Gothic 3 was literally the FIRST game I installed, on a new PC I built, after having taken a very long break from gaming. I'd built a Core 2 Duo e6300 with a 7800GT, and I'd done it for a reasonable price. Installed the essentials (Quake 3 OSP, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III + Dawn Of War) and then I installed the three games I'd bought that day, to test the PC. The first of them was Gothic 3 (there was TOCA 3 and something else also ... could have been Rise Of Legends). Never played either of the other 2 Gothic games, but I knew it was something like Morrowind / Oblivion. And honestly, the game blew me away. The graphics, the music, the sound! I had no idea what I was doing, or where I was going, and I noticed there were some serious glitches and bugs going on .... but it really was a great place to explore. HOWEVER, the freezing as assets were loading into memory was insane! My PC could run the game in pretty much max settings, without AA, at 1440x900 ... but entering new areas brought the framerate to it's knees. Encountering new enemies the same thing. I had 1GB RAM. That was the problem! Even though it was minimum requirement, the game CLEARLY needed more at higher settings! I took the game to a friends house, who had a similar system but 4GB RAM. Not his type of game, but he let me test it, and it was flawless, barely any stuttering or loading in assets. Every other game around that time was totally fine with 1GB RAM. Gothic 3 needed 2GB minimum with all the details turned on, and at high resolutions. Not sure how the developers said it was "playable" with 1GB, even though I nearly finished it in the two weeks I played it with 1GB, it wasn't a happy experience by the end. It got frustrating. Made me have to go and buy more RAM! And to be honest, although I'll always remember it fondly with nostalgia, it really wasn't that good of a game! Weapon types and variations were sparse, AI sucked hard, plot and quest system was broken, etc. I never returned to it. But it sure was pretty when it came out!
@@MidnightGeek99 Yup. I remember thinking "if i JUST had another 256MB even! that would make a huge difference!". But I figured, if this game needs 2GB to be playable, perhaps more games will need 2GB going forward. So I ordered another 1GB stick from eBuyer. See I'd been on a long 2 year break from gaming. So I figured 1GB would be enough. I was wrong.
If you ever want to try it again, play it on SSD. The game has permanent loading and that solves the permanent stuttering. Also use unofficial patches that solve most of bugs and in the end it is the great game that its developers wanted. BTW, RIP Piranha Bytes.
i love G3, i played it on laptop with iirc Cel 1,43ghz and radeon X1600m it worked on lowest settings with many drops but it was enough. Later i got better PC and game was patched enouch to play on max settings. I need to refresh this title
Ah those memories. I had some AMD CPU, 1GB of ram and FX5500 if I remember right. It run in double digits without multiple npc in combat at once. Saving while looking direcly at your feet could reduce loading time for about a minute by culling all stuff arround the player. :D
The release version of Gothic 3 or rather whatever version it was that also came with Gothic 1 & 2 with Night of the Raven being a mandatory install was my first jump into the Gothic series, and with all the jank that came with it. And it was on a crappy 2008 Toshiba laptop. Still, it and the previous 2 games were fun experiences even with all the rage that came from getting beaten around in Night of the Raven and with 3's bugs, including the boars.
@@MidnightGeek99 the boars were something I always dreaded to fight in a melee. Wolves weren't as bad with their stunlock but the boars were always the worst.
I wonder how big impact patches would have with that hardware. I didn't test Gothic 3 on my current setup, but on my previous build it still had long loading times and stutters during changing location with the newest CP1.75. Teleport stone would freeze the game for a few seconds. And all of that on a 7200RPM HDD paired with Skylake CPU. I suspect that least optimized part of this game is memory and asset management and as a result CPUs and disk are main bottlenecks.
Teleport stones always froze the game for a few seconds and I think they always will. It must have to do with loading all the assets for the new location.
