Screen flickers in Doom 3 with new video card

[kaotao]

I just installed my newly purchase x800xl. There's been a noticable improvement in games overall, but in Doom 3 the screen flickers when the resolution is set above 1024x768. I thought it might be a driver issue, because when I ran the install CD, during install, a lot of the set up instructions were either a bunch of ????????????, and other wierd characters? Please help.

 

[Cheese]

Hmmm...

Sounds like an RTFM issue. Try enabling VSYNC in the Doom 3 video options. That fixed flickering when I had it. Although this was just 60hz doing the flickering, nothing more.

Word.

 

[kaotao]

I'll give that a try. Anyone have an answer to the ?????? and wierd characters during driver install?

 

[ikaz]

Are you using the drivers that came with the video card ? If so then you want to go download the lastest drivers from ATI. I never use the CD drivers they are way out of date by the time you get the hardware setup and installed on your system.

 

[kaotao]

I installed the drivers from the CD first, mainly to get the DVD decoder I lost when I did a full system recovery last year. Half Life 2 wouldn't work, so I installed the latest catalyst driver 6.6. Now, all my games play fine except for the flickering problem in Doom 3 at higher resolutions. I'm also having problems with my load times. It took FOREVER to even get to the main menu in HL2, but once it was loaded, it ran fine. I think there's something taking up a lot of my system resources, because I have longer than normal load times even for normal applications. Any suggestions?
My specs:
AMD 2600+
512MB RAM
X800XL 256MB
450W PSU

 

[Cody_7]

Okay, well I think I can help you with the flickering problem.

First off do you have a CRT or LCD monitor? For some reason, Doom 3 forces a 60Hz refresh rate when playing (which makes flickering pretty noticeable on CRTs). Open up the Catalyst Control Center and search for a setting to force the refresh rate; I know it's there. You are probably going to want to force a refresh rate of 85Hz or higher on a CRT.

As for the slow load times when you first open up games like HL2: I get them also. I have 1GB of ram, and it still takes up to 30 seconds for the main menu to open up sometimes. I highly reccomend getting another 512MB of ram if your motherboard supports it.

P.S. Usually when you get alot of wierd characters like the ????'s and the square symbols it's because the text is in a different language and you don't have that language pack isntalled. I don't know how the installed ended up in a different language though :?

-Hope that helps!

 

[kaotao]

I have a CRT moniter, and have my refresh rate set at 85Hz. It took at least two minutes to get to the HL2 main menu last night. It's starting to drive me crazy! The rest of my games don't take as long, but last night I tried to load a check point in the FEAR demo version, and after 20min of waiting, I just shut my computer off.

 

[Cody_7]

So, even though you have it at 85Hz, do you still experience flickering in Doom 3? Try opening up your monitor menu when you've got Doom 3 open, it might tell you what refresh rate it's at while running the game.

And more RAM is really going to help with loading times in games..

 

[kaotao]

Yes, even at 85Hz. The refresh rate was the first thing I checked after noticing the problem. It was set at 75Hz, so I changed it to 85Hz. My GPU seems to like it better at that refresh rate, however Doom3 is still flickering at resolutions above 1024x768.

 

[kaotao]

I'll try enabling vsync after work tonight, and hopefully that'll work. Thanks.

 

[phase_verocity]

I looked for ages but couldn't find anything, then i deleted the doomconfig.cfg file in doom3\base and restarted it. It worked fine after that.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey