Gothic 3 G3 on below min system

I am running gothic 3 on a 6-7 year old comp so I was wondering if i could get some help with the ge3.ini file. I have a 2GHz p4 (altho it clocks at much less than that... i think about 1.5GHz), 768 DDR RAM, and an unsupported video card Radeon 9250. I managed to successfully run the game somewhat smooth without any visual glitches, freezes or jumpy FPS (except during revolutions heh). i get anywhere from 5 during revolutions to 25 in open world FPS which is not as bad as it sounds once you get used to it (and if graphics are not what you look for in a game). So far I have only modified the ge3.ini file mainly the ROI (the distance it draws entities at), the distance landscape, and several obvious ones like shadows are turned down. I am not sure what the other settings do such as DOF, postprocessing, all the cache settings... pretty much anything that does not have a comment next to it. Does anyone know if there are any features that would increase my FPS if they are changed / turned down? For example, should I turn down all the video cache settings (or leave them unchanged)?. I have tried changing some settings Im unsure about but that messed me up so much that I couldnt even run the game so I copied ge3.ini from the CD and stayed away from those unclear settings since then.

Also, are there settings in G3 that are present is some other games to help with FPS like v-synch, hardware mouse, wind on/off, crappy (2 dimensional) looking trees on/off....? I will probably overclock my PC and graphics card and do the whole list someone posted (format HD, fresh windows, defrag...) to try to improve performance once I get some free time but for now Im just trying to figure out what all the settings do.

I think video cache settings affect how much of the world is loaded into RAM at each stutter, essentially making each such load take longer but reducing the frequency of them. It's a setting I prefer to keep as high as the RAM allows, but with 768 MB you are in a bit of a bind.

You should get more RAM anyway, it's a cheap component and will help both Gothic 3 and general Windows performance a lot. It's unlikely that such an old mobo supports more than a gig of RAM tho.

i am surprised that you could run it!! that's good i might say! with a bit of ram it will be better! also if u plan on updating the PC... i would advice you to but a new one! usually you can find good PC's at about hmm maybe even under 600 or even 500 $

Yeah, I tried messing with the cache settings and it looks like RAM is limiting my FPS. I dont want to upgrade my old computer with more ram (and youre right, 1gb is the max it can have) since its too old to properly run any new games anyway. Still cant find that balance between how much RAM to allocate to each cache setting. Do you know about how much of my total RAM I should let each setting have and how much should I leave unallocated so the game doesnt start freezing and slowing down to a crawling 1fps for no apparent reason? (happened to me a couple of times )

I also might be able to give FPS a boost with some console commands (once I can get the damn thing to display something other than flickering squares that is) and possibly by finding tweaked shader files. Btw, do you know if the community patch helps with performance / FPS... I have it downloaded but a little suspicious about installing it after reading that it has some language related side effects. I almost wish the first 2 games werent my favorite RPGs so that I wouldnt absolutely have to play the 3rd one

i know your feeling! these games are also my favorite! as for the performance.... well...i suggest to stop all programs that run in background so you have all the RAM you can get available! you can try and use this AutoRuns

and this HijackThis

also no antivirus and also take your internet cable out! it may help!

as for the RAM you are trying to allocate to the caches i can't really help! try to have an even balance ... i mean have as much allocated as unallocated! you can also try to use some hard as ram but since you don't have a new HDD dunno if that would help very much... ultimately try to defragment (if you want to format that is even better) try some tweaks... put all on low... and dunno! that's all i can think of right now

Thanks, gonna try those programs right now. Im not sure what you mean by new HDD tho... formatted, recently bought..? Does it make a difference? I have 2 hard drives each with a paging file (made them as big as Windows will let me ) and I think it helps a bit. I ran into a problem while defragmenting... after it gets to a certain point, it tells me the file is too large to move and exits... not sure how to fix that yet

The community patches shouldn't impact performace, but you should probably still install 'em - they do fix an odd little bug here and there (mostly typos and such, but it does help). As for defragmenting, you could always try with some custom defragmenter (like JkDefrag - using it, you could even tell it to put your Gothic 3 folder files at the beginning of the disk (which'll help, since the beginning can be significantly faster than then end)).

Vlad T said:

Do you know about how much of my total RAM I should let each setting have and how much should I leave unallocated so the game doesnt start freezing and slowing down to a crawling 1fps for no apparent reason? (happened to me a couple of times )

Click to expand...

Cant help you there, when I build my PCs I always make sure that RAM is the last thing to be skimped on (both my significant other and I run memory hungry apps in our professional life).

Gaboru: Using virtual memory (swapping against the HD) intuitively seems like a bad idea for such an old system. The harddisks are likely not very fast by themselves, and probably use an old IDE interface, making that particular bottleneck extra painful.

my bad... sry