Is Gothic 3 performance doomed?

I own a high end system and tried running Gothic 3 several times with community patch 1.6 and i also did try many tweaks, the

framerates are high, but the major problem which is killing performance is the constant "engine stuttering" which i have been told is caused by the engine constantly trying to access the hard drive to retrieve data..?

Is there any hope to solve that issue or am i beating a dead horse?

Maybe an SSD,I wouldn't say G3's performance is doomed.
Community Patch 1.70 is due to come out at the end of the month maybe they have fixed something I think It's worth a try.

Maybe you forgot to defragment lately? If you're really feeling "tweaky", you could try putting all G3 data on the first sectors of your HD (which can be much faster than the end). Of course, maybe you're HD just can't take it? Then again, it's just as likely it's Gothic's fault - it's not really the worlds most optimized game.

Of course, more RAM is a given, but I assume you're already got lots.

Originally Posted by VPeric
Maybe you forgot to defragment lately? If you're really feeling "tweaky", you could try putting all G3 data on the first sectors of your HD (which can be much faster than the end). Of course, maybe you're HD just can't take it? Then again, it's just as likely it's Gothic's fault - it's not really the worlds most optimized game.

Of course, more RAM is a given, but I assume you're already got lots.

They guys working on patch 1.70 don't know how to fix the stuttering problem, which is i believe is a universal problem (gothic 3 engine related) that most players experience.

Yes i did defragment before/after installing gothic 3 and that did not help at all and i doubt further tweaking by moving files around sectors will help.. it might reduce stuttering but not eliminate it.

Did anyone with an SSD test gothic 3 and care to comment?

Why not raid a pair of MLC PATA SSD's? - its all way over the top and too expensive.

My system is not top rated (dual core AMD M2N) and yet i have no detectable lag or stuttering, pseudo raided (hard) + (windows soft) 2 @ 300gb hdd's - the low cost solution.

Any theories to the cause and cure of gothic 3 stuttering?

Have you set this to 0?
Threads.PVSPrefetcherCount=0

Also this to false?
Render.EnablePVSPrefetcherThread=false

Also the FPS entries:
FpS.Average=25.0
FpS.Min=15.0
FpS.Max=40

Also the cache settings:
Cache.SizeImage=256000000
Cache.SizeMaterial=80000000
Cache.SizeMesh=140000000
Cache.SizeSound=160000000
Cache.SizeCollisionMesh=80000000
Cache.SizeAnimation=80000000
Cache.SizeSpeedTree=20000000

From 24 pages of:
http://forum.jowood.com/showthread.php?t=126976

These seem to be the consensus bang for the buck performance tweaks. These are playable on the demo of Gothic 3 on the system in my sig, I will have the full version of Gothic 3 to test these out soon.

i did not test the prefetcher settings or change fps entries but i did change all cache values.. won't disabling the prefetcher cause the engine to stop loading new areas?

I have no 3D performance problem, the issue is what appears to be the engine constanly streaming data from the hard drive causing the stuttering or that's what i have been told..

Maybe you should post your system specs.

Core2Duo @ 3.4 Ghz
2GB DDR2
GTX260 SSC
WD3200KS
Windows XP SP2

more RAM, that's your sollution.

Yup RAM. But you will still stutter during disk access for the content streaming. Just live with it. The whole world is seamless and that is the price you pay. I would not give it up just to avoid the stutter. The only time it annoys me really is when I'm in combat, because you usually end up looking at the sky or the ground after the stutter. Oh well. Nice video card btw.

More RAM shouldn't improve that much though. The limit is 2 GB per program. More with a little hack, but who knows of this has disadvantages.

True Gorath, but your OS also takes up a bit certainly when there is a lot running in BG. (virusscanners, firewall and other stuff)

Sure. That's why he gets ca. 400MB RAM for G3 if he upgrades.

Yes i could get more ram but that won't fix the stuttering issue, since players who own better systems with 4GB ram also have this problem, i never ran out of ram when playing pc games anyway, i keep background processes clean etc..

Can anyone explain why some players get no stuttering at all all, while most others get stuttering? Is it the raided hard drives like wulf pointed out or tweaked settings with the no prefetch option? Where should i go from here?

I doubt you can do much if we assume that your Windows is in good shape. G3's performance is rather unpredictable.
One of the Community Patches deactivated the dualcore support because it was broken from the very beginning. Of course this step didn't help performance on newer systems.

@ Novice,

Would you be willing (no cost involved) to try a full reformat of your single hdd and split it in two via the windows install and make a raid (01 striped) set to gain some extra drive data throughput…just so as to evaluate the possibile difference to the G3 stutter?

You would loose just a few Mb of sectors on each virtual drive for the data segment areas.
Allocating equal size partitions works great.

I would rather purchase one or two new hard drives and test a raid configuration,
as a full reformat would involve too much work for me right now, but to be honest with you, getting new HD's and setting RAID would take too much time, energy, and money for just a "what if". If that setup was 100% confirmed as working then i might be willing to try it. I guess ill just have to move on. Thanks for the help guys.

Originally Posted by Wulf
@ Novice,

Would you be willing (no cost involved) to try a full reformat of your single hdd and split it in two via the windows install and make a raid (01 striped) set to gain some extra drive data throughput…just so as to evaluate the possibile difference to the G3 stutter?

You would loose just a few Mb of sectors on each virtual drive for the data segment areas.
Allocating equal size partitions works great.

Wulf the whole point of RAID 0 is to have multiple heads attack the IO tasks. Raiding a partitioned drive will still be a serial read/write operation.