Greatly speed up Doom3 performance

I'll post this incase users haven't seen it. I am doing it now and apparently it GREATLY improves your Doom3 speed and performance. Here is the link:

http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs/genmessage.php?board=12608&topic=15503352&page=0

High

Well I may try it out, dunno if it's worth losing multiplayer over though (I plan on DMing late into the night with my friends).

I'm going to try this too. :)

...I don't know, losing out on MP...

Seems to work pretty damn good, upped my frame rate to about 30fps walking around and low 20's high teens when im in a big fight.
Running:
2 gig Athlon XP
512 megs of ram
A7s333 board
Radeon 9500 128 megs
Running at 800*600 med quality everything but aa on
Things to be aware of:
-Doubles the size of doom3
-No MP
-No less than 256 megs of ram 1 gig recomended
-If your CPU is more than 3gigs it might not be worth trying.

omg...wow

it really works and I just moved my pk4 files to another folder so I can play mp by just swaping them.

Someone should email Id and just make sure that they didn't do that because It will melt your computer or something.

Goliath, I think ID only did it to keep overall file size down. All this does is free's up the CPU since it no longer has to uncompress the pk4 files.

How does it mess up multiplayer, out of curiosity? Is it because it can't find pk4 files?

If that's the case... *.bat and *.sh files are my friends.

cgsouthern said:

Goliath, I think ID only did it to keep overall file size down. All this does is free's up the CPU since it no longer has to uncompress the pk4 files.

I kinda thought that just felt like a nervous being that I just got this computer.. also I have only a 5700 le and run on 1028* 762 and get about 57 to 60 fps all the time....1 gig ram and a 2.9 ghz p4

If your getting over 50 fps dont bother messing with it, the games capped at 60 anyways!

How about this, Make a new folder in the doom3 folder called Base1(place all you backups here) and Decompess all the pk4 files into your base folder, Then when you wana play multiplayer, just rename the BASE1 folder to BASE and BASE folder to BASE1 Like an on off switch.

Dj, because it just does ;) j/k Reason is the server looks at your game files for "alterations" and will not let you join the server.
Chris

Don't do this if you want to play multiplayer, it won't work,then you have to totally remove Doom 3 and re-install

Oh gee thanks for the hot tip.

This really helped my older computer!

Yes, the load times are greatly reduced. The FPS is slightly better too! :)

This actually did nothing for my performance.

It helps older computers the most..but still helped mine about 10 fps

Having an old machine myself, I will try this shortly as well.

I've tried this, not really much to say, I don't think it works, unless I unpacked them incorrectly (doubt it).

If i'm getting it right, you unpack them into say

../Doom 3/base/pak000/
../Doom 3/base/pak001/
../Doom 3/base/pak002/
../Doom 3/base/pak003/
../Doom 3/base/pak004/

For the respected files?

unrar them to the base/ directory, not the pakXX dir.

This sounds very useful. I'll try it when I get home. Just to clarify, it's OK if I unpack everything in that folder, and then when I want to play MP I just take out the unpacked files and put back in the original paks right?

Epyo said:

...I don't know, losing out on MP...

OMFG! an idiot!

I didn't see any noticable difference. Either 1) my machine is REALLY old (1 year old) 2) or you must delete the pk4 files completely. All I did was move them out of the Doom 3 directory.

Hmm, it's not making sense. If each level is completly loaded at the start of each level, then why would it have to get things out of the pk4's while you are playing? The best it could possibly do is help load times, right?

Perhaps it's just a placebo effect.

Perhaps levels are further subdivided for various textures/models so that people with lower ram don't have issues. Maybe if you have a lot of ram it will only effect the level load time because of this. Maybe?

Believe it or not, but I actually read the user license agreement for the first time out of any piece of S/W I ever owned. The reason that it will not allow MP to work is that part of the licensing for MP is to prevent cheating of any kind, ALL mods of anykind, even those to enhance performance is a violation of the licensing, and a void of warranty.

This is from memory and not exact, but it sums up why id won't allow mods in the MP mode.

Just extract each .pk4 file to the base directory. I believe tthat there are subdirectories within each .pk4 file. Make sure to keep them intact. I really think that every user will see different results, depending on computer specs. Some people may see negligible changes, and others may experience a huge gain in performance. Reports have ranged from as high as a 30% improvement (or even higher) to negative results.

Just remember, if you try it, don't delete the .pk4 files (either rename them or put them in another directory on your computer) so you can easily retrieve them if it doesn't work or if you want to play multiplayer.

Actually I just tried the .pk4 thing extracted and the way they are after fresh install. I did not see a huge difference in gameplay/speed of the game. I did notice a HUGE difference in the loading time of the levels. Not loading the game but the actual level, I did not time it but I would say it loaded 3x slower; on top of no real visable difference in game speed. What did help me though was editing the config file with:

seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "256"
seta image_cacheMinK "20000"

as posted in this thread:
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26178

I'm running 1024x768, everything yes in advance options under system all but antialiasing. I'm also running high texture quality. I bump around 45-50 standing still in a room with a lot of lighting and shadowing activity. In a heavy fight scene 5-6+ critters and me unloading plasma gun I drop to around 35ish, which is still great imo.

Seems like I was reading somewhere motion pictures are only filmed at 42 fps... so I always felt like if that fps was good enough for a movie it was good enough for playing a game *shrug*. I believe it's because a human eye can not see faster than 42 fps? I may be wrong. To late and I'm to tired to dig around to find the exact scientific fact heh.