Speed your Doom 3: Part Two

For some users our tweak worked and for some it didn't but others revealed some nice tricks on how to speed up things.

One said: "In the base folder of ur Doom 3 installation, there are several *.pk4 files These files contains all the resources that doom 3 uses, like models, textures, sounds, … If these files are uncompressed using WinRAR, u will see great speed ups in doom since now, those files no longer need to be extracted".

Be warned that after extraction, your Doom III installation will be over 4GB, but that you can delete the *.pk4 files afterwards.

The second mail came from Bill, and was very detailed and helpful:

"Here are some changes to the DoomConfig.cfg file that some people report to being helpful in performance but not always in FPS btw.

seta image_useCache "1" == originally - 0
seta image_cacheMegs "256" == Originally 20 (set this to half your total system ram)
seta image_cacheMinK "20480" == originally 200 (change or will crash when u set usecache to 1)
seta com_showFPS "1" == originally 0 to show your FPS
seta com_videoram "128" == Added this value. Memory on video card, default is 64 so this should help
Andy said:

"Well, as everyone was shouting about this I decided to check the numbers.
Results of timedemo demo1 (console from ctrl+alt+`).
seta image_cacheMegs "20"
run 1
2148 frames in 69 seconds.
31.1 fps

run2
2148 frames in 62 seconds.
34.6 fps

seta image_cacheMegs "32"
run 1
2148 frames in 66 seconds.
32.5 fps

run 2
2148 frames in 62.1 seconds.
34.6 fps

seta image_cacheMegs "128"
run 1
2148 frames in 66 seconds.
32.5 fps

run 2
2148 frames in 62.1 seconds.
34.6 fps

seta image_cacheMegs "256"
run 1
2148 frames in 66 seconds.
32.5 fps

run 2
2148 frames in 62.1 seconds.
34.6 fps

My specs for those interested:

Athlon XP 2800+ (Tbred)
Shuttle XPC SN41G2V2
2x512MB Corsair XMS DDR PC3200 (6-2-2-2 sync with 333fsb)
ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB
2xWD 80GB Caviar 8MB Cache
"As you can see the second run in all cases was faster than first run. The results for image_cachemegs "20" were included because that is what i had as default.

"Game running in medium quality 1024x768 32bpp all advanced options on except AA.

"What is strange is that it does seem faster during real gameplay than the timedemo suggest. Maybee were seeing something similar to the old com_hunkmegs from quake, where its caching more of the textures before the level starts instead of during play. Who knows why it doesn't seem to be reflected in the timedemo stats.

Andy".

Thanks you for your, time you guys. µ