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Doom 3 - Enhance the Experience

For those who are interested, I found an interesting article.

Description
Doom 3 has caused upheaval in the gaming community, especially since most players lack the necessary specs to make the most of their experience. Thanks to our readers we have traced a few ways that most gamers can enhance their experience fighting the hell-breathing monsters that are after their fellow marines.

Light at the end of the barrel

While gamers everywhere are struggling to calm their trigger fingers following the Doom 3 experience, many are already complaining about the need for more light. Thanks to a bit of duct tape and a lot of ingenuity, Glen 'FrenZon' Murphy has created the Duct Tape Mod, a solution to all our Mars vision troubles. A link to the files and a brief description of the mod is available by following the download tab above.

Cheap Cards Not Choppy Games

Another kind soul has taken pity on the poor gamers tackling Doom 3 with the Radeon 8500, 9000 and 9200 series of cards and has released a Graphics Optimization Guide, guaranteed to solve the OpenGL Blues of all low-end ATI card owners. A link to the guide is also available by following the download tab above.

Finally a kind Megagames reader, you know who you are Slijkhuis, has sent in another way to get a very definite performance boost. This guide works by releasing a lot of CPU resources and manages to do so by eliminating the need to decompress data while playing the game. According to our benefactor, there is a catch! By using the fix, you temporarily can't connect to pure multiplayer servers. You have been warned (although there is a way back)

The Guide

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. We can unpack them and thus take the strain of your CPU.

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 overright 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 the original Doom3 /base folder (that is, before the unpacking), you would have thse folders and files "maps" "savegames" "config.spec" "doomConfig.cfg" "doomkey" game00.pk4" and "gamex86.dll", nothing else.

ALSO DO THIS! If you open DoomConfig.cfg (C:\programfiles\doom3\base) in notepad and change (make sure to save a backup copy) seta image_cacheMegs "32" to a higher number, such as 128 or 265 (depends on RAM, use 256 for a gig, 128 for 512mb) you will see a big increase too. You also have to change the seta image_useCache to "1" and seta image_cacheMinK to approx "20480" (or higher)
There you have it, since the CPU wont have to unpack the textures, sounds, etc...there is a MASSIVE performance increase at the expense of no MP and requiring more HD space.

Please feel free to post your experiences using these fixes and Mod in the User Comments section.

Source = megagames.com/news/html/pc/doom3enhancetheexperience.shtml
(not to sure if I am aloud to link outside of these forums, so just add the www)