The guide to a faster DOOM 3 experience!!!

[James]

I don't know if any one has noticed that doom 3 is slow. People are pi$$ed cause the min specs are far to low. What would be the point of buying a game that laggs. I by no means have a "beast" pc but i managed to squeeze huge FPS's out of a badly made game. ID should actually do a survey on peoples hardware and make the game based on the majority.

Step 1:

Far cry was about 4 gig, UT2004 was 5.5 gig....Doom 3 1.4 gig. Something wrong there. They compress everything, so when u need it the game in real time has to uncompress it. go into your doom3/base dir, and use winRAR/winACE to open all the ***.pk4 files. there are 4 of them. open them and extract them to the base directory (the same place you got the .pk4 from). *WARNING* Once finished keep the .pk4 files as you need them for MP, this is a SP solution. This will also make you DOOM 3 folder with out those .pk4 files 4.4 gig. This makes a huge difference though.

you can also open DoomConfig.cfg (C:\games\doom3\base) in notepad and change (make sure to save a backup copy) seta image_cacheMegs "32" to a higher number, such as 128 or 265 (depends on RAM, use 256 for a gig, 128 for 512mb) you will see a big increase too. You also have to change the seta image_useCache to "1" and seta image_cacheMinK to approx "20480" (or higher)

There you have it, since the CPU wont have to unpack the textures, sounds, etc...there is a MASSIVE performance increase at the expense of no Multi Play and requiring more HDD space.



There is no peace without war!!!

[Sabre]

Pr13st,

Seen lots of reviews of Doom3, seems a lot of people believe it to be repeditive, too dark and minimal storyline, albeit with great graphics ..... would you recommend getting it?

[James]

yes and no, the graphics are great if you have the specs. I thought it would be longer but there are a few "choices" to be made so you can play it again and go the other way. I have not done so yet, just played it once. But yes, compared to what is out there it is good and worth the R300.

No if you do not have a high end machine.

There is no peace without war!!!

[James]

Lone Gunman,

2.8ghz, 1 gig ram and a geforce 4 does not constitute as a low level machine, trust me. I said i would not buy it if did not have a high end machine. Yours is def high end. But yes the game is great but very resource hungry. I bet you that the settings you running is prob 800x600 medium detail and ad settings on with no AA. looks great wait till you have a heavy fighting scene.

I must say though the game had me hooked, not many games have done that for me latley. i norm get bored and quit playing then, Doom i just kept playing till i finished it. wanna try on nightmare but think i will practise a bit more before i attempt that.

There is no peace without war!!!

[Cloud]

thanx for the tips Priest, will try them out 2moro.

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death - life is only a dream - and we're the imagination of ourselves.” – Bill Hicks

[freeek]

I agree with Pr13sT, I consider my pc a pretty decent pc. I am not crazy to buy a R5000 graphics card, but I would say I have a super pc either way but it still runs crappish at times.

AMD 64 3000, 512 DDR, GF FX5900xt : I would say for anygames being released today that would be overkill!

..- dot dot dash ;)

[LoneGunman]

Pr13sT - heh - I'm so out of the loop in terms of what constitutes 'high end' and 'low end' machines that I kinda figured what I've got is sorta barely into entry level :)

(I tend to play RTS stuff mostly, like Cossacks/American Conquest as well as old retro adventure games like Broken Sword & Longest Journey etc - so I'm used to just figuring as long as those run smoothly, I'm sorta barely into the arena of the hardcore gamer-geeks - but yeah, playing on the lowest setting.. (I also tend to be downloading at the same time with BT - no ways I'm stopping d/loads on those rare moments that sentechs behaving, just to play a game :)

Anyone else have that same clash of 'do I play a game - or do I soak up the bandwidth while its there' dillema and end up trying to do both at the same time?

[Perdition]

Playing games should not adversely affect your download speeds especially with a hyper-threading CPU. I also have a 2.8 (currently running at 3.3) and even if the game I'm playing is killing it my downloads still run 100%. I'm not using MyWireloss though so there may be an issue specific to the MW driver.

As far as where your machine is sitting in terms of performance, the only thing holding you back is your video card. With a Geforce 6800 GT you could run D3 at 1600x1200 in High Quality on your rig, just unfortunate that the card costs more than the rest of your PC combined!