Widescreen Gaming Forum

Just got a laptop, and would like to know if we can play Doom 3 right out of the box without tweaking the specs etc.

Anyone have it running on a laptop?

Our laptop specs:

HP zx5000 - P4 3.0HT, 15.4" Brightview WXGA - 128mb ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 - 512MB SDRAM (1x512) - 60GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive - DVD/CD-RW Drive - 54g Integ Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN & Bluetooth

Dunno. Try it and find out. ;)

I've been too chicken to install it on my laptop yet. :lol:

Someone over at the zd7000 forums said they got it to run great on their machine:

Doom 3 runs very nicely on my ZD7k 2.6/512/ 64 MB 5600. Last evening - I even ran this on High Settings @1440*900 with great results - but the machine got very hot

And I found this tweaking link while surfing over at the x1000 forums:

http://ucguides.savagehelp.com/Doom3/FPSVisuals.htm

I'll give it a try and see how it turns out. Thanks for the link to the tweaks, Ibrin. :)

On an nx7000 (1.5GHz P-M, 512MB RAM, 64MB ATi M9+) Doom 3 runs like an absolute dog.

1680x1050 (the native res of my screen) is impossible: it's a slideshow, even with all the details turned down.
1024x768 is slightly better: it plays with a normally stable framerate in the 20fps region; not great, but just about playable. It jerks pretty badly sometimes, though that's pretty rare.
800x600 is smoother than 1024, but still isn't really worth worrying about.

I'm pretty certain I could get better results if I tried for longer, but I can play it on a desktop, so why worry? ;) Other potential help would be a gig of RAM, possibly a faster HDD (I'm using a 4200RPM at the moment) and maybe dropping a Dothan core processor in. As much as I'd love popping an M11 in for graphics, I don't think it'll fit. :lol:

Skay, you'll likely have more luck: you've already got a better graphics card and more powerful processor. Not to mention a lower native res. :)

When I had an x1000, I was able to compare a 4200prm drive and a 5400rpm drrive. I can tell you that the faster drive made MUCH more of an impact on how Windows performed and responded, versus anything else. I also tried RAM configs of 512MB, 1GB and 2GB. No discernable difference, though Windows isn't taxing the system like Doom3 would be. Also, upping the proc from the 1.3M to the 1.6M didn't make much difference either.

Yeah, a faster HDD makes a big difference in Windows, but in graphics heavy games, not so much. ;)

I'm pretty sure dropping in a 2GHz Dothan core chip (it's been done with a 1.7 Dothan) would boost the performance of my laptop, though. :D Although it would likely need a laptop cooler underneath it after that... ;)