D3's playable on my old PC, no NEED for new video card

[EvilHorace]

After reading previous posts here, I was afraid that I'd be wasting $$ buying this game for my older PC but no, it's playable and looks good too. It does require Win2K or above (no Win98) but to most, that's not a problem.

Just adding this thread for those who are hesitating to buy this game due to their older equipment. No, I havent yet tryed max resolution yet but I will.
...and no, I also havent seen/tested what my actual FPS is but as long as it plays good, I usually don't care.



Specs:
AMD T-bird 1.4ghz, Shuttle AK31, 1024mb Samsung PC2700 DDR, GeForce2 GTS (now very outdated), SB Live, (2) 18gb SCSI Seagate Cheatah X15s ,Win2K

[Invisible Evil]

Your GTS is playing it?? Whats the game specs you have going?

[eGoCeNTRoNiX]

I'm playing it on my 9000 AIW Pro.. And it runs fine and still looks good.. Will let you know if you're missing anything when my 9800Pro comes in..

eGo

[Busby]

My 9700 Pro handles it at 1024x768 with little hiccups at Medium quality. I may bump it down to 800x600 but for now it's not a real issue.

[Executioner]

LOL a Geforce 2 GTS (same card in my rig). Is your card the 32 meg or 64? I head that it requires a minimum of a 64 meg card. I can't play it anyway because I'm still using Win98 but I have been seeing the game on my son's pc, and he's got choppy video. He got a P4 1.4 with 640 megs of ram, and I don't remember what Geforce card he's got.

From what I've seen of the game, it's a cross between the old doom and HL. The graphics are excellent, but it's the same old stuff: throw a switch, open door, kill monsters. I'm not really that impressed with the game from what I've seen on my son's pc.

[PreDatoR]

Originally posted by eGoCeNTRoNiX
I'm playing it on my 9000 AIW Pro.. And it runs fine and still looks good.. Will let you know if you're missing anything when my 9800Pro comes in..

eGo

lol you haven't got your 9800 yet ego? Mine showed up yesterday

I'm playing it on my 9500 Pro just fine. nice and smooth and looks good. i'm sure it will look better once i drop this 9800 Pro in here in about 10 min

[eGoCeNTRoNiX]

Originally posted by PreDatoR
lol you haven't got your 9800 yet ego? Mine showed up yesterday

I'm playing it on my 9500 Pro just fine. nice and smooth and looks good. i'm sure it will look better once i drop this 9800 Pro in here in about 10 min

Oh Yah? *head out to his aunts house* I'll be back with an update..

eGo


***edit***

IT'S HERE!! MWA HA HA!! I've got it going now.. Tried cranking it up to Ultra lol.. SLIDESHOW!! hehe.. So I turned it down to high and it looked GREAT! I'm MUY impressed!! If it hadn't been for the price of the card I'd have done without, so my biggest thanks goes out to Greg!!

eGo

[Invisible Evil]

Welcome to the big leaguNow you gotta see if the 9800 pro can be softmodded to the XT.

[Hipnotic_Tranz]

I've not even played the game yet, but I saw this at another message board:

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). I went from running low quality at 800x600 to running High Quality on 1024x768. This improves load times AND framerate/details.

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. Lets fix this!

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 normal mode, you should have "maps" "savegames" "config.spec" "doomConfig.cfg" "doomkey" "game00.pk4" and "gamex86.dll", nothing else.
ALSO! If you open DoomConfig.cfg (C:\programfiles\doom3\base) in notepad and change

seta image_cacheMegs "32"

to a higher number, such as 96 or 128 you will see a big increase too.

[tunis5000]

yeah it's been proven that those things do nothing special...

[Busby]

Same thing was heard when Quake 3 was first around. It does nothing really special. You can do some console commands to tweak frames and overall performance.

[EvilHorace]

OK....I'm back (was out of town for two days).

....

Your GTS is playing it?? Whats the game specs you have going?

Specs? Don't know how to run a "time demo test" on this game as I havent done that in many years with any game. As long as it seems playable to me, I'm happy If someone tells me, I'll give it a shot.

LOL a Geforce 2 GTS (same card in my rig). Is your card the 32 meg or 64? I head that it requires a minimum of a 64 meg card. I can't play it anyway because I'm still using Win98

Yep, 32 meg card here, it's probably at least 3 yrs old?

Ex, why not upgrade your PC to Win2K? That should be painless IMHO and say by to those Win98 error messages.

[FlyingPenguin]

You must be missing out on something visually. I've seen videos of multiplayer games for instance that run as a great framerate, but all the textures are very blurry. They had to crank down the visual quality to get a decent framerate.

A lot is objectivity - some people can deal with a poorer framerate than others. I'm spoiled.

I'm running D3 single player on 2 different systems. Performance is good on both of them:

AMD 2400+, NForce2, 1Gb, Radeon 9800 128Mb (non-Pro), default visual settings (Medium Quailty). At 640x480 it's accepably smooth. At 800x600 it's playable, but it lags more than I like.

AMD 3200+ Barton, NForce2, 1Gb, Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb, default visual settings (Medium Quality). Runs smooth at 800x600.

Game is scary as hell.

[PreDatoR]

damn FP stop being a wimp and run it at 1024x768 i have yet to have it lag out on my 2500+ barton with a 9800 Pro and i have it set on high quality. the top setting makes it cry though

[Demrok]

Sapphire 8500le 128 megger with an Athlon 2600+, 1 gig of ram in dual channel and she runs nicely at 800x600 medium detail
a little chop once and awhile but nothing that you can't shotgun blast through
wicked game!