Poor 9800PRO performance

[speedbird]

System:
Asus A7V8X-X (AGP8X) and Athlon XP2600+
Connect3D ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128mb AGP8X
300W PSU
512mb DDR333
Seagate 160gb
Liteon DVDRW and Liteon CDRW
onboard sound and ethernet
Standard monitor (very high resolution)

OS:
Windows XP, 100% up to date including SP2

Drivers:
all latest including Catalyst
DirectX 9.0c

Problem:

Doom 3 (all current patches and updates installed)

Very poor performance (around 30 frames per second or less) at all resolutions and graphics settings. Based on online reviews and tests, I should be achieving around 60fps based on my system specs and medium graphics settings.

Anyone any idea what's up with the bloody thing? It's driving me mad. I just don't understand why the performance is so crap. It should be fantastic with a 9800 PRO but is unplayable even with graphics set to low.

[moonspell]

I am having exactly the same problems. Somebody please help as this is extremely frustrating for us.

[Ixnatifual]

I have a 2400 mhz computer and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and get 37 FPS with a timedemo using demo1.

I run it at 1024x768, High Quality, with everything enabled except anti-aliasing and vsync. It runs pretty well, although it lags a little for a few seconds upon startup, plus it lags the first time I switch weapon, the first time I fire, and the first time I get hit. Therefore I always switch to pistol and fire 1 shot before proceeding, after starting a game. I'm guessing these things happens because Doom 3 would like more than 512 MB RAM. But after that everything runs smoothly, even with many enemies on the screen.

In the beginning I also had problems, but I did the following which solved it:

1. Found a program that removed some nasty files my old nvidia card had left on my harddrive.

2. Got the latest Catalyst.

3. Discovered to my horror that my port bus speed was set to 100/100 in the BIOS instead of 133/133 like it was supposed to be, which gave me in effect an extra 500-600 mhz (my computer would only register as 1.8 Ghz before correcting the bus speed).

All of these steps seemed to give major performance boost. Before no. 1 it ran, at the same settings, at 28.8 FPS average with timedemo demo1.

I hope this can help to you out.