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DOOM3: ULTRA QUALITY vs. QUALITY

O

oozish

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 27, 2003
Messages
1,465
no problem running Ultra quality here, not sure why carmack says this requires a 500mb card.

1600x1200 Ultra quality second run demo1 = 61fps
1600x1200 Quality second run demo1 = 63.1

12x1024 Quality run was 62.2, no sense in running this low of a resolution. Enabling 2x aa at 1600x1200 hits too hard, ashame too cause it looks great this way, the best setting I say. However it is very playable, i'm just a freak tho i don't like going below 50fps ever.

Anyway, looks like Ultra quality is a no brainer? Thoughts? Oh, the above settings were with Kyles tweak, 'r-usedepthboundstest 1'

Without that tweak I lose about 1 FPS; so it's no big deal either way.
 
the problem isn't with the timedemo runs or the framerates, it is mostly due to the the fact that alot of texture swapping has to go on if you don't have a 512 meg card, so it has a tendency to lag a little at times as textures are loaded from the system memory to the vid card.
 
Interesting, so many people are able to play it at UQ 1600x1200, even XTPE users. If you didn't mind much below 60fps you could probably have 2-4xAA even...and you have a 2.4OC, 1Gb...
 
Blad3 said:
Interesting, so many people are able to play it at UQ 1600x1200, even XTPE users. If you didn't mind much below 60fps you could probably have 2-4xAA even...and you have a 2.4OC, 1Gb...
Click to expand...

LoL I have a GF4 ATM and I can play it at1280x1024 at Ultra. A slide show of 8 fps, but still it looks pretty sweet. Can't wait till FedEx ships my GT!
 
yes but I mean playable, people with "lower-end" machines' are finding UQ 16x12 fully playable..
 
I get 69FPS on Ultra, 16x12.

No real problems running it like that, though I don't notice any difference between High and Ultra.
 
Merlin45 said:
the problem isn't with the timedemo runs or the framerates, it is mostly due to the the fact that alot of texture swapping has to go on if you don't have a 512 meg card, so it has a tendency to lag a little at times as textures are loaded from the system memory to the vid card.
Click to expand...

This is my point though: I don't notice the lag at all. I'm not just not noticing lag...it's not there.
 
I tried ultra quality 1024x768 exopecting it to be choppy and all that. It ran pretty good. The only time I see a little chopyness is the cut scenes. But I played the first 30min and everything ran fine. I did check my ram and I had 80megs free while I was playing. so 1gig is just enough to do ultra quality. I also have aperature set to 256megs. And the cache setting in doom3 set to 256megs.

Someone should do bench marks with ultraquality on agp 8x and 4x using 256mb card to see how much more 8x helps in texture swapping if any over 4x.

bfg gt oc 400/1000. p4 3.0c 1gig of ram
 
I found out there is no real discernible difference between the two settings (oh no...please don't hit me!...I didn't mean to say that!!...ouch! ouch!! :eek: ). I mean, I know the quality difference is there. Anyway, I began playing 1600x1200 @ Ultra settings no prob but I noticed some hiccups here and there (specially when a new monster would pop out) and it was bothering me a little bit. My frame rate was excellent but those hiccups where getting on my nerves bc my machine is powerful enough to run it (P4 2.8 @ 3.6 + BFG GeForce 6800 Ultra, etc.) After reading the [H]ardware Guide for Doom 3 I switched to High settings from Ultra and boy...I'm so glad!...No lag or hiccups whatsoever!...now the game is truly spooky (I was getting bad because I knew a monster was going to show whenever my system would lag a bit.) I honestly recommend you leave the Ultra setting for what its supposed to be... next-gen 512Meg cards. Hope it helps a little.
 
how come I only get 38 FPS? My system is pretty similar to yours
Click to expand...

38FPS? Sounds like you have Vsync on for the benchmark.

I get like 39 with vsync on, 54ish with it off.
 
Guess I'm going to be the idiot here...but where is this benchmark/demo at?
 
TBH I am doubting some of these "ultra quality" reports, unless no aa/af is used.

i mean, HardOCP used an FX53 with 2GB of ram and 4xAA/8xAF wasn't playable at high quality on a x800xtpe at 1600x1200, nevermind ultra quality. High quality no AA/AF had 25fps min framerate, on one of the most powerful CPUs out there.

