My thoughts about G3

My system:

AMD Athlon 2600+
2,14 Ghz
1,0 GB of RAM
GeForce 6600GT
128 MB video RAM

I've played Gothic for about 2-3 hours and I have already experienced a lot of problems.
I know my computer isn't very high-end but I'd expect that with every setting low or off (except texture and model quality, which are medium) and a screen resolution of 800*600, it would still run with medium fps.
Unfortunately, this is not so. I have constant lag and stuttering around the huge world. As if this wasn't enough, now for the first time I'm experiencing out of memory crashes.
I got rid of the white flickering stuff by turning on bloom and I have yet to decide which of these hurts my eyes more…

Can anyone give me a hint or two to get better performance without buying anything? I dont know anymore, I'm so sick of that frigging out of memory error appearing every five minutes or so, that I've decided not to play anymore.

By the way, I've played G1 and G2 too, both of which I absolutely enjoyed. So yeah, Gothic 3 has been somewhat a disappointment for me.

We have a Gothic Tweaks thread that is full of hints, tips and suggestions to get the best out of older rigs.

Apostrophe, even though you said "without buying anything," I'd still suggest you do buy another GB of RAM and scavenge/buy another HDD from somewhere. With 2GB and two HDD's, with the swap file on a different disk than your system and programs, you will see very noticeable performance improvements. The second HDD can be small; I'm sure you can find a 40 gig one for tens of bucks somewhere.

I've got one 60 GB HDD and one 40 GB HDD, but I've got both Linux and Win installed so it's pretty heavily partitioned…
I'm not really sure I understand the swapfile thing. I read the article, but I didn't get it.
And by the way, I've got 2x512 MB RAM sticks, not 1x1024 MB RAM stick.
Now, as patch 2 is out, I might give G3 another try, cause before, it was unplayable.

The memory setting in the Tweak thread heal very much as Corwin has pointed out, think they are on page 2 (?).
Well from your description its proabably the Medium Textures doing most of the chugging, in worst cases like big fights or in towns try turning down yoiur View Distances and Object Detail to Low, also make sure you Cache settings are on Medium.

It should run at 1024*768 with reasonable detail on such a low end system. Tweaking is necessary though. You won´t get high frame rates but you should be able to minimize the stuttering quite a bit.

Originally Posted by Apostrophe
I've got one 60 GB HDD and one 40 GB HDD, but I've got both Linux and Win installed so it's pretty heavily partitioned…
I'm not really sure I understand the swapfile thing. I read the article, but I didn't get it.

It´s actually quite simple. Swapping is used when the RAM is full, which happens after approximately 10 seconds if you only have 1 GB. Furthermore each controller on your mainboard can only read from one device at the same time. So ideally you want to have the game on one HDD and a fixed swap file on the other disk on the 2nd controller. That way swapping and reloading can be done simultaneously.