1:15 Me when i first tried to play the this game on my intel celeron/fx5200 pc back in 2006. I remember it took me like 10 minutes just to load up the game, i went to kitchen to make myself a coffee and when i came back the game was still loading lol. So many great games i wanted to play like Stalker , Oblivion, Two worlds, Witcher etc but i couldn't because of my shlty pc, it was time to upgrade to real gaming pc. After that somewhere in late 2007, when my new pc was complete, i was the happiest man on earth when i could finally play this game at max settings with a decent fps and few seconds loading time. Hah crazy times :)
Gothic 3 passed a bit past me back in the day, but I played a ton of Risen. Since you did the original release version it would be interesting to have another round with the latest updates and patches. Just to see how much it affects performance, in whatever direction. For comparisons like these I think a graph at the end showing all the results would be a nice idea.
Back in the day, when Cothic 3 arrived, I had a Prescott 3.0GHz, 2GB of DDR1-533 (not DDR2, it was two corsair kits of 2x2x512MB of the fastest DDR1 that I knew of), 2x320GB SATA 150 RAID 0 disks for the data partition, and an Radeon X700 AGP 256 MB, all on the Asus P4C-800-E Deluxe motherboard (i875 chipset). It put my computer that I had a good opinion, except maybe the GPU as I wished for an X800, on its knees.
Wow, do you still have that AGP X700? I'm looking for one like crazy...it was rare in Romania, and all over the world. Gothic 3, just like Crysis, had no chill.
@@MidnightGeek99 It released the smoke of life in 2007. I replaced it with the HD 3850 PCIe and upgraded to a Core2 Duo 6750 on Asus P5K (Intel P35). At this time, both the dead card and the working P5K with a Core2Quad 9400 are at a friend of mine who wanted them. The card was indeed rare and I felt bummed when it died. Would have used it in the secondary computer instead of the Radeon 9600XT 256MB if it still worked. I should still have a HIS IceQ X1650 AGP arround; just saying.
Hah this was such a nostalgia trip, i remember i wanted to play this game so badly, at the time i couldnt force myself to play gothic 1 and 2 because graphics was so important to me back then. The issue that on my athlon XP 1600+, 1GB DDR dual channel ram and FX5200 was complete slideshow. I remember how long it took to load first time and the constant audio looping while seeing glorious single digit fps (probably ~5 fps or lower). Only with custom config file with like 10 meter draw distance the framerate became somewhat playable, but stutters or more like "stops" were so bad that i just gave up. Finished this game only few years ago on my high end system with patches, without stutters at 4k, with custom high end config file, which increases draw distance significantly. I loved exploration but its obvious that game was rushed, story was really underdeveloped, overall after years of gaming experience gothic 3 would be 6/10 for me.
@@MidnightGeek99 yeah i remember that i played counter strike source instead of 1.6 solely for graphics, haha now thinking about it its a bit silly, but i had fun so thats that 😅
Remember playing this in 2007 on AMD 3800+X2, 7600GT, 1GB DDR2. The loadings was awful especially near the end of the game. However I would play it on FX5200 if I had to haha.
I played GTA Vice City with the invisible cars cheat, all settings on low, double speed cheat, and only went at the beaches looking straight down. This Gothic experience would've been a dream back then for me, lol. Anyway, a shame about Gothic 3 how it has a bad reputation. There were massive performance issues and plenty of bugs at the beginning, but if you play it now it's still one of the best open world RPGs. It's clunky, but it has its charm. The Gothic games are better than the Elder Scrolls games, in my opinion.
Playing Vice City like you did shows that you are a true pro :) I too prefer Gothic over Elder Scrolls, but to be honest, the 2 series are quite different, there's room for both.
