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Doom 3/Thief 3 - Can our laps handle it?

post #1 of 35
8/2/04 at 8:35am
Thread Starter 
Hello, anyone here who has Thief 3/Doom 3 ... can our laptops handle it?

I have the default 128mb 9600, P4 3.0ghz, 512 ram, etc etc etc~

I'm planning to buy these 2 games, but I'm not sure how it will run.

I hope someone can share their experiences.

ALSO, I'm a "default" user, I'll make the graphics look good, but I won't push everything to the max, so I'm not worried about graphics looking as they should be ... etc

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post #2 of 35
8/2/04 at 9:06am
Doom 3 shouldn't be a problem at medium settings. You should check out the gaming forum as people who bought it early are sharing their experiences.
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post #3 of 35
8/2/04 at 9:10am
i´ve played both, and while i´ve really enjoyed thief 3 and are currently enjoying doom 3, i can´t say that they run well at all.
the thief 3 (and deus ex 2) engine sucked big time, so on default settings it didn´t run well for anyone, but using extensive tweaking i managed to get it playable in 800x600 resolution (and i have the same stats as you, except i have the 3,2 and 1024 ram). doom 3 is playable with medium settings on 800x600, which is not really to intriguing, as looks kind of bad, but it fun non the less. i manage to get about 40 fps all the time, all in all ranging from 10 fps to 60.
there are some problems with crashes, which according to other people gets solved once the 4,8 beta drivers are installed for the gpu, but that is not possible for me as i must wait for omega to release theirs, so the game will crash now and then, which is kind of bad.
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post #4 of 35
8/2/04 at 11:44am
I'm able to play Doom 3 at 1024x768 at avg 30FPS. About the same for Thief. Its very playable even at 1280x1024 but no FPS counter for me to tell.
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post #5 of 35
8/2/04 at 1:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by thinkjose1
I'm able to play Doom 3 at 1024x768 at avg 30FPS. About the same for Thief. Its very playable even at 1280x1024 but no FPS counter for me to tell.
dont you recieve these annoying drops when a monster suddenly appears on the screen... i´ve played through quite a few levels, and i´ve yet to see the actual jump animation of that monster that jumps/throws fireballs... the only thing i see is first it´s half a mile away from me, and the next second it´s slashed me into pieces...
also, everytime some monster/human/robot is on the screen it drops to about 5 fps, 15 fps at the most. and that is even if i turn it down to low settings, 640x480, **** the radeon9600...
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post #6 of 35
8/2/04 at 1:13pm
I recently read this article from HardOCP outlining the hardware and technical specs of Doom 3, apparently they spent some quality time at id with Doom 3. I found it to be a great insight as to what hardware is able to run Doom 3 and what compromises we laptop people can make in order to get the best performance and graphics quality.

Its a little long but give it a chance, there is a lot of really good information in there.

http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQ0
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post #7 of 35
8/2/04 at 2:16pm
Yea the HardOCP article owns. It shows all the differences in low, medium, high and ultra.

Harkon, I never seen drops to 5FPS, although there have been a few times where I drop to like 15FPS when a monster comes as you said. I hover around 25 - 35 for the most part.

Perhaps you should upgrade your drivers, because I'm not sure what the Geforce equivalent of the 9600 is but the game should run stable at 640x480 low on a Geforce 3.
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post #8 of 35
8/2/04 at 3:26pm
Yeah, and as I found out in that article and as I plan to test when I get Doom 3, it looks great under 640x480. How awesome is that.
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post #9 of 35
8/2/04 at 3:58pm
It looks ok. Not really that great.
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post #10 of 35
8/2/04 at 4:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by thinkjose1
Harkon, I never seen drops to 5FPS, although there have been a few times where I drop to like 15FPS when a monster comes as you said. I hover around 25 - 35 for the most part.

