Originally posted by Geoffreyeolson
I've been having major problems with doom 3. The game just runs like garbage on my computer. When I get into a gun fight it always drops down to a slideshow. On the time demo. The first time the marin whips out his flashflight the entire game freezes. It takes at least a second just to render a frame, and I have similar problems with doors which sounds common though.

I'll show you guys my specs if it helps out:

cpu: 2200@2400 with fsb at 150
video card: 9600 pro ez with memory at 500 mhz
mobo:k7s5a
ram:512 of pc133

Imo my specs are pretty decent except for the ram and mobo. I have a friend with a computer that only has an athlon 2000@stock, and a geforce 3 ti, but he has a gig of ddr. His computer runs doom 3 just fine. It's excellent. He doesn't get any lag spikes like I do.

My score on time demo were:

640 at medium details: 22.6
1024 at medium details: 17.6 fps

At the higher resolution it felt the same as it was at the lower resolution, had the same bad lag spikes at both resolutions. It just when at 1024 the maximum fps wasn't as high. Which didn't really bother me at all. What bothers me are these horrible lag spikes that makes the game unplayable, and I don't think they're video card related. I've already done all the tweaks possible to doom 3 and nothing has solved the problem. Itried screwing around with the video card settings and I've decompress the pk4 files and still no success
1. Even a 150MHz FSB/memory bus is not that much.
2. The K7S5A was a good board for its time, but its not going to compete with the performance of current chipsets.
3. Even though you have 512MB of RAM, that PC133 is absoluting starving your system of bandwidth.
4. I could be wrong, but I believe the 9600 Pro EZ means the card has a 64-bit memory bus, which like you computer, is absolutely starving your video card for bandwidth.

Doom 3 has some pretty hefty system requirements, and even though it can be made to run on lower end systems by lowering the graphical settings, I wouldn't expect the performance to be any better than what you now have currently given your system specifications.