Your FX 5200 is doing not that bad, I tried to playing this from the early official russian CD back in 2007 on Athlon XP 2500+ with Radeon 9200 - 2-10 FPS. Anyway, I never made Gothic 3 past the quarter of the game even on the modern hardware :D
Only if you have Pentium 2s, or low-end Pentium 3s, if you have at least a good Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, the differences will be negligible. I've made a video about this: ua-cam.com/video/P1_uwHOUiM8/v-deo.html
i got a ultimate Windows XP gaming desktop in my room here are my Specs intel 3rd Gen i5 3550 CPU 4 GB RAM DDR3 GTX 960 2gb GPU Asus P8H61/USB motherboard SSD 480 GB for system SSD 1TB for Games OS Windows XP Professional SP3
I could make an entire dissertation about this, but TL'DR, I think that: 1. most games were better optimized back then (with some exceptions) 2. modern hardware is better suited now to run games (even low-end components), compared to hardware back then It's hard to compare because in the early 2000s 30 FPS with poor resolutions and settings was the norm, now you need 1000 FPS at 4K to be satisfied.
Gothic 3 was literally the FIRST game I installed, on a new PC I built, after having taken a very long break from gaming. I'd built a Core 2 Duo e6300 with a 7800GT, and I'd done it for a reasonable price. Installed the essentials (Quake 3 OSP, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III + Dawn Of War) and then I installed the three games I'd bought that day, to test the PC. The first of them was Gothic 3 (there was TOCA 3 and something else also ... could have been Rise Of Legends).
Never played either of the other 2 Gothic games, but I knew it was something like Morrowind / Oblivion. And honestly, the game blew me away. The graphics, the music, the sound! I had no idea what I was doing, or where I was going, and I noticed there were some serious glitches and bugs going on .... but it really was a great place to explore.
HOWEVER, the freezing as assets were loading into memory was insane! My PC could run the game in pretty much max settings, without AA, at 1440x900 ... but entering new areas brought the framerate to it's knees. Encountering new enemies the same thing. I had 1GB RAM. That was the problem! Even though it was minimum requirement, the game CLEARLY needed more at higher settings! I took the game to a friends house, who had a similar system but 4GB RAM. Not his type of game, but he let me test it, and it was flawless, barely any stuttering or loading in assets.
Every other game around that time was totally fine with 1GB RAM. Gothic 3 needed 2GB minimum with all the details turned on, and at high resolutions. Not sure how the developers said it was "playable" with 1GB, even though I nearly finished it in the two weeks I played it with 1GB, it wasn't a happy experience by the end. It got frustrating. Made me have to go and buy more RAM! And to be honest, although I'll always remember it fondly with nostalgia, it really wasn't that good of a game! Weapon types and variations were sparse, AI sucked hard, plot and quest system was broken, etc. I never returned to it. But it sure was pretty when it came out!
Yes, the RAM was a huge deal, especially because we had slow hard-drives. You need 3 GB of RAM for this game.
@@MidnightGeek99 Yup. I remember thinking "if i JUST had another 256MB even! that would make a huge difference!". But I figured, if this game needs 2GB to be playable, perhaps more games will need 2GB going forward. So I ordered another 1GB stick from eBuyer.
See I'd been on a long 2 year break from gaming. So I figured 1GB would be enough. I was wrong.
If you ever want to try it again, play it on SSD. The game has permanent loading and that solves the permanent stuttering. Also use unofficial patches that solve most of bugs and in the end it is the great game that its developers wanted. BTW, RIP Piranha Bytes.
i love G3, i played it on laptop with iirc Cel 1,43ghz and radeon X1600m it worked on lowest settings with many drops but it was enough. Later i got better PC and game was patched enouch to play on max settings. I need to refresh this title
Like I've said, if you could've played it decently with what you had...great.
Ah those memories. I had some AMD CPU, 1GB of ram and FX5500 if I remember right. It run in double digits without multiple npc in combat at once. Saving while looking direcly at your feet could reduce loading time for about a minute by culling all stuff arround the player. :D
I will keep the feet trick in mind, thanks a lot :))
The release version of Gothic 3 or rather whatever version it was that also came with Gothic 1 & 2 with Night of the Raven being a mandatory install was my first jump into the Gothic series, and with all the jank that came with it. And it was on a crappy 2008 Toshiba laptop. Still, it and the previous 2 games were fun experiences even with all the rage that came from getting beaten around in Night of the Raven and with 3's bugs, including the boars.
