Doom 3 FPS issue resolved; More Gaming Followed

Last night, I finally beat Doom 3. I still think it’s one of the best games available for the PC right now. Totally captivating. The realism of the game along with the lack of opportunity to get distracted (solid gameplay) just sucks you right into the game. I’ve heard of people playing this game straight from beginning to end (about 20hrs?) in one sitting, and I can see why.

After I had beat the big guy at the end, it dawned on me that I had actually read somewhere already that there is some sort of bug in the nvidia drivers that causes doom3 to perform very poorly (fps) when dual screens is enabled. This page explains it all, but you need to either disable the second screen, or go into the advanced performance options and change the “acceleration mode” to single screen rather than the default setting of dual-head acceleration. This allowed me to still use the second head for aim/irc/web and still get full performance in doom3 on the first. After the fix, I was able to run at 1024×768 high detail at ~20 fps’ish. While it’s fun to play like this (BEAUTIFUL) it’s not as smooth, and that’s what REALLY matters. I’ve been playing at 800×600 low detail at about 60 fps. My GF FX 5600 128M is performing better than I thought it could.

So, needless to say, I had to play some more doom with my newfound performance boost. I took a few more screenshots, but I didn’t have enough really cool ones to bother posting them all. I started playing with some cheat codes and stuff, too. I turned on ‘notarget’ which makes the monsters play like they don’t see you at all. So I was able to shine my flashlight in this demon’s face and get a nice screenshot of him, which I cropped and resized in the gizzimp. (Original screenshot at 1024×768 medium detail.)