Doom3 performance stinks...

[rudder]

With three kids and wife a stay at home mom, I don't have an unlimited budget. I do have some options to upgrade my box and was wondering which would give me the most boost in performance.

Here is my setup:

2.4 p4 northwood 533fsb
512 Meg
Intel d845pebt2 mobo
ATI 9700 PRO 128meg


Here are my options:
upgrade to a faster cpu ~$80
upgrade video card to 9800pro ~$50
Add 512 Meg ram ~$80
swap ATA HD for SATA HD ~$50
Possible motherboard upgrade although I do not think that is the bottleneck.

Doom3 runs choppy even at 640X480 with all details but no AA. I close most memory resident programs like anti-virus, popfile, winamp agent , etc. And it still runs like crap.

 

[LanFear]

Go with the 9800 Pro, framerates is what you're after, and upgrading your cpu and mem won't have near as much of an effect as upgrading your grahpics card. I would go higher than the 9800 Pro personally, none of your options that you are considering upgrading will make that much difference. Consider the 6600 GT, If you can wait a little while, not out in retail yet, but it should cost around $200.00 and will give you much better performance. You are video card limited and that's the main problem.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: rudder
upgrade to a faster cpu ~$80

Marginal improvement unless you go up to 800FSB, which would also require replacing the MB and RAM.

upgrade video card to 9800pro ~$50

The 9800Pro isn't much faster than the 9700Pro (~10%, although a new 9800Pro will OC more than the older 9700Pros would).

Add 512 Meg ram ~$80

Might be worth it.

swap ATA HD for SATA HD ~$50

???

Possible motherboard upgrade although I do not think that is the bottleneck.

Moving up to a gig of DDR400 and a P4C would help, I think.

Doom3 runs choppy even at 640X480 with all details but no AA.

Note that "High" or "Ultra" details will absolutely crush your video card, since it doesn't have enough memory to hold all the textures, and it forces 8xAF. Try it at "Medium" settings and see if that works better... you should be able to run at least 800x600 Medium, maybe even 1024x768, with halfway decent performance.

I close most memory resident programs like anti-virus, popfile, winamp agent , etc. And it still runs like crap.

Maybe a check for spyware? Never a bad idea... and free.

 

[jim1976]

I don't know about prices since I'm living outside U.S but regarding DIII and perf/price ratio I can recommend:

A64 3000+ (but in this case you'll have to bear the cost of a mobo too) so you can always o/c yours too.
6800NU
512mb ram(DIII luvs extra ram)
No need for anything else IMO.

 

[tak3shiro]

The big bottle for most games is the Video Card. Upgrading RAM (past 512)/CPU/HDD will only give you small overall boosts unless you have the video technology to back it up.
I'd take the advice of "LanFear" and get the 6600 GT when it comes out. It's proven to take care of Doom 3 with graphics turned up! go to www.hardocp.com to get the framerates (can't remember exactly). Don't bother with the other peripherals for now.

 

[rudder]

I think I may go with the 9700pro to 9800pro and add some RAM. The 6600GT would be nice, but I am on very limited budget. I could get a used 9800pro and add some ram and with the difference of y stuff getting sold will still be a lot less than a $200.00. But hey, the kids will be off in college in 10 years, I will have extra $$$ then!

I should have mentioned I am only using doom3 as a benchamrk as well. Borrowed a copy from a firiend who finished the game over the weekend. I am really waiting for half-life 2 and I want that to run decently on my machine as well.

 

[JimRaynor]

i wouldn't expect much going from a 9700pro to a 9800pro, probably won't even be able to notice the difference.

 

[Fern]

Have you done any tweaks to the game yet ?

With no AA, I'd think you should do OK 10 X 7 at medium. I do OK at 12 x 10 medium. My rig ain't much better than yours!

 

[Sureshot324]

IMO all your components are about equal and your system isn't really being bottlenecked by any one component. With a 128mb video card you need to set the quality for medium. High is designed for 256mb video cards and ultra is designed for 512mb video cards (which don't exist yet). There isn't that much visible difference anyway.

I would wait until you can afford to upgrade the whole system.

Edit: I think going from a 9700pro to a 9800pro is a big waste of money.

 

[epsilon9090]

yeah, you should just upgrade your entire computer. I say get an athlon64 2800+ with a cheap motherboard and cheap ram, but a gig of it, a cheap case and a cheap dvd-rom, and a cheap hard drive and your set.

 

[TekDemon]

First off, tweak the config file...sometimes it's not that the FPS is that bad but that your system is loading textures which slows the FPS and causes a lot of chop.
In order to really increase the caching though, you need more RAM =P

Your system should be quite decently capable of playing Doom3 to be honest...not super ultra smooth at 1600x1200 but it should be nice and smooth and good looking at 800x600...

Anyway I suggest upgrading to 1GB of RAM and boosting the cache to 512MB, but in the meantime open up DoomConfig.cfg in Notepad and find the following values:

image_useCache Set this to 1 (it's on 0 by default)
image_cacheMegs Set this to 256 (half your system RAM)
image_cacheMinK Set this to 25000 (don't ask why, just freakin' do it ok?)

Boot up Doom3 again and you should have NOTICABLY smoother play...