Night of the Raven is hard, but the unpatched boars from Gothic 3 are something else.
@@MidnightGeek99 the boars were something I always dreaded to fight in a melee. Wolves weren't as bad with their stunlock but the boars were always the worst.
I wonder how big impact patches would have with that hardware. I didn't test Gothic 3 on my current setup, but on my previous build it still had long loading times and stutters during changing location with the newest CP1.75. Teleport stone would freeze the game for a few seconds. And all of that on a 7200RPM HDD paired with Skylake CPU. I suspect that least optimized part of this game is memory and asset management and as a result CPUs and disk are main bottlenecks.
Teleport stones always froze the game for a few seconds and I think they always will. It must have to do with loading all the assets for the new location.
You are right, the CPU and the disk were the main culprit, but you had no excuse, in 2006 we had Core2 :)
1:15 Me when i first tried to play the this game on my intel celeron/fx5200 pc back in 2006. I remember it took me like 10 minutes just to load up the game, i went to kitchen to make myself a coffee and when i came back the game was still loading lol.
So many great games i wanted to play like Stalker , Oblivion, Two worlds, Witcher etc but i couldn't because of my shlty pc, it was time to upgrade to real gaming pc. After that somewhere in late 2007, when my new pc was complete, i was the happiest man on earth when i could finally play this game at max settings with a decent fps and few seconds loading time. Hah crazy times :)
Gothic 3 was really something else, the engine was terrible, absolutely atrocious.
Parallel Universe Patch is protip ;)
Yes, but you did not have it in 2006, right? :)
@@MidnightGeek99 Yeah
Gothic 3 passed a bit past me back in the day, but I played a ton of Risen.
Since you did the original release version it would be interesting to have another round with the latest updates and patches. Just to see how much it affects performance, in whatever direction.
For comparisons like these I think a graph at the end showing all the results would be a nice idea.
Yeah, I should have tested also with patches installed, but it slipped my mind, but time is not lost.
Back in the day, when Cothic 3 arrived, I had a Prescott 3.0GHz, 2GB of DDR1-533 (not DDR2, it was two corsair kits of 2x2x512MB of the fastest DDR1 that I knew of), 2x320GB SATA 150 RAID 0 disks for the data partition, and an Radeon X700 AGP 256 MB, all on the Asus P4C-800-E Deluxe motherboard (i875 chipset). It put my computer that I had a good opinion, except maybe the GPU as I wished for an X800, on its knees.
Wow, do you still have that AGP X700? I'm looking for one like crazy...it was rare in Romania, and all over the world.
Gothic 3, just like Crysis, had no chill.
@@MidnightGeek99 It released the smoke of life in 2007. I replaced it with the HD 3850 PCIe and upgraded to a Core2 Duo 6750 on Asus P5K (Intel P35). At this time, both the dead card and the working P5K with a Core2Quad 9400 are at a friend of mine who wanted them. The card was indeed rare and I felt bummed when it died. Would have used it in the secondary computer instead of the Radeon 9600XT 256MB if it still worked. I should still have a HIS IceQ X1650 AGP arround; just saying.
Hah this was such a nostalgia trip, i remember i wanted to play this game so badly, at the time i couldnt force myself to play gothic 1 and 2 because graphics was so important to me back then. The issue that on my athlon XP 1600+, 1GB DDR dual channel ram and FX5200 was complete slideshow. I remember how long it took to load first time and the constant audio looping while seeing glorious single digit fps (probably ~5 fps or lower).
Only with custom config file with like 10 meter draw distance the framerate became somewhat playable, but stutters or more like "stops" were so bad that i just gave up. Finished this game only few years ago on my high end system with patches, without stutters at 4k, with custom high end config file, which increases draw distance significantly.
I loved exploration but its obvious that game was rushed, story was really underdeveloped, overall after years of gaming experience gothic 3 would be 6/10 for me.