Perhaps you should upgrade your drivers, because I'm not sure what the Geforce equivalent of the 9600 is but the game should run stable at 640x480 low on a Geforce 3.
I get around 25-35 for the most part also, until a monster or something "moving" enters the screen...
i´ve got the nevest omega drivers, which are based on the 4.7 catalysts. from what i´ve heard the game runs so much better on the 4.8 betas, but unfortunately i´m not able to upgrade to that, as that one does not support mobile gpus. aargh. would so much like to play this game, but it is damned unplayable even at low settings... why is it that all these new games (farcry, thief 3, doom 3, and so on) have to have this extreme laggyness seemingly built into it. i mean, even in farcry, if i turn everything down to lowest, the game wont run as good at for example quake3. it´s like the mouse is lagging... really annoying...
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post #11 of 35
8/2/04 at 4:25pm
I was using Omega drivers at one point and thought they were great until I installed Call of Duty and it was so choppy and slow. So I reinstalled the AW drivers and Call of Duty runs great now.
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post #12 of 35
8/2/04 at 4:27pm
in doom it wont make a difference if you have the aw drivers or the omega, you still need the 4.8 catalyst betas if you want it to not crash all the time.
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post #13 of 35
8/2/04 at 5:07pm
Its the engine dude. Far Cry is made for new CPUs. Of course a DX9 card will own a DX8 (or 7?) game.
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post #14 of 35
8/2/04 at 5:41pm
I'm going to get it today and I'll see how it runs on the 5600
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post #15 of 35
8/2/04 at 5:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by thinkjose1
Its the engine dude. Far Cry is made for new CPUs. Of course a DX9 card will own a DX8 (or 7?) game.
eeer, what?
i have a new cpu, and i have a dx9 card...
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post #16 of 35
8/2/04 at 6:22pm
For those who are having troubles with drivers try http://www.rage3d.com and download the MobileMod program which allows the OFFICAL ATI catalyst drivers to be installed onto any mobility card

As for performance in those games, we brits havent got Doom3 yet so I cant make much opinion towards it, however having read the Hard OCP article I'm hoping things will run nicely at medium settings at medium res.
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post #17 of 35
8/2/04 at 8:05pm
DX 9 doesn't matter on video performance since doom3 engine is opengl... nividia should naturally run it better because of that reason alone but I going to give it a shot.

PS not to say DX is not involved but it is required for direct sound on audio not video.
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post #18 of 35
8/2/04 at 9:09pm
eeerhm. i just noticed that my area51m must have some serious problems. will have to format the machine i guess.
because i´ve not played any new games (farcry, doom3, thief3) on any other computer than my area51m i guessed those games all had this nasty built in laggyness that i´ve always experienced in them. but now i went over to my brothers house and played doom 3 on his machine (amd xp 3200+, 1024 ram, radeon 9800 pro and so forth) and bloody hell i was able to aim in the damned game! always before, even on 640x480 res with all on low, i´ve not been able to aim correctly. it´s like al my mousemovements are slowed down and laggy, and the game has generally been stuttering like mad even thou the fps-counter has said that i´m at 40 fps...
and on my brothers computer i was at 25-30 fps, and everything was going smooth as hell....
what the **** can be wrong with my machine?!?! aargh!

Quote:
Originally Posted by AlienMayhem
For those who are having troubles with drivers try http://www.rage3d.com and download the MobileMod program which allows the OFFICAL ATI catalyst drivers to be installed onto any mobility card
is it stable to run beta catalyst drivers on a mobile card using that... thing... ?
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post #19 of 35
8/2/04 at 10:26pm
I just ran it on my sys, specs in the sig. Without using a counter I was at least getting 40 -50 fps during battles. I'll try to get a more accurate fps, anybody know how. This game rocks, oh btw the visual settings were set on the 2nd best quality settings.
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post #20 of 35
8/2/04 at 10:55pm
Riktor, you mean medium?

And dude, you're confusing Direct3D with OpenGL. They are competing rendering methods. DirectX is what ALL games that run on Windows use. It combines Direct3D and OpenGL.
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