I am assuming people are running through non stressful areas and assuming everything is fine. A good to test fps I've found is after the first auto save point on level1, when you run into the big room that has all the ramps in it where the captain says "theres civilians in here, be sure not to shoot them"
 
tranCendenZ said:
TBH I am doubting some of these "ultra quality" reports, unless no aa/af is used.

i mean, HardOCP used an FX53 with 2GB of ram and 4xAA/8xAF wasn't playable at high quality on a x800xtpe at 1600x1200, nevermind ultra quality. High quality no AA/AF had 25fps min framerate, on one of the most powerful CPUs out there.

I am assuming people are running through non stressful areas and assuming everything is fine. A good place to actually test fps is after the first auto save point, when you run into the big room that has all the ramps in it where the captain says "theres civilians in here, be sure not to shoot them"
Click to expand...

There's several posts, some say noAA, some say 2xAA, not sure if I've seen a 4xAA XTPE owner say it's playable yet. They've played through a lot of the game and say it's fine.
 
I played past that and thru when all hell breaks thru in the game. NO aa was used and 1024x768 was used. 1ggi of ram was used and the game with the 256mb apeture used nearly all my ram with like 80megs to spare. Course it may have paused for a split second but no huge hipcups. I should try it with 2x aa and see.
 
tranCendenZ said:
TBH I am doubting some of these "ultra quality" reports, unless no aa/af is used.

i mean, HardOCP used an FX53 with 2GB of ram and 4xAA/8xAF wasn't playable at high quality on a x800xtpe at 1600x1200, nevermind ultra quality. High quality no AA/AF had 25fps min framerate, on one of the most powerful CPUs out there.

I am assuming people are running through non stressful areas and assuming everything is fine. A good to test fps I've found is after the first auto save point on level1, when you run into the big room that has all the ramps in it where the captain says "theres civilians in here, be sure not to shoot them"
Click to expand...

I'm not monitoring this statistically to give the lowest fps I see, but I never see it go below 42-25 and that only happens during the beginning of a cut scene. no aa is used but of course AF is being used (8x). But there is only like 2fps difference in the timedemo between Ultra and normal quality at 16x12 for me. I've run these tests multiple times along with in game monitoring of fps and it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to run lower quality when the gameplay is not changed when I up the quality and rez. I mean, I know the best fps I can get, where it seems to never drop from 60's--is 12x10...I think, "I'll play at those settings.....but then there is just nothing compared to how it looks at 16x12 so I always go back. I'm a FPS junkie, I love fluid gameplay, and I hate stuttering and choppiness. Believe me I wouldn't play if it stuttered, I'd find the best settings that didn't and use that.

Very rarely I get a stutter with Ultra Quality...but it's not any different if I had it on Quality.

16x12 Ultra: 61
16x12 Quality: 62.2

In game the fps (using com_showfps) is usually at 60 and only drops to 42 is the lowest during the start of a cut game scene...in game during firefights and stuff it's never choppy...but drops to the 50's.

The game looks and plays amazing.

What I've done to get this is:

1. lock refresh rate at 85 in display properties.
2. Using 'r_usedepthboundtests 1
3. Disabled Fast writes (helped me alot for stuttering)
4. Nvidia settings are 'Quality' trilinear opts on af opts off,
5. Vsynch is OFF (no visible tearing with refresh rate locked; it was much worse before I did these tweaks).

Also, I don't know if it matters but my memory timings are 2-2-2-7, my FSB 260, so maybe this helps too. My GT is clocked at 415/1100.
 
I think I'm CPU limited becuase I'm getting free 4xAA [no FPS diff from 2xAA]. You guys think I can OC the CPU to 2.4 without touching the multi?
 
what is 'r-usedepthboundstest 1'? is it a line added to the config file? what does it do?
 
just searched google:

r_useDepthBoundsTest use depth bounds test to reduce shadow fill

more info would be great though!
l
 
the depth bounds test is a major part of the tech that makes up ultrashadow and ultrashadow 2. that test more specifically prevents unseen shadow volumes from being drawn, conserving fill rate.
 
Kyle posted that tweak in a thread somewhere and wanted feedback. It's only to be used if you have a 6800 or better and are using the 61.77 driver set. It gains me about 1-2fps only.
 
Hmm... I have a question (one suitable to an uneducated hordesman): Do you think that using PCI-Express might heavily reduce the lag on loading textures from system memory? I mean, PCIe is supposed to be a heck of a lot faster, having more bandwidth and being capable of simultaneous reads/writes. Would this allow for much faster texture swapping to/from system memory? I think I'm going to try this tonight.

