quake 4 issues...pls help

[xsnv]

hey guys, could someone please help me! I've got the rig in sig and just tried playing quake 4. I however can't play at ultra settings as i'ts basically a slideshow(as in 5 seconds per frame!). Is there a problem somewhere as i know the gtx can run quake 4 easy at those settings. Could it possibly be my 1gb ram?

thanks

 

[Rroff]

Most deffinatly your RAM... quake 4 in ultra mode easily uses 1.5-1.8gigs of memory at times, which would result in a hideous amount of data swapping from the HDD with 1gig of ram hence the slideshow like performance.

 

[gurusan]

1gb of ram for sure is the culprit for sure.

My system can run in Ultra mode 1400x900 in single player just fine..multiplayer it dips into the 40s and sometimes 30s.....gross!

 

[xsnv]

Thanks a lot guys. just wanted to be sure. Guess it's just "high" for me then

 

[Rroff]

The difference from high and ultra quality in quake 4 is marginal unless you get up close and study the textures...

 

[gurusan]

The difference from high and ultra quality in quake 4 is marginal unless you get up close and study the textures...

That's what I noticed.....the performance difference is much more significant than the quality.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

From personal experience I can tell you it IS the RAM. When I only had 1GB of RAM in this machine, Quake4 ultra was unplayable with high settings, due to memory usage. After I stuck in 2GB, it was running smoother than you would have believed possible having seen it before, and at the same higher settings, sometimes with extras chucked on!

 

[lay-z-boy]

Going to chime in with the ram, from experience, i know that 2gb makes a world of difference in q4.

 

[Margaret]

Ultra Mode @ 1440x900 and High Quality settings on NV Control Panel here and it runs smooth as hell, 4x Anti-Aliasing too.

 

[edgaruy1980]

You need more ram, I have as background process about 400MB and with Quake 4 I can reach 1.25GB and even more.
Also ultra settings will uncompress all the textures, about 500MB , so if you have only 256MB video ram, the other frame buffer will go to your system RAM, and when you reach the limit, will start to allocate on your virtual memory, your hard drive, so you will have to wait for the writing time.
Some people think 512mb is for those with high resolutions, but many games are pushing bigger textures, so you need more video ram.
Examples of games that require 512MB video ram are: Doom 3, Quake 4, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Tomb Raider Legends (Next gen setting on).
On Quake, you can try with a lower resolution or get more ram.

 

[Sir Random]

Have you installed the 1.3 patch? I was disappointed with Quake4 performance on my 8800GTX, until I read about the 1.3 patch. It gave me a big boost in performance (constant 60fps @ 1600x1200, 8xAA, 16xAF, Ultra quality)