How to boost your Doom3 performance by 40% on ATI hardware

Hi All

First off great work and this ati tweak! just a couple questions.

What is the latest version of the Humus tweak?
Which the best way to implement it?
What is the dl link?


Thanks all


deitY

 

This is why thread hotlinking is bad.
Go into the Games Talk forum and read the sticky.

 

my bad.


Thanks for the pointer.

Cheers

 

Ruined, if you look at the Xbitslab benchmark I think the gap between the X800XT and 6800U is more or less closed if you would use the Humus tweak. But..., it depends on if they used CP AF or AC AF. Looking at their settings (8xAF/16xAF) I think they used the CP AF. If so you can add a 20% gain to the Ati results.

 

No, it doesn't, because the GeForce 6800 would lose similar performance from using CP AF.

 

I'd like to know how to apply AF to oneself and um..."The Humus Tweak"

 

woohoo!

Intel 2.66/533
768MB PC2100 266mhz
BBA Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB
Shuttle SS51G (SiS651)
no overclocking
Catalyst 4.9 beta drivers

800x600
Custom autoexec.cfg with various tweaks ('double vision' off, cachemem tweaks, general tweaks for a 128MB grphx card, etc.)
Doom 3 set to "high quality"

timedemo demo1
30.1 to 35.1fps

timedemo trdemo1 (from techreport.com)
50.1 to 59.2fps

Woohoo! I haven't played much or done and real hardcore comparison, but so far I see no artifacts or loss of image quality. I confirmed my numbers by renaming my glprogs folder back and forth twice (quack.exe style )and it does indeed coincide with the jump in performance.

Thanks Humus!

EDIT:
I renamed it to glprogsxx or something. Doesn't matter. I downloaded the tweak from the link on the first post of this thread two days ago, I don't think it has been changed for several days.
Here is my autoexec.cfg:
http://freon.shackspace.com/autoexec.cfg

Very impressed! ~15% out of thin air. I'll try to do some better comparisons and take some screenies. Hopefully this will make an official patch at some point. (I may be missing something, I've only solidly read the for 20 or so pages of this thread) I definitely don't want to consider it the be-all-end-all if it is just trading off quality or artifacts, as it would be missing the point, but I'm fairly confident so far.

Numbers are from the second run of each demo. Subsequent runs yield margin of error (+/- 0.5fps)

edit again: My ATI OpenGL CP settings:
http://freon.shackspace.com/opengl.png
This is what I have always used because it works in older games (i.e. Half-life). I use "performance" mode (bilinear) because "quality" mode (trilinear) starts to hit my performance on many games.

 

Heh, what did you call it? glfrogs?

 

Humus - you're da man! Big Thanks!

Just tested Humus tweak last night and I must say, it REALLY works!

1024x768 High Quality
0AA,8xAF forced by ATI CP

(CFG file: shadows=1)

"timedemo demo1" before optimization: 21.5fps (tested more than 5 times)
"timedemo demo1" after Humus optimisation: 29,4fps (tested more than 5 times tested)

Before the tweak, the lowest frame rate was around 20-21fps and now is 28-29fps. The game is really fluid now, I'm playing between 28-29fps and 60fps!

Amazing performance increase - 36%!!!!! This was a major improvement!

The best part: did not find any quality loss or any artifacts.

Thanks again Humus!

New statement: ATI OpenGL drivers really "RUCKS"! Eheheh...

 

Hi,

Not sure if this was posted before but you prevent needing to run the timedemo twice because of the caching.

Just use: timedemo demo1.demo usecache and it will precache the demo.

Sorry if this was posted before!

oh.... Thanks to Humus for this great tweak. Gave me 5 or 6 fps more!!

 

Nice tip. Thanks.

 

Sweet, that saves me some time Thanks

 

That may be the best tweak posted in this thread.

 

It only took 45 pages and 350000 views, but we finally got something else that's useful in the thread

 

Thanks for verifying that there's no driver IQ bug involved. It's like every time this gets said someone comes along and "ruins" D) the thread with yet another post asserting knowledge of such a "bug". Heh...

My question is why D3 evidently is garbling instructions to the ATi driver as to how the game needs to properly treat texture stages so that we need to force the treatment to get the proper IQ. I installed the 4.9b's yesterday, and get much better performance with your tweak, *and appreciably better IQ* at the same time, by forcing both AF and AA from the Cpanel as opposed to setting them both in-game and letting the D3 engine directly instruct the drivers. With or without your tweak, the IQ is much better when forcing the treatment--which is an anomaly in my experience with the Cats (where usually I always get better results letting the engine control the treatments.)

 

Thanks for the tip. 1152x864 x4FSAA x16AF (AF&AA from Cpanel & Humus' tweak), R9800P stock, Cats 4.9b, on AXP @ 2.08GHz, 188MHz fsb, 1Gb ram (2x512), vsync ON, double-buffered, Ultra Quality, shadows ON gets me 25.2 fps on timedemo 1. Not too shabby for my specs, I think, considering my game settings.

It seems a bit odd, but the game itself is much more fluid than demo1 displayed, with much higher peak framerates as well--even though I'm running 6-channel sound and game logic, of course, which aren't present during the timedemo run. It's not a big deal, but I think the disparities between the timedemos and the game itself are worth a bit of probing.

 

why no triple buffer?

hm... I'm running:

AXP 2600+
1gb DDR333
R9800p 128MB

and... I run the game at HQ 1280x1024 with 16x AF CP setting...timedemo demo1 gives me 28fps.

I might try Ultra settings tonight, but I seem to get some brief stuttering when I walk through certain doors.

 

What seems to be the case for me (and I'll look into it further when I can) is that triple-buffering hurts my performance with Ultra Quality because it consumes 9800P ram which really needs to be there for the increased local texture load (or so it seems.)

As far as the hitching under Ultra Quality goes, you might try putting set r_image_preload "1" into your autoexec.config. I noticed that this command is added to the normal Doomconfig settings file as a seta command when I switch to Ultra Quality from HQ using the D3 menus, but then later for some reason just disappears from the Doomconfig--so I moved it as a set command to the autoexec in order to retain it. While it does not completely eliminate the occasional hitch, it at least seems to eliminate most of them I was getting in UQ after the command would "disappear" from the Doomconfig setting in subsequent sessions.

 

Nevermind, you answered as I posted.

 

ah... makes sense

Thanks!

actually, have you done most of your tweaks in your autoexec ? would you mind sending a copy of it to me? (or copy paste and PM me?)