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highlander

Greatly speed up Doom3 performance

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movies are usually filmed at 24 fps (i think sometimes 22 or 25), tv shows are usually 30 fps (although i think regular tv signals are 60 fps).. the eye can see a maximum of 60 fps

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bcrt2000 said:

the eye can see a maximum of 60 fps


There is no maximum framerate "the eye" can see, because everyone sees things differently. Some people claim they can't tell the difference above 30fps, some say they can tell the different between 60 and 100.

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The eye catches about 24 fps, as well as most movies.

The difference is in motion blurring. See, when a scene is rendered in a game, you're being treated to swapping still images. Each separate image is composed as if everything in the scene were perfectly still. But you're seeing them in succession, of course, so the brain assumes that these shapes are moving.

When the eye captures images, it's getting residual light from moving objects-- every image is blurred. That's why you'll always be able to tell the difference between real life and a computer-generated moving scene. Of course, graphics cards are adding support for motion-blurring, and framerates are getting high enough-- hypothetically, the eye could interpret a CG image the same way as a real-life image if the FPS was high enough that only one pixel moved at a time.

But, yeah. That's all a few years off.

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AirRaid said:

There is no maximum framerate "the eye" can see, because everyone sees things differently. Some people claim they can't tell the difference above 30fps, some say they can tell the different between 60 and 100.


ah you caught me on that one :)

sorry was being a bit lazy, the truth is that studies show that the eye can't distinguish between anything higher than 60 fps.. people saying that they can notice the difference between them is probably pure BS (if they are staring at the fps counter and saying yeah i can notice a difference, its purely psychological) or an artifact from the way computer screens are drawn

maybe it wasnt 60fps, but it was something like that...

edit: you can just throw out the whole 60 fps thing i just said-- just read up a more recent article on eyes, and they say its been proven that we can see up to at least 220 fps, and probably more than that

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Thanks for the tip :)

Definitely worth trying when I get it.
This is my setup:

Intel Pentium 4 2.4ghz
1GB Crucial RAM
Radeon 9800 pro 128MB

I plan to play on medium and possible high settings. I believe walking along the corridors will be perfectly ok but encountering monsters is likely to eat away at the FPS

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ZiGZaG said:
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. [/B]


I believe a minimum FPS of 16.5 is required to accurately trick the human eye into believing fluid motion, which is what very early movies were filmed at.

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Shaikoten said:

I believe a minimum FPS of 16.5 is required to accurately trick the human eye into believing fluid motion, which is what very early movies were filmed at.



Are those the same very early films that where black and white and almost looked like pages flipping really fast? haha

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For those of you having issues let me explain the process of unzipping the pk4's, atleast the way i did it. Warning: may use in excess of 7-10 gigs.
1. Setup (2) temp folders. I used TempBase and DoomPK4
2. Cut and paste all files and folders from the doom3/base dir EXCEPT the Pk4 files. Place them into the TempBase Dir.
3. Using winrar extract ALL Pk4 files into the DoomPK4 dir
4. Put the xxxxx.pk4 files from the base dir. into a seperate temp dir for the time being incase you want to re-use them. Your base dir. should now be empty.
5. Cut and paste all files in the doompk4 dir back into the doom3/base.
6. Copy the files from tempbase dir back into doom3/base. Keep your files in this folder incase you want to restore it back the way it was.
7. Start Doom3 and Enjoy!

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I just got done installing more ram so i'm upto one gig. My frame rates are up another 5-10 fps too! At 800*600 im running at 40 fps and fights are from 25-30 fps! About to try next higher frame size.

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Long time reader, first time poster lol. I must say these tweaks really do work. I never thought my system would be able to handle doom. Here are my specs.

1.33 Ghz AMD T-Bird
512 megs PC2100ddr
Biostar M7MIA rev 2.00
geforce 3 replaced with fx5900xt oc

I can now say this system runs doom 3 on high quality at 1024x768 with slowdown only occuring with lots of monsters. I swear, the wonders of the t-bird hehe

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Epyo said:

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.

I think it probably is, the game unzipps the .pk4 files into system ram when ever a level is loaded, it then transfers some of the textures into video memory.. there is no way that it is loading zipped files into video memory and highly unlikely that it is unzipping files on the fly... ever unzip a large file and try to do anything else at the same time? yah it would be that slow...

