Running slow on Fx 5700

[RamboBones]

I've had doom 3 for a while, well as long as anyones had it, and I'm finding my frame rate very odd. When I look on benchmark scores such as http://techreport.com/etc/2004q3/doom3-midlow/index.x?pg=3 I see geforce 4's getting double the fps I'm getting on the same settings. For instance when running at medium quality 640x480 with all settings default I get 26 fps on the first timedemo runthrough, and then 32 on the second. On the first runthrough it would appear that doom 3 doesn't load all the data before starting so it loads it ad-hoc. I'm running a AMD 3000+ at 2 ghz, 1gb DDR 400 kingston ram. As far as I can tell my speed is severly video card limited, however I'll be benchmarking my cpu and memory to see if that might be causing a slow down. My video card as I mentioned is a FX 5700 is non ultra with 256 mb of ram.

I am of course running the latest nvidia drivers.

So two main questions. Is my gameplay going slow because of my cpu/mem or my video card? And how do I make doom 3 load everying it needs at the start of the level instead of part way throug?

[Kojak_Man]

I'm rather skeptical about those results as they are MUCH faster than any other I've seen. They also use a custom demo, have Vsync turned off, and probably have several other tweaks enabled for their results. The results they report do seem high compared to what I get with my system (25 fps/800x600 High Quality on timedemo demo1, 2.8Ghz P4 w/HT, 1GB PC3200, and a Geforce 5700 256MB) and compared to other benchmarks I've seen. (In reality, my frame rate using com_showFPS 1, is usually from 30-60 Fps and drops to about 18-20 Fps at a minimum during the most graphically intensive areas.)

I would check the HardOp article (do a news archive search) as the results there seem more realistic (with my system at least) and is the result of actual gameplay and not a demo.

EDIT: After reading even more, I really would not trust anything from that site, they seem to consider 22Fps unplayable (it is very playable, it just won't look as smooth, 15 Fps is where I would draw the line on playability.) They also seem to think a card is only capable of a certain setting if it stays in the 40 Fps range.

[SyntherAugustus]

A geforce 5700 plain isn't really that good. I'd day you get a 5700U or higher.

I have a 2400+ and a 5700 atm and it doesn't run too bad.