[junkheap]

Hmm, i saw this on a car board i frequent when i am at work, yes everyone is talking bout doom. Either way there was a post like this:

"I tried this and Im now runnig at 1280x1024 compared to 800x600 at the same settings.

"As all of you who allready have this game recognized the game is very slow even on new Computers.

I found out the reason for this and the solution to fix this problem.

As you already know after installation the game consits only of the doom3.exe and some .PK4 files. Those PK4 files includes the entire game (sounds, videos, textures etc.) in high compressed form.

Normally those files were decompresse during the game.

But this exactly is the problem. Even new CPUs are not able to decompress those files while running the game with good peformance and therfore the game runs very **** also on new computers. I don't know if the develpers of ID-Soft was just too stupid to think about this or if they have an agreement with some hardware manufacturing firms.

How to get around this problem:

It is very simple. Go to your Doom 3 installation directoy and get inside the folder "Base". There are some .PK4 files you have to open each of them with WinRAR 3.3 and extract their entire contents to the Base dir in you Doom 3 installation folder (replace all files if they are any duplicates). Now you have to delete all .PK4 files in the Base folder to prevent the game to use those compressed files agian.

Now the game starts and runs mutch faster!!!

Have fun playing Doom 3!!! "


then followed with this

This is a guarenteed way to get a MASSIVE performance increase to your game, at the expense of taking up a little more hard drive space (2 gigs approx). I went from running low quality at 800x600 to running High Quality on 1024x768. This improves load times AND framerate/details.

There is a catch! By doing this, you temporarily can't connect to pure multiplayer servers. You have been warned (I'll tell you how to revert it at the end)

After installation, the Doom III Folder consists only of the doom3.exe and some .PK4 files. Those PK4 files includes the entire game (sounds, videos, textures etc.) compressed. They are normally uncompressed in mid game, which is very hard on your CPU. Lets fix this!

1. Make a copy of ALL the files in C:\Program Files\Doom 3\base. This is some big filage, but if you want to revert to MP without reinstalling you need to do it.

2. Unrar the following .pk4 files (just pretend they are .rar's and open them with winrar) into the C:\Program Files\Doom 3\base folder (each one should unrar a single folder such as textures or models):

pak000.pk4
pak001.pk4
pak002.pk4
pak003.pk4
pak004.pk4 (This one has many files, put them all in \Base and over right any that apply.

3. Now delete the files above (pak000-004) or move them to another folder for storage so you can revert to multiplayer.

When you want to revert to multiplayer, restore everything you had before and get rid of the new stuff. I'm not sure if the folder "maps" is the same or not, so make sure you back that up.

When in normal mode, you should have "maps" "savegames" "config.spec" "doomConfig.cfg" "doomkey" "game00.pk4" and "gamex86.dll", nothing else.
ALSO! If you open DoomConfig.cfg (C:\programfiles\doom3\base) in notepad and change

seta image_cacheMegs "32"

to a higher number, such as 96 or 128 you will see a big increase too.

I know this will work great for all of you, it has for me!
(NOTE I am not the one that came up with this I am just passing it along!)

Well the seta image_cacheMegs "32" we know about, but i doubt it does anything.

If anyone has time can you please check it out, or delete thered if full of crap.

[digitalwanderer]

Neat tip, I'm game.

[Sonic]

I got the message: Couldn't load default.cfg

I'll play around with it a littler more to see if I'm missing anything.

[digitalwanderer]

Jeeze, I'm almost done expanding it all and it's over 5Gb now!

[junkheap]

5 gb, wow....hopefully it does soemthing other than just waste peoples time...

[Sonic]

Ok, this tweak as you say does indeed work. I accidentally unrared one of the paks into a pak000 directory but after I put the contents of that in the base directory everything and tried it out it worked correctly.

Onto a little review type thing. The game seems to have loaded a littler slower actually, what the causeof this I do not know. It may just be because it is the first time, but it was only about 5 - 10 seconds slower than usual so it could have been affected by an outside program. The game itself does run smoother or so it seems. In a previous post I reported I made sudden turns or moved into new areas of a level and would get quite a bit of jerkiness. That hasn't happened in my test of the uncompressed files in the directories. So far it seems to have worked pretty well, I will play more later today to confirm if my few observations in the 10 minutes I justplayed is true or not. The framerate seems faster too.

[trinibwoy]

Maybe you should try a defrag after decompressing 5GB ( ) to see if that helps load times.

[junkheap]

Cool, if it works, i cant take credit as i said i found it on a car website. I just thought i would post it here, since we have some threads about doom 3 tweaking and most of us would like it smoother.

[digitalwanderer]

No increase in fps, but here's where the interesting bit lies:

Compressed pack bench run:

1. 30.8
2. 35.8

Uncompressed pack bench run:

1. 32.9
2. 35.2

I tried it with/without shadows and got about the same results. The uncompressed trick helps to cut down the jerkiness on the first run and the load times, but the final fps once it's all loaded is the same.

I'll try playing it later to see how it works out in actual gameplay, I'm too busy during the day to actually play. (Damn it. )

[rashly]

This (along with the cache tweaks) will only affect actual gameplay, and not timedemos.

[Guden Oden]

I'm very sceptic this will actually affect gameplay much at all, as the game hardly ever loads anything during gameplay if one's got 512MB minimum. Doom3 is very good at not swapping under such conditions.

At best it would help with a few framerate hitches, it will certainly not increase overall fps.

[AlStrong]

methinks id should have included a *full* installation option that has uncompressed everything for maximum speed in loading.... like in the good old days...

[Rodéric]

although decompression comes at a cost (can be little depending on the compression lib and ratio), using package file reduce file fragmentation, provided your disk isn't too fragmented to begin with.

A sequential read on the hard drive (assuming little/no frag of the package file) is likely to be way faster than Random access...

Anyone want to try using defragmented uncompressed packages to check that ?
(while you're at it... you're not @ a few GB now, are you ? )

or just defragment the disk before and after installing the game.