[ Outline ] · Standard · Linear+ Doom3 Performance Boost, There's hope!

[SailCat]

I haven't had a chance to try this yet (damn work interferes with playtime), but feedback from gamers is positive. When time allows, I'll need to do this to get Doom3 to run properly on my own underpowered 'puter.

Here's the routine, feedback appreciated:

This is a guarenteed way to get a MASSIVE performance increase to your game, at the expense of taking up a little more hard drive space (2 gigs approx). There is a catch! By doing this, you temporarily can't connect to pure multiplayer servers. You have been warned (I'll tell you how to revert it at the end)

After installation, the Doom III Folder consists only of the doom3.exe and some .PK4 files. Those PK4 files includes the entire game (sounds, videos, textures etc.) compressed. They are normally uncompressed in mid game, which is very hard on your CPU. We can unpack them and thus take the strain of your CPU

1. Make a copy of ALL the files in C:\Program Files\Doom 3\base. This is some big filage, but if you want to revert to MP without reinstalling you need to do it.

2. Unrar the following .pk4 files (just pretend they are .rar's and open them with winrar) into the C:\Program Files\Doom 3\base folder (each one should unrar a single folder such as textures or models):

pak000.pk4
pak001.pk4
pak002.pk4
pak003.pk4
pak004.pk4 (This one has many files, put them all in \Base and over right any that apply.

3. Now delete the files above (pak000-004) or move them to another folder for storage so you can revert to multiplayer.

When you want to revert to multiplayer, restore everything you had before and get rid of the new stuff. I'm not sure if the folder "maps" is the same or not, so make sure you back that up.

When in the original Doom3 /base folder (that is, before the unpacking), you would have thse folders and files "maps" "savegames" "config.spec" "doomConfig.cfg" "doomkey" "game00.pk4" and "gamex86.dll", nothing else.

ALSO DO THIS! If you open DoomConfig.cfg (C:\programfiles\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 MP and requiring more HD space.

YMMV, please post back with results.

~SC

[TheAvatar]

I found the best way to get a performance boost is to use the "Scan my hardware" thingo in the in game video settings. I have a radeon 9200 and it ran pretty crappy before I did that. Then I did the scan thingo and beefed the res up a bit and it still runs nicer than it did when I tweeked it myself.