Even on my crappy 9000 mobility there was noticable smoothness boosting, although it still looked like ass and ran much like ass. But smoother ass.

Heh, I also discovered that on the 9000 mobility radeon if you use texture quality settings over Medium the stupid card splits the textures to render, causing all kinds of lighting errors to break loose...making the edges between the splits very very very obvious...

Also, since you have a 9700, there's a patch out there for the shader calculations that will speed things up a bit more:
Shader File Thread at Beyond3D

Also, install ATI's latest drivers with DOOM3 speed enhancements, including a fix for a problem that resulted in Doom3 making ATI cards run full anisotropic on everything instead of selective (doom3 has a selective system that should work).

THEN, install the latest Doom III beta patch or whatever.
You should get a HUGE boost if you do all of these...it'll feel like 15FPS faster although probably not actually be that much faster (it'll feel much faster since there won't be load stutters).

If it runs better but not a lot better and still seems to have caching lag, install the extra 512MB of ram and change the cache size to 512 out of 1GB...that should kill any annoying load-freezes once and for all.

Oh and the settings you should probably initially run after all this tweaking is just 800x600 medium. Make sure you set it to 800x600 medium then edit the config file since it might very well overwrite it when you set the new settings.

 

[Demonicon]

There's no reason that system can't play Doom3 @ 800x600.

Your problems are likely driver related more than hardware related.

 

[bigal40]

i think your problems are probably driver realted also. I got a 25% fps boost in doom 3 when i upgraded from the catalyst 4.3 to 4.8. I am running a amd 64 3000+@1.8ghz,(it's the mobile version in a laptop) 512 mb pc3200 ram, and a 9600 mobility at 35-40 fps at 1024X768 and medium quality. another you should try doing is turning shadows off. that pulled me up about 5fps alone.

 

[Goi]

I think the 9800Pro would do you more good than another CPU. If you have a good 2.4, you might be able to reach ~3GHz, you might wanna try that. As a reference, my old system with a P4 2.8@3.2/1GB PC3200/9700Pro system was running pretty ok at 1024x768 medium details, with a min framerate in the 20s. Don't try to run high settings unless you have a current generation flagship series 256MB video card. By that I mean the X800/G6800 256MB series, until the X700/6600 series arrive.

 

[GullyFoyle]

Originally posted by: rudder
I think I may go with the 9700pro to 9800pro and add some RAM. The 6600GT would be nice, but I am on very limited budget. I could get a used 9800pro and add some ram and with the difference of y stuff getting sold will still be a lot less than a $200.00. But hey, the kids will be off in college in 10 years, I will have extra $$$ then!

I should have mentioned I am only using doom3 as a benchamrk as well. Borrowed a copy from a firiend who finished the game over the weekend. I am really waiting for half-life 2 and I want that to run decently on my machine as well.

I for one think you're pointed in the right direction. I whipped out the calculator and Anands Doom3 performance graphs and the 9800Pro looked to be about 13%-14% faster than the 9700Pro in the "midrange" charts.

I have another friend with only 256Meg of memory in his computer, and it won't even run Doom3. I'll bet having 1 Gig would make a noticible difference over 512Meg.

What you were wrong about was you having any money while your kids are in college...you'll have to wait at least until they graduate

 

[TekDemon]

Originally posted by: DanDeighan

Originally posted by: rudder
I think I may go with the 9700pro to 9800pro and add some RAM. The 6600GT would be nice, but I am on very limited budget. I could get a used 9800pro and add some ram and with the difference of y stuff getting sold will still be a lot less than a $200.00. But hey, the kids will be off in college in 10 years, I will have extra $$$ then!

I should have mentioned I am only using doom3 as a benchamrk as well. Borrowed a copy from a firiend who finished the game over the weekend. I am really waiting for half-life 2 and I want that to run decently on my machine as well.

I for one think you're pointed in the right direction. I whipped out the calculator and Anands Doom3 performance graphs and the 9800Pro looked to be about 13%-14% faster than the 9700Pro in the "midrange" charts.

I have another friend with only 256Meg of memory in his computer, and it won't even run Doom3. I'll bet having 1 Gig would make a noticible difference over 512Meg.

What you were wrong about was you having any money while your kids are in college...you'll have to wait at least until they graduate

I really think it's not worth it to upgrade for the 13-14% boost...I mean, that's only like 4FPS if you're getting 30ish FPS. If you're willing to drop extra cash for 4FPS that's OK, but personally I think a little bit of tweakage is a much better option. Plus the 9800 is nothing but a tweaked 9700 core anyway clocked at a higher speed....so overclock that 9700 =P

The RAM definitely should go to 1GB though, but you have to tweak the memory settings so doom3 really utilizes it because by default it's setup so it'll work on less.

Rudder said he'll probably waste some time tweaking soon so I'm eagerly awaiting his results =P

 

[LocutusX]

(spoiler maybe)

The advice given in this thread seems to be fine so far, but for the record, I'm almost finished the game (just done with Hell, which I've heard is the slowest part of the game) and did it all @ 1024x768 / High.

Only for Hell I lowered it to Medium. Turned it back up to High after leaving Hell.