... I'm so jalous just because it's my dream to ride Hawaian windsurf spot... not more... 

You've just been on holiday for three weeks - don't get greedy ;) 

You are right, I don't have to be greedy.... but Hawai is THE ultimate destination for a respectable windsurfer... and for sure, when I will be a "grown-ups", I will have a trip to Hawai !! ... just hoping I will win enough money to pay the travell... grrrr... 

I haven't managed a holiday in three years. 

Kinn, I couldn't imagine any second that a man can work for a so long time without having holidays !! So, I agree: I can consider myself lucky compared to you... But you know: there is a life after job... Holidays never kill somebody... just think about it... 

I have the game woohoo!!

Now, I want to know how to prepare my system for it. What I'm aiming for is 1024x768, steady 30 FPS, and then the highest settings I can have, preferably 2xAA, and no bloody graphical glitches.

System is:

P4 2.8 GHZ
1 GB Ram
Radeon 9800Pro 256 meg
Windows XP

Everything generally working fine.

Are there any tweaks, tips, tricks, driver updates, setting changes etc etc that I should do/change to get the best out of D3?? 

you should be fine, 2xAA may be slow, but you'll most likely won't need it. 

Get the latest DX and drivers for your video card. For cutting edge software, that's pretty standard procedure. Beyond that, I dunno. 

seta image_useCache "1"

seta image_cacheMegs "256" <--- should be 1/4th your total memory

seta image_cacheMinK "20480"

Without the useCache value set to 1, the cacheMegs variable does nothing. Also, without changing the cacheMinK value, setting useCache to "1" will crash the game on loading.

Your setup is pretty similar to mine, and the game runs good for me. There are a shitload of supposed tweaks floating around out there and most of them are bullshit (including one brilliant suggestion to un-pak all the files so they can be read faster--all that does is make loading levels take about four times as long), and the ones that aren't bullshit generally make the game look like various varieties of ass.

The above settings allow me to knock resolution up one more notch, and smoothed out loading of new areas a bit. 

Also make sure you grab the newest Catalyst drivers for your ATi card. There is a set of beta 4.9 cats that give about 1-5 fps boost. Nothing that much but worth a look perhaps. Personally I think the only reason ATi has released those drivers is to show they haven't given up on the OpenGL side of stuff which they admittedly haven't worked on in over a year. Given most new titles use DirectX it has never been much of an issue for ATi till Doom3.

PJW: I read that somewhere and Robert Duffy himself was watchin the thread and basically told the guy he was completely incorrect and was asking where he came up with "facts" he used to justify the "tweak". 

clah is there some evil netsplit atm or is there any other reason I'm alone in #tf? 

#tf is full of scumbags again 

They released the Offical 4.8 Cats today, appearantly they have the 4.9 Doom3 improvements in them. ATi claims up to 12% improvement on their X800 series cards. For the 9800 series expect a smaller increase, but an increase. 

What about avoiding the glitches I've heard of (wasn't it sort of red and white sparkles people were having problems with)?? 

The graphical artifacts you speak of are usually on 9800Pros that have been overclocked. I've read some reports that even normally clocked Pros create this issues and you must sometimes even underclock your card. Unfortantly if you are getting these errors there isn't much you can do. These new drivers I suspect would not cause any errors if you don't have any already. JC has said a few times that overclocking graphics cards will create artifacts has his rendering paths use sections of pipelines and chips that are often not used. As long as you don't have the specks now tho Sham, I suspect you'll be fine with the new 4.8 Cats. 

The problem isn't directly about overclocking and is just good old fashioned too much heat. The 4.8/4.9b drivers do a better job of balancing the load, but just opening up your case will probably be enough. 

I run Doom 3 on a-
P4 3Ghz
1GB RAM
ATI 128MB 9800 Pro

I run it at 1024x768 at High Detail.. no AA as its a bit slow. But timedemo gets me about 47fps. 

I downloaded the Doom 3 E3 demo two years and got approximately 33bps (Bees Per Second). 

the E3 demo was alpha, it doesn't reflect the final product. I a much lower framerate is that than I did in the final game. 

. 

you should wait until post 8335. 

I run Doom 3 on a-

P4 2.8Ghz
1GB RAM
ATI 256MB 9800 Pro

I tried it at 1024x768 at High Detail.. no AA as its a bit slow. And timedemo gets me about 35fps.

So is that extra 0.2 GHZ of processor power somehow enough to compensate for half the video memory AND get you a third more FPS than my set-up (which is with Cat 4.8, DX9.0c, freshly defragged system, shader tweak, etc etc)??????? I believe the phrase "WTF?!" is most appropriate here... 

I dunno if it makes any difference, my 3GHz is a HyperThreading CPU. Dunno if your 2.8GHz is and dunno if HT makes that big of a difference in Doom 3?

A few other things, I'm using the 4.7 Catalyst drivers. But after a reading this on another forum I tried it, you can take the 4.9 beta OpenGL driver from ATI and put it in your Doom 3 folder. It will load this instead of the .dll in your system folder. Also using a shader tweak, don't remember what I changed in the file so just posted the file below.

Put this in- \Doom 3\base\glprogs\
http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/doom3/interaction.vfp

ATI Catalyst v4.9 beta OpenGL driver:
http://shadowdane.shackspace.com/doom3/atioglxx.rar

Also using the Image Cache tweak:
seta image_cacheMegs "256"
seta image_cacheMinK "32768"
seta image_useCache "1" 

http://home.san.rr.com/redv/racist-legos-owned.jpg

seriously 

Maybe your 256mb 9800pro has the 128bit memory controller instead of the 256bit which is on most of the 128mb cards? Or something.