Performance problem quesions (mostly just curious)

[Richo Rosai]

After all this time and all the tweak guides I've read I don't expect to suddenly make the game run any better, but I thought I'd pose a couple of questions that bugged me just to see if any of the technically knowledgeable people might want to provide some insight.

1: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 all give the same FPS. Turning the various advanced options on and off (incl. AA) doesn't affect the FPS either, except shadows (about +5fps when off). Basically, no matter what settings I change, the game runs the same (something along the lines of: medium empty room=60fps; 1 imp=25fps; 2 imps=10fps; 3 or more enemies=F9). I thought the resolution was the big thing that could affect performance--what gives? Failing that, I thought stripping it down to look like an N64 game might bring more drastic improvement than it did. Might I be experiencing some kind of bottleneck effect or something?

2: The game freezes moderately frequently. One of the most common spots is the instant an imp's health expires and it starts to dissolve. Why the hell would the game need to load for an imp to die, of all things?

Oh, and my system, which I built specifically to play Doom 3 (around the time the alpha was leaked) is a P4 2.4 with 1.25 GB of RAM (I think it's all DDR-333, but the two 512 sticks definitely are) and a Radeon 9800. If I leave the task manager running, it shows that I'm rarely using 100% of my processor and I don't ever seem to be using half the memory. And no, I don't have anything running in the background when I play, not even explorer.exe.

[Jim Rainer]

Your graphics card may be inadequate.

[Cadman]

I'm running 2 Nvidia 9800 GT's with 512 on each card in SLI mode and have had no issues.

[r_rr]

Could be a number of things.

Cadman said:

I'm running 2 Nvidia 9800 GT's with 512 on each card in SLI mode and have had no issues.

I'm actually running ONE, and I have an SLI ready motherboard. I just need get around to getting a second one. But I'm actually having surprisingly performance with the single 9800GT.