Smooth then Choppy Doom III

[richpull100]

Hey guys, I just installed Doom III and I am having severe problems with my frame rate. I am running it at 800x600 with medium quality, and I my system is supposed to be able to handle it. I have a 2.53 Pentium 4, Radeon 9700pro, and 1gb of ram. I don't think the settings are too high because the game runs smoothly for a few seconds, like over 30fps, then gets slowdown. This same thing happens in Counter Strike as well. It is definately not a virus doing this since I just reformatted and installed Systemworks less than a week ago. I have Direct X 9b and Catalyst 4.7's. Please help!

 

[Dedatorv]

You should NOT have any slow downs in counter-strike with your system. Did you make sure you installed all the correct drivers for everything? You could try getting the Direct X 9c. Make sure all your graphic settings under the ATI control panel are set for the best performance, also make sure AA and AF is completely disabled.

Are you sure your processor isn't underclocked(When the PC boots up it actually says 2.53GHz P4)? Check to see even if your video card is underclocked as well.

 

[richpull100]

I have no idea what could cause this. I am going to format after copying all drivers onto a CD and reinstall xp without connecting to the internet. I will see you in 2 hours.

 

[Dedalus]

hmm, what a weird problem.

i'd check the jumpers on my motherboard to see if the cpu is running at the right speed. clear up your hard drive (formatting works also!).

what net connection are you on? check for background programs that are running at the same time. it might be, that your anti-virus program starts scanning while you're in the middle of a game, so best to disable it when you jump into a game.

 

[Shuzer]

The slowdowns happen to *ALOT* of people with mid to high end systems in CS these days (including me..). Dunno what happened, but I blame ATi's OpenGL driver.

You're not running FSAA/AF, are you? That's what does it for me in CS. Without AF and AA, CS runs fine. Haven't had any issues with D3 after I upgraded to Cat4.8 beta

 

[riTuaL]

Yeah I get that once in a while too. Kind of rediculous since we all exceed the recommended specs by a whole lot today. Must be something with the code..who knows.. As for D3, I'm not exactly sure what to do.. Sorry.

 

[NYHoustonman]

In Doom 3, I'm able to run at 1280x1024 at medium, and it's playable (a bit choppy in big firefights). I have an XP 2400+, 512MB PC2700, and a 9800 Pro, so you should definetly be close to me in performance. That said, I don't have the slightest idea what could be wrong... Are all your drivers updated? Programs running in the background, etc.?

 

[dscowboy]

There are a couple tweaks that could help considerably. If the problem is that your harddrive is thrashing when it slows down, extracting all the data from the pak files will help. Doom3 is accessing all the content in compressed pak files, decompressing them real-time. It seems pretty rediculous, no idea why they did this.

If the problem is loading textures from system RAM to video RAM, you can edit your config file to increase the buffer size, which has improved performance majorly for some people, esp with 128 mb cards. Check the planetdoom forums for details on both these tweaks.

 

[Johan_Tayn]

I hear Ati has a beta Catalyst 4.9 for those who want extra D3 speed somewhere.