downSizeBump "1"
seta image_downSizeSpecular "1"
seta image_downSize "1"
seta image_forceDownSize "1"
seta image_anisotropy "0"
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST"
128 Megabyte Video Cards
seta image_downSizeLimit "512"
seta image_ignoreHighQuality "1"
seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "512"
seta image_downSizeSpecularLimit "64"
seta image_downSizeBump "1"
seta image_downSizeSpecular "1"
seta image_downSize "1"
seta image_forceDownSize "1"
seta image_anisotropy "0"
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST"

Ripper, are you sure those work at the end? I am a bit scared to mess with anything that drastic...

he got that from this website
http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Doom3/FPSVisuals.htm

i dont know im sure some of those tweaks would work. but im running doom 3 on high settings with 4x AF and no AA with excellent FPS. and that website recommends high seetings only for 256 cards. i havent benchmarked yet but i dont notice any lag so i dont feel that need too.

Did the first one and it made a considerable differnce.

Did the second one and it didn't really do much. Game starts faster, maps load at the same rate though and the fps is pretty much the same.

Just a note... unpacking your .pak files does nothing but make the game run slower, and load slower.

iD Software commented about it recently... I will try to find the source again and post it.

And I have done a number of benchmarks and the game was on average 5 fps slower when using the unpacked files vs. the .pak files.

I posted this earlier on another forum, some of you might find it useful:

ATI has released Catalyst 4.9 (beta) drivers that will help boost Doom 3 performance: http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4547.html

nevermind

what works best for me is turning off shadows. Turning that off is that single best thing I did to make the game run better

Hi,
In any other game, I would agree with doing this. But in Doom 3, the shadows are a huge part of the experience. Seeing a zombie cast shadows as it emerges from the darkness, or the fleeting shadow of an Imp as it scurries towards you is part of what makes the game so impressive. Playing without shadows, you are not truly playing Doom 3 :(.
Thanks,
Manga