OK, cool.

Chugs are usually texture loads. Most of the time when I see that stuff happening, it's because the computer or the video card doesn't have enough free RAM to do the job smoothly. Also, it could be caused by an AGP bus that's not running at its full speed, and it's taking longer than expected to squirt the textures to the card.

Of course, I've also seen games where the chunk happens simply because the game code doesn't manage the texture loads efficiently enough. Hope that's not what's happening here, or there are going to be a lot of disappointed people tonight.

Great. After years of waiting for the software, now we're going to have to wait for years for the hardware too!

I'm on a 2.4Ghz, Radeon 9700Pro, 1G RAM. Running at 800x600 Medium Quality. It's both stunning and almost always 30fps (with an occasional blip below, but always very playable). I'm curious to try higher res + higher quality just to see what it looks like, but I believe I'm at the edge of my machine's capabilities currently.

This game is so incredibly immersive. The amount of detail is just amazing in the environments -- it's obvious why it took them so long to finish it. The other part that is very surprising is that there really is a story and it is actually interesting. They also have tons of unique NPC's -- no repeating Half-Life scientists ("I won't move another step!") and the voice acting is great. Definitely some serious attention to detail here.

By the way, I'm at the forum here because Doom just made my adrenaline shoot through the roof and I need to come down. It's a really creepy game.

I believe it's 128M on the card ... I'll double check in a little bit.
[Edit] Yep ... dxdiag says 128M

Also, for ATI people, ATI released beta Doom 3 optimized drivers yesterday:
http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4547.html

Ok, called ATI today. Grunt level customer service guy had no clue, transferred me to second level. He found my 9700 order by my phone number. Oddly the order number on the reciept wasn't valid. Anyhow, he also wasn't sure about it, so I got transferred to some guy on the "Internet promotions team" who did know about it, and took down my correct address.

Now comes the problem. They anticipate shipping the copies out middle of this month. Probably due to the now broken ties between iD and ATI, or something. Anyhow, I'm going to go buy a copy from the store to have for Quakecon, then when the ATI one comes, return it in unopened form back to the store for a refund.

I'll probably be a promo copy with no bar code or something.

You will be a promo copy?

This tweak might be useful. I've not got Doom 3 yet so can't tell you if it actually does anything significant.

Changing seta image_cacheMegs "something" doesn't make any difference to my timedemo1 scores (always 5.0 )

I optimistically tried changing seta image_useCache "0" to "1" but when I do that the game doesn't load and I get reverted back to the windows desktop.

Has anyone else had any better luck, oh, and BTW, I'm using a PC with 1GB, P4 2.5GHz, 64MB Nvidia gfx card?

I changed my useCache to 1, my cacheMegs to 512 (half of my available RAM), and my cacheMink to 20480. It seems to work out fine for me.