The only difference between high and ultra quality is that ultra has completely uncompressed textures, right? So if I'm playing right now with 60fps on high, and I changed it to ultra and saw no FPS drop, it might be reasonable to say that PCIe is really useful for this, right?
 
milling_hordesman said:
Hmm... I have a question (one suitable to an uneducated hordesman): Do you think that using PCI-Express might heavily reduce the lag on loading textures from system memory? I mean, PCIe is supposed to be a heck of a lot faster, having more bandwidth and being capable of simultaneous reads/writes. Would this allow for much faster texture swapping to/from system memory? I think I'm going to try this tonight.

The only difference between high and ultra quality is that ultra has completely uncompressed textures, right? So if I'm playing right now with 60fps on high, and I changed it to ultra and saw no FPS drop, it might be reasonable to say that PCIe is really useful for this, right?
Click to expand...


carmack said PCI Express has no performance effect on the game...or hollenshead...it was in the PC Gamer interview.
 
What I'm asking goes beyond the specifications of a single game; what I'm trying to figure out is if having a PCI-Express bus allows signifigantly faster texture tansfer from system memory to video memory.

I mean, the theory behind all this talk about "loading from memory causes stuttering" is that it takes time to load the textures into the video memory. What I want to know is if this is because the memory speed/bandwidth is the limiting factor, or if the AGP speed/bandwidth is the limiting factor. If it's the later, don't you think that having a bus that reads twice as quickly and has simultaneous up and down just _might_ make a differnce? That's what I'm looking to find out. Of course, for that I'd need a 5900 xt in a similar rig sitting right next to me, and the chances of that happening are nil.

But still, I'm going to test this out tonight and beneficial results, if any do occur, because it's one of those meta-engineering things I'm interested in.

I mean, has the 5900 ever been praised as an excellent card that should be running this game at 1024x768, high quality, no AA/AF without a hitch? Not really. I'm thinking that it can handle the 1024x768 so long as I don't add in AA/AF. What I'm wondering is if this new bus will allow for faster system/video memory interaction, not if PCIe will allow the card itself to work faster.

Consider this: It wasn't until I unlocked those "image_cache" options that I could up the resolution and, more importantly, the qualiy so drastically. I was getting 30- fps on 640x480 medium or low quality. So if the bus allows signifigantly faster cache transfer, wouldn't it make a darned good amount of sense that it would decrease texture load times that signifigantly? Regardless, it's all speculative, and I won't know a thing until tonight (or maybe if I go home for lunch I can check).
 
oozish said:
Very rarely I get a stutter with Ultra Quality...but it's not any different if I had it on Quality.

16x12 Ultra: 61
16x12 Quality: 62.2

In game the fps (using com_showfps) is usually at 60 and only drops to 42 is the lowest during the start of a cut game scene...in game during firefights and stuff it's never choppy...but drops to the 50's.
Click to expand...
First of all, it sounds like you have different version of DOOM3. There is no such thing as "Quality" in options.
It's either ULTRA, HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW. :p

Also, I don't know if it matters but my memory timings are 2-2-2-7, my FSB 260, so maybe this helps too. My GT is clocked at 415/1100.
Click to expand...
Your memory timing or FSB have very negligible effect. Because your AGP bus (which connects your video card to north bridge) speed is fixed at 66 MHz @ 2.1 GB/s of bandwidth.

Also even if we ignore AGP bus speed, your system memory (DDR) is way too slow compared to onboard video memory (GDDR3).
 
First of all, it sounds like you have different version of DOOM3. There is no such thing as "Quality" in options.
Click to expand...

oh so sorry, didn't mean to confuse you, I'm just typing and trying to get my thoughts out not trying to verify what should be obvious what I'm talking about anyway. Got that confused with the nvidia display properties terminology. I meant Ultra vs 'High' but I think you got that anyway.
 
ATW said:
Guess I'm going to be the idiot here...but where is this benchmark/demo at?
Click to expand...

"No stupid questions, just stupid assumptions." -Some famous guy

To get to the timedemo do this:

In game, Hit [ctl]-[alt]-~ to open the console.

them type in: timedemo demo1
Let it run for a bit then hit [esc] to exit and it will tell you average fps.
 
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