Bad Performance with ANY setting

I am going absolutely nuts trying to play this game.

My specs are:

Windows 2000
Pentium 4 - 3 Ghz
1 GB RAM (Dual Channel PC 3200 )
Motherboard - ASUS P4P800-Deluxe
Seagate 160 GB Serial ATA HD
ATI Radeon 9600 XT

I've tried different ATI driver versions - Catalyst 4.7 and 4.9

I've re-installed Windows and formatted my computer and exclusively installed Doom3 and my comps drivers to run it.

I've defragged my computer.

Running timedemo demo1 I get at most 22 FPS. In the game, any time I encounter a monster, go into a different room, or doing anything but stand still I get like 5 FPS. At the very start of the game, the first room, I get 5 FPS.


No matter what settings I have.. whether it is resolutions - 640x480 - 800x600 or 1024x768 - or any kind of detail settings - Shadows off/on - Bump mapping on/off specular on/off etc etc.
Or Video Card Settings -
Triple Buffering enabled
Anti Aliasing turned off
Secondary Monitor Disabled
ATI Performance settings turned to OPTIMAL Performance for DirectX and OpenGL.
ALL AGP speeds , Fast Writes on/off

PAK files unpacked.

Turning Write Cache Enabled on/off for my Hard Drive.

I've tried every type of performance tuning for the Doom3 CFG file..


All of the these things have resulted in no performance change. I do get little fluxuations in Timedemo demo1 results, but that is just like 22 FPS instead of 19.5 FPS. etc.
No real change.


I am at wits end here. What could I possibly do? What haven't I done?
Anyone experience the same thing? With the framerate I get, the game is hardly playable.. well I can play it until I have to shoot anything..

Any help.. PLEASE!!!
Thank you! (*ties noose around neck* )

Spyware, shitty OS settings, and cooling problems in your case could all be preventing your hardware from performing as well as it could. Refer to all other technical issue threads to find specifics on all of the aforementioned issues.

I doubt its Spyware because I re-formatted and installed ONLY Doom 3 and my video drivers and other essential drivers.

I doubt that cooling is the problem... I dont overclock anything.. and the problem happens even when I just turn the computer on, before it really has time to get too hot.

I have checked other threads.. as I said in my post i've tried every combination that I've seen everyone else post about.
No real performance gains....

Just because you aren't overclocking doesn't mean that you won't have cooling issues. I've known people running stock cooling rigs to have their computers boot already with the thermal sensors reading in the 50's (celsius), and when loaded down somewhat the system will reach shutdown (for AMD) or downclock (for Intel) temperatures in order to save themselves from scorching.

Is the room your computer is in hot? The fans can only deliver air as cool as that which is in the room. Is there a lot of cabling -- broad, flat IDE cables in particular -- blocking airflow from your front case intake fan? Air does no good if it can't reach your processor. Is the heatsink on your processor properly mounted? Conduction of heat depends on a solid bond. A good thermal solution such as Arctic Silver or Ceramique fills the tiny gaps where the heatsink doesn't touch the processor core in order to transfer heat evenly.

There are many considerations when it comes to cooling, so it can't be easily discounted by simply running your equipment at stock speeds.

Does your computer do this to you when you try to run other games with high system requirements? If not, we could perhaps discount the problem being with your equipment, though not entirely. Perhaps Doom 3 pushes your equipment just far enough to cause problems.

Cyb recently posted this:
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26336
None of those seem to deal with your card, according to Cyb's summary of the articles (I didn't look at them myself), but you might still find useful tips to boost performance somewhat.

The room isn't too hot.. I used a thermal compound on the chip (between the heatsink). In the past, I used a portable fan, and had it blowing on the computer. That helped drop the temperature 5-10 degrees. This was in the past when at one time i had 3 computers running at the same time and the heat was noticeable. It is the only computer running now, but maybe i'll have to try that again.

I havent really had any high-end games to test, so there isn't much I can do about that. The only game that came close was Painkiller, and I ran it maxed out graphic settings and it always ran without a hitch. But I doubt that game is even on the same planet compared to Doom3.

Thanks for the help anyways.. I'll look deeper into the cooling issue.

You might want to get a utility like SiSoft's Sandra or whatever it is, or Motherboard Monitor, something like that, to check the temperature readings of all of your accessible thermal sensors. Temperatures up to the mid 40's (celsius, convert to Fahrenheit if necessary) should be acceptable for idling. Monitor your temps at full load (while running Doom 3 would be a good test) to make sure they aren't coming above 60 C. Even that's plenty hot, and potentially somewhat dangerous given that many thermal sensors are inaccurate or misreported by their monitoring software, and given that thermal sensors only read the temperature of the place where they are sitting, when other points could be much hotter.