good system but choppy fps?

[Godshatter]

im running doom 3 on 800x600 (everything but AA on and on High quality).

my specs:

AMD Athalon 64 3000+
512 mb pc 2100 ram
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256 (newest Omega drivers)

my fps is all over the place, it kinks for a second when a door opens a lot of times and runs between 20 and 60 fps. (ocasionally lower than 20)

it also gets choppy at times (cant really tell the fps)

any ideas?

[Alientank]

PC2100? Ouch. That's a big factor there.

Your computer is only as fast as it's slowest part.

[Amaster]

I noticed that the Omega drivers started out great but caused lots of strange behavior. Sometimes they even seemed to be worse than the official drivers. So you might want to think about reverting.

[useless warrior]

Yeah, change to refrence drivers. I was using the nvidia omega drivers and my preformace in doom 3 was horrible, so I switched to the latest nvidia drivers and the frame rate sky rocketed.

[Ultraviolet]

See also: Cooling, spyware, Windows bloat

[Godshatter]

Alientank said:

PC2100? Ouch. That's a big factor there.

Your computer is only as fast as it's slowest part.

how big of a factor are we talking about


also,i have not had any odd problems that might be related to my omega drivers.

[Laguna]

Godshatter said:

how big of a factor are we talking about


also,i have not had any odd problems that might be related to my omega drivers.

Yeah, the Omega drivers have usually 3 different settings; Performance, Quality, and High Quality just like the reference drivers. However, I'd get the newest ATI drivers and attempt at playing the game with them. I like ATI and Nvidia, but Nvidia cards do indeed run the game much more smoothly. Luckily, ATI is working on getting the game running faster on their new drivers. You should really get them.

The factor of RAM speed is not the measuring stick necessarily, but keep in mind that if you have a LOT of DDR166 RAM and you have your AGP aperture size set to 50%, it will take longer to cache textures from the game to physical memory, and just as long to retrieve them or remove them from memory. I guess the only thing you really can do to remedy this is to significantly lower your quality settings, or buy some DDR333 (PC2700) or faster.