9700 pro poor performance

[JD]

Your computer is not slow, do you notice any serious slow downs in real
gameplay??? My computer, an Athlon 2600 with 1gb ram and 9700 pro gives 32
FPS at 1024x768 on medium setting, that is basically exactly the same as
your 29 FPS on high. Turn on the "set com_showFPS 1" to see your realtime
FPS in the game, they are likely around 50-60 FPS most of the time?

Read that web page again, tell me where exactly it says they are using
Timedemo1 which you are comparing to? They probably just made a demo where
he stares at blank walls all the time.

 

[Tony DiMarzio]

Make sure your AA and AF settings are set to "Application Preference" in the
ATI control panel. Then add the entry [seta image_anisotropy "2"] to your
autoexec.cfg. You should be around 40fps for timedemo demo1 at 1024x768x32
High Quality.

 

[Seth]

I've got really poor performance when playing Doom 3. My PC spec is as
follows:

2.4Ghz Pentium 4 (400fsb)
Asus motherboard with 4x AGP
512MB of DDR 333 (PC2700)
40GB ATA133 HDD
Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB

All FPS from timedemo:
I was initially using Catalyst drivers 4.5 and this gave me 31.6 fps in 640
x 480 at low quality. Bumping it up to 1024 x 768 at high quality dropped
the frame rate down to 26.9.

I upgraded to the latest drivers 4.8 and this increased my 640 x 480 at low
quality to 44 fps and 1024 x 768 at high quality to 29.2 fps. This is still
very low.

I've tried the trick of changing the cache image setting in the config file
to 128 and to 256 but this hasn't helped.

I think the problem lies in one of three places:

1. My system can handle 533fsb except the processor so I could upgrade to a
2.4GHz Pentium 4 (533fsb) - Cost £85
2. Add more memory either another 512MB or a whole 1GB extra - Cost £45 per
512MB
3. My motherboard only supports 4 x AGP but the graphics card is 8 x AGP.
Upgrade motherboard to another that is 8 x AGP but is still compatible with
my socket 478 CPU and DDR 333 RAM - Cost £40 ish.

I've done a bit of research and it seems like the issue of the 4 x AGP and 8
x AGP is not an issue because the bandwidth limit of the 4 x AGP port will
never be reached so 8 x AGP will be very little noticable difference if any.

I've attempted to overclock my system to see if having a higher fsb will
improve the frame rate. After overclocking to 420MHz fsb (CPU speed rises to
2520MHz) I get a fps of 29 at 1024 x 768 at high quality (dropped fsp of .2
this is a bit weird).

I then overclock again up to 440MHz fsb (CPU speed rises to 2640MHz) I then
get a fps of 29.8 at 1024 x 768 at high quality.

I can thus assume that having 533MHz fsb will provide very little increase.

I found the following website and it would suggest I should see a lot more
fps: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Features/doom-atibarton/

Can anyone help me with my machine spec and what I need to do to see higher
fps? Thanks

 

[Bill Crocker]

It's not your machine, video card, or you. Doom 3 just sucks!

Bill Crocker

 

[Athura]

I've got really poor performance when playing Doom 3. My PC spec is as
follows:

2.4Ghz Pentium 4 (400fsb)
Asus motherboard with 4x AGP
512MB of DDR 333 (PC2700)
40GB ATA133 HDD
Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB

All FPS from timedemo:
I was initially using Catalyst drivers 4.5 and this gave me 31.6 fps in
640
x 480 at low quality. Bumping it up to 1024 x 768 at high quality dropped
the frame rate down to 26.9.

I upgraded to the latest drivers 4.8 and this increased my 640 x 480 at
low
quality to 44 fps and 1024 x 768 at high quality to 29.2 fps. This is
still
very low.

I've got a 533fsb 2.8g P4 with a gig of pc2700 and a 128meg 970pro and i get
33.3fps @ 1024x768 on high quality
I play it at 800x600 on high and get 42.5 fps.

 

[Sleepy]

I've got really poor performance when playing Doom 3. My PC spec is as
follows:

2.4Ghz Pentium 4 (400fsb)
Asus motherboard with 4x AGP
512MB of DDR 333 (PC2700)
40GB ATA133 HDD
Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB

All FPS from timedemo:
I was initially using Catalyst drivers 4.5 and this gave me 31.6 fps in 640
x 480 at low quality. Bumping it up to 1024 x 768 at high quality dropped
the frame rate down to 26.9.

I upgraded to the latest drivers 4.8 and this increased my 640 x 480 at low
quality to 44 fps and 1024 x 768 at high quality to 29.2 fps. This is still
very low.