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Shaikoten said:

I believe a minimum FPS of 16.5 is required to accurately trick the human eye into believing fluid motion, which is what very early movies were filmed at.


movies are at 28 fps, but they motion blur each frame a little to blend with the next successive frame which makes it look continuous.

Games when rendered frame by frame have no motion blur thus look "flickery" at 28 fps, only by maintaining a rate at or above 60 fps does it start to "trick" the eye and look smooth.

unfortunately for me, I can see the flicker of any refresh lower than 75 (like the rate of my monitor) so playing at less than 75 always looks like it is flickering to me :-/

edit: DOH!! just saw this whole thing already posted above.. heh guess thats what I get for reading the thread backwards....

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want to clear up a couple points here. First off pk4 files are simply zip files. That said you can open them with any program that opens zip files (winzip, pkzip, power archiver and so on). Winrar is not required for this, and frankly there are better programs avaliable.

Second, the game does not load all the maps into memory, because that would require you to have a whole shitload of memory (map data is over 1gb) and it would be useless, so it only loads the map you're going to play next. It also loads all the necessary graphics and probably a bunch of models into memory.

The speed gain here is because whenever it needs to load something on the fly (often a sound) it simply can just read it directly from the hard disk which saves a nice amount of cycles. With the pk4 files it had to grab the file and decompress it, which keeps your cpu busy a bit longer (reading from disk doesn't use any cpu really).

Also loading on the fly from the pk4 is easily done, and nothing new really. It doesn't bother with the entire pk4, that would be silly, just the segement it needs. The reasons for using pk4s are to save space (/base takes up 1.44gb before you extract, 3.85gb after) and because it looks a lot neater to have four files there instead of a billion of them. Also note 3.85gb would need 6 CDs, which is a lot (though they could be stored compressed on the cds and then be decompressed during install).

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Cyb said:

Winrar is not required for this, and frankly there are better programs avaliable.


Heh, it does the job, so...

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And of course everybody has winrar now thanks to RTC-3057

Sardaukar said:

Long time reader, first time poster lol. I must say these tweaks really do work. I never thought my system would be able to handle doom. Here are my specs.

1.33 Ghz AMD T-Bird
512 megs PC2100ddr
Biostar M7MIA rev 2.00
geforce 3 replaced with fx5900xt oc

I can now say this system runs doom 3 on high quality at 1024x768 with slowdown only occuring with lots of monsters. I swear, the wonders of the t-bird hehe


You've got to be kidding me! I have nearly the same specs but nearly twice your processor speed and I'm stuck on 800x600 medium quality!

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Heh, I just tried this and the game runs quite a bit better than it did before. It went from about 25fps to about 40 in the timedemo. Of course, I'm still having to play the game at 640x480 at low quality, but at least it's playable now..

I think those beta Radeon drivers might have helped a bit too.

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This only seems to help the CPU only. you might be able to go up a frame size but i doubt any higher detail with older graphic cards since they cant seem to render all the neat graphics in high and ultra modes as quickly.

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More bad news if you try this mod, seems you cant use quick save points while using a mod. I tried two of the nongibbing mods and cant seem to use my save points :( Someone please make make a mod so that this no longer is an issue, i'd try but i dont know anything about programing?

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Well, me stuck on my crap comp, I did this anyawy(only 256mb of RAM, 64mb card)and I still got a nice increase of about 5-10(Which trust me, was DEFINETELY needed, I was getting around 10-15 FPS, now I get 20-25, MUCH MUCH more playable.)
So, I don't think you really need above 600 ram to do this, but you probably get an even bigger boost if you did.

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Science may say you cant notice anything different between 60 and 100 but I know for a fact if you play 100 for a long time, you will notice a little different.

One of the differences on CS for me (Mind you this I dont think has to do with me.) But everything seems a tad slower with vsync on limiting it to 60fps rather than my stable 100. My gun fires slower everything looks like its moving slower.

So that may be game oriented but even if it is then its proven the eye can tell a difference between 60 and 100. No one stated what kind of difference.

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Can we have the people who see a noticable difference post up a screen shot of before frame rate and after to actually verify this is happening?

There is a way to show your FPS in the game, so please enable this, take a ss during some action, repeat the action and take a ss after the "fix"


this command in console (ctrl+alt+~) will show fps
com_drawfps 1

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yah it might be, I googled for it and this was what i found.. maybe draw is for quake3.. either way try it and see :) if i wasn't at work i'd find out for sure :-/

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