Graphics were important for all of us, back then, and we today blame the younger generation that they are looking for good graphics :)
@@MidnightGeek99 yeah i remember that i played counter strike source instead of 1.6 solely for graphics, haha now thinking about it its a bit silly, but i had fun so thats that 😅
Remember playing this in 2007 on AMD 3800+X2, 7600GT, 1GB DDR2. The loadings was awful especially near the end of the game. However I would play it on FX5200 if I had to haha.
Play it on the FX 5200 to feel like you're living the good life :)
I played GTA Vice City with the invisible cars cheat, all settings on low, double speed cheat, and only went at the beaches looking straight down. This Gothic experience would've been a dream back then for me, lol. Anyway, a shame about Gothic 3 how it has a bad reputation. There were massive performance issues and plenty of bugs at the beginning, but if you play it now it's still one of the best open world RPGs. It's clunky, but it has its charm. The Gothic games are better than the Elder Scrolls games, in my opinion.
Playing Vice City like you did shows that you are a true pro :)
I too prefer Gothic over Elder Scrolls, but to be honest, the 2 series are quite different, there's room for both.
finally i can run this game with my 4090 but now i cant insert a cd anymore :(
Your FX 5200 is doing not that bad, I tried to playing this from the early official russian CD back in 2007 on Athlon XP 2500+ with Radeon 9200 - 2-10 FPS.
Anyway, I never made Gothic 3 past the quarter of the game even on the modern hardware :D
10 FPS...awful :))
@@MidnightGeek99 it was peak FPS!
Dont fraps use alot of cpu power? Am going into retro build my self😄 so am wondering if there is any performences jump without it?
Only if you have Pentium 2s, or low-end Pentium 3s, if you have at least a good Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, the differences will be negligible.
I've made a video about this: ua-cam.com/video/P1_uwHOUiM8/v-deo.html
why I imagine Jordi el nino pola is making these videos ?
2:30 Gothic 3 has plenty of bugs and bug transformation potions.
Yes, just like Gothic 1 and 2 :)
lol i remember completing this on my athlon 64 and a 7800gtx. 1024x768 high setting....10-30 fps max haha!
Yeah, 10-30 FPS seems about right for that system :)
@@MidnightGeek99 the game is buggy AF and the optimization is crap at release lol
I played this game on RAdeon x1950 PRO and my fps was 40 )))) But you need install path for dual core CPU )))
Even Crysis 1 used ONE core now ))))
Yes, Gothic 3 runs better with some patches, I did not use any of them here.
i got a ultimate Windows XP gaming desktop in my room
here are my Specs
intel 3rd Gen i5 3550 CPU
4 GB RAM DDR3
GTX 960 2gb GPU
Asus P8H61/USB motherboard
SSD 480 GB for system
SSD 1TB for Games
OS Windows XP Professional SP3
Extremely fast. I had a build with the GTX 960, but I had some compatibility issues and decided to use another card.
On modern PC you need DXVK for play this game (((((
Why? Don't you only need the community patch?
Lol. Got to love some hardware torture .
Always!!
So what you're saying is that modern games are much better optimized than older games? Or maybe Gothic3 was just an abomination.
I could make an entire dissertation about this, but TL'DR, I think that:
1. most games were better optimized back then (with some exceptions)
2. modern hardware is better suited now to run games (even low-end components), compared to hardware back then
It's hard to compare because in the early 2000s 30 FPS with poor resolutions and settings was the norm, now you need 1000 FPS at 4K to be satisfied.
Gothic 3 WAS an abomination.
Nice game
Yeah, but it needs some love!
When I finally got this game many years after it came out to run properly, I realized..........It was kind of crap.
:)) It's a decent game, but they've ruined it by trying to copy the Elder Scrolls series.
Now do the patched version, m8
Hmm, patches are for casuals, m8...
On my older PCs I'm trying to play the games as close to their original state as possible.