I've tried the trick of changing the cache image setting in the config file
to 128 and to 256 but this hasn't helped.

I think the problem lies in one of three places:

1. My system can handle 533fsb except the processor so I could upgrade to a
2.4GHz Pentium 4 (533fsb) - Cost £85
2. Add more memory either another 512MB or a whole 1GB extra - Cost £45 per
512MB
3. My motherboard only supports 4 x AGP but the graphics card is 8 x AGP.
Upgrade motherboard to another that is 8 x AGP but is still compatible with
my socket 478 CPU and DDR 333 RAM - Cost £40 ish.

I've done a bit of research and it seems like the issue of the 4 x AGP and 8
x AGP is not an issue because the bandwidth limit of the 4 x AGP port will
never be reached so 8 x AGP will be very little noticable difference if any.

I've attempted to overclock my system to see if having a higher fsb will
improve the frame rate. After overclocking to 420MHz fsb (CPU speed rises to
2520MHz) I get a fps of 29 at 1024 x 768 at high quality (dropped fsp of ..2
this is a bit weird).

I then overclock again up to 440MHz fsb (CPU speed rises to 2640MHz) I then
get a fps of 29.8 at 1024 x 768 at high quality.

I can thus assume that having 533MHz fsb will provide very little increase.

I found the following website and it would suggest I should see a lot more
fps: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Features/doom-atibarton/

Can anyone help me with my machine spec and what I need to do to see higher
fps? Thanks

My system is XP2400, 768mb SDR, 9700 NP
and I got playable framerates at 800x600 medium settings - I used the 4.8s
and the Humus tweak from the
Beyond3d forums. I can play at 1024x768 but the slowdown I sometimes get in
close quarters combat drops framerates to single figures. Turning off
dynamic
shadows in advanced options also gives a decent boost with little visual
loss.

 

[Frank]

When I see that your board is only set to 4X AGP, I wonder if that is not
your problem right there. I would guess that there should be some
performance increase if you had 8X.

 

[Tony DiMarzio]

wrong. No performance increase on a 9700pro 128 going from AGP 4x to 8x.
There's still plenty of pipe left in a 4x config when the 9700pro is maxxed
out.

 

[Pluvious]

wrong. No performance increase on a 9700pro 128 going from AGP 4x to 8x.
There's still plenty of pipe left in a 4x config when the 9700pro is maxxed
out.

Look into a proc with 800fsb, get 1GB of PC3200 ram (ddr400)
Problem should be solved.

Pluvious

 

[John Hall]

The best advice here is to turn off AA and AF in the ATI Control Panel and
set everything to application preference. Turning on AA will give you a
huge performance hit and all Doom 3 tweak guides tell you to turn it off.
When you set image quality to "High" it automatically turns on 8xAF. A gig
of ram will also help. I'm getting 42.5 fps in timedemo 1, 9800 pro, Athlon
2800+, 1 gig of ram, with game set to 1024x768x32 on high settings. I'm
also using the Humus patch.

JK

 

[Wags]

There is no problem - your performance is just about right for your
machine. Mine is similar except XP 2800 and 1GB Ram and I found the
game very smooth and playable at 1024x768 HQ - about 34 FPS

 

[Falkentyne]

I've got really poor performance when playing Doom 3. My PC spec is as
follows:

2.4Ghz Pentium 4 (400fsb)
Asus motherboard with 4x AGP
512MB of DDR 333 (PC2700)
40GB ATA133 HDD
Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB

Your problem is the RAM.
You really REALLY need more RAM for doom 3. 1 GB is a must.

Same thing happened with Far Cry..when people went from 512 mb to 1
GB, Far Cry performance improved -more- than considerably.

Your scores are otherwise about on par, but again make sure AF and AA
are disabled in the control panel. (set to AP).

You can also try the 4.9 beta cats; stick the opengl file from them
into the game folder. Easiest way is to pick temp a folder for
extraction, when the installshield wizard pops up, open a cmd prompt,
change to your temp folder, then find the driver/2kxp_inf/B_whatever
folder, get the atioglx_.dll, move it into the doom 3 folder, and then
run the expand.exe utility to expand the file. Then cancel the
install.

BTW, I'd stick with the 4.7 cats, and just use the direct3D (MUST be
in the windows/system32 folder, placed there in safe mode only--back
up the one there previously) and open GL file (hotswappable) with the
4.9 version's. I noticed a quick appearing strange artifact bar when
starting up BF1942, with a clean install of the 4.8's, EVEN when using
the 4.9 D3D file(!). Using the 4.7's with the 4.9 d3d (or 4.7 d3d)
didn't show this problem (even though the bar only appears for 1
second).