Is Gothic 3 performance doomed?

Just for the record i did test wynams G3 ini settings including no prefetch options and it did nothing for me in terms of stuttering and 3-5 sec pauses..

The frame rates are smooth tough.

@ToddMcF2002
Yes of course hardware raid is much faster, but alternate read and writes overlay'd between two partitions is faster than just one plus you get a small boost from the dynamic disks.
This experiment was suggested to verify if any boost occurs, not to substitute raiding two hdd's.

@Novice
3 to 5 second pauses! - that is indeed a serious situation, sorry to hear it spoils the G3 experience.

My own striped raid set is via a promise cached disk controller…one of the best but there are others.

What do you believe the chances are that hardware raid will eliminate gothic's stuttering, i mean how much faster can 2 hd's be in raid vs a single one?

Originally Posted by Novice
Just for the record i did test wynams G3 ini settings including no prefetch options and it did nothing for me in terms of stuttering and 3-5 sec pauses..

The frame rates are smooth tough.

Okies … I had read that the prefetch helped some people on JoWood forums.
I play Gothic 3 demo version (full version coming media mail). I occasionally get stutter on loading up a new area (stepping into a cave, torches, stepping over a vista). While it is unfortunate, I was hoping going from Demo->1.7 would alleviate more of this.

I think I am too optimistic? At best, Gothic3 circa 1.7 will be as good as it can be and will still be flawed.

I also wonder if NCQ is helping me? I have AHCI enabled on a SATA II that supports NCQ.

Originally Posted by Novice
What do you believe the chances are that hardware raid will eliminate gothic's stuttering, i mean how much faster can 2 hd's be in raid vs a single one?

Stuttering will always be there.

I've been playing G3 on my older system and my upgraded system, and for me, the main improvements came with upgrading my RAM from first 1 to 2 and then to 4 Gigs. I kept one of my old hard drives, (not SSD) and incidentally have G3 on it now- that doesn't seem to make a difference - my G3 runs smootly on it.

What also seemed to help is tweaking the .ini file like has been suggested above, and on the official forum; -getting those cache values just right, etc.

I've only patched to 1.6, and my G3 is running as smoothly as you would expect a continuous area gameworld to run. I do get the occasional momentary lag, sure, as has been said above, " on loading up a new area (stepping into a cave, torches, stepping over a vista) " , but nothing game-breaking at all.

I did used to get crashes after playing continuously for many hours, which I think was caused by the notorious memory leak problem. I found that exiting the game every few hours and re-entering helps for the memory-leak problem, though this was supposed to have been fixed by one of the patches.

I know theroretically your XP 32-bit system is only supposed to allocate limited amounts of RAM, but I find the issue of adding extra RAM a bit of a grey area (like believing or not believing in aliens - there's evidence for and against ); as I believe adding enough RAM to cover the 3.xxGbyte supposed limit to your system does free up more resources.

I dunno, it just can't really hurt to get an extra gig or two of RAM, it's become so relatively cheap these days, and I'm certainly very glad I upgraded to 4 G RAM.

(..and don't try and convince me otherwise, Gorath! )

I have two WD Raptors in RAID-0 configuration, and stuttering on G3 was never a huge issue for me (although it was still present on occasion). I haven't tried the latest patches, although the huge community patch has gotten me curious about giving it another spin.

Originally Posted by wynams
I play Gothic 3 demo version (full version coming media mail). I occasionally get stutter on loading up a new area (stepping into a cave, torches, stepping over a vista). While it is unfortunate, I was hoping going from Demo->1.7 would alleviate more of this.

Full version arrived yesterday. I installed and did the .ini tweaks mentioned earlier and applied CP1.6. This combination did seem to run better than the older demo code.

I too have 4GB RAM (even though XP will never use all of it … I hated Vista and rolled back). As RivianWitch suggests, I too am skeptical of what whitepages and design documents say regarding programs being capped at 2GB RAM usage.

Back to suggestion mode if you are defragged, patched and RAM'd up and still not running well … take a look at your startup processes with a tool such as:
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml. Remove anything you do not need loading up.

Also run crapcleaner, turn off file indexing in windows and give your drives another defrag.

If possible, another hard drive (raid 0 or not) and move your page file to a different device than windows and/or Gothic.

This looks promising too:
http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum…2&#post8804912

Performance boost of about 20% on a Core Duo 8800GTX.

I played a bit the 1.7 and still get hurt by how blurry the image becomes when I do a circular look. But I also found a trick it's to use a camera far to the character and then circular look is slower and that removes most of the blurry effect.

I'm not sure but I also did two sessions, one with AB activated and one without it, I get the feeling to have lag I hadn't with AB activated.

Originally Posted by Wulf
@ToddMcF2002
Yes of course hardware raid is much faster, but alternate read and writes overlay'd between two partitions is faster than just one plus you get a small boost from the dynamic disks.
This experiment was suggested to verify if any boost occurs, not to substitute raiding two hdd's.

Hm, i thought the only reason having one harddrive into two raids was either to easier expand the discs in machine (RAID-0, RAID-5) or to make sure important data would be a little more robust (RAID-1, RAID-5) by spreading the data into two different sectors.

if anything, since the drive is a mechanic thingie with stuff that reads and stuff that writes and a magnetic spinning thingy going round and round. I fail to see how my read arm could be on the same place at the same time on two occasions.
Nor do I see how my transferring cables shuffles more data at the same time.

If people is formatting their drives and making a raid 0 and reporting a performance gain it would be more logic to assume its because the data is nicley ordered on a newly format drive?

However, i have not researched the subject. So i am curious about it since my logic might be flawed.

Getting performance on a home pc is still best achieved by having 2 or three disc in RAID-0… and having a backup solution ready.

Here an article about RAID being faster for data reading. It's for linux but base is probably the same for Windows:
http://www.linux.com/feature/124256

Again, the idea was just a trial and error suggestion, not too specific, to experiment with an open mind, to keep the original HDD with its windows OS installed, then, without any raid controller whatsoever (either mobo or added card) if a second HDD was added as a way of testing the G3 data access speed, a striped raid (0) could be enabled through the windows xp OS software. It would literally transform to a raid system and the data throughput would be significantly noticeable.

G3 would need to be reinstalled obviously, yet this together with the 1.70 community enhanced patch would give some low cost effective HDD speed increase.

Even with only one HDD raided through software there is a small % of extra data throughput as the data retrieval interleaving that takes place is through the channeling system eg: logical addressing and data tagging etc'

There is embedded into windows xp a raid software - "Veritas" volume manager (symantec) i believe, all just sat there waiting to be used but it will never be better than a cached hardware controller with cpu chip. These depending on memory levels interact with the cached memory on the HDD. So a pair of HDD's with say 16mb each, could have 32 mb of level 2 memory accessed through a small raid level 1 controller cache - very fast.

Compared to single drives, in the normal everyday hardware raid-0 setups, 25% speed increases are normal, with the newer super drives 40% and even 50% extra data throughput can be realised.

A pair of raided "Velociraptors" with their 346.6 burst speeds are not to be snuffed at…..
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the…ard_drive_ever

Cost is "the" factor obviously.

I'm still waiting for SSD prices to come down. When I can get this for about 200 euros, count me in.

Same here, but it will be the ssd raid controller technology that will be the crucial factor.
There's some way to go yet before it all gels together…but it's happening.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sam…raid,7224.html

I'd be happy with a single SSD; RAIDing that would be overkill.

RAID is great for crash disk, speed is totally secondary aspect. Who's here never crash a disk?