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Well, being a gamer at heart and having 3 ATi cards in the house, I went through the chore today of getting each one overclocked, drivers updated, and getting Doom 3 tweeked out at the best settings. The biggest pain being the T41p simply because of the driver drama. ATi released a hotfix for Doom 3 in their 4.9beta drivers, and all kinds of fun. After 6 hours of benchmarking and more versions of the Catalyst drivers, I do have a winning combination, and a few funkey theories. Enough of my rambling, here is the raw results.
To Clarify, I am running an IBM T41P 2373GEU. 1GB of Ram and the 128MB FireGL T2 Core. All benchmarks are ran on medium quality, as that is the quality intended for cards with 128MB of Video Ram.
4.7 Cats + Mobility Modder = No working OpenGL Core
4.9 Cats + Mobility Modder = No working OpenGL Core
Omega 4.7 Based Cats = No Working OpenGL Core
Ouch, what a way to start. Current running theory here is the INI files don't load the OpenGL that a FireGL T2 Card needs to function correctly. Could probably hack them up, but I just benchmark stuff
DNA 4.7's stock
800x600 = 18.5
1024x768 = 14.7
A set of Catalyst Driver mods I found that actualy do load a working OpenGL core on Mobility chipsets, you can find these in the download section at Guru3d, but hold your butts , we arn't done yet.
IBM Drivers Stock
800x600 = 25.2
1024x768 = 17.6
These are your standard IBM drivers that are on their website, no mods, I didn't even look at them funny. Seems that going with IBM is a good idea in all cases. But wait, there is more!
ATi released an updated DLL file for OpenGL functionality within the 4.9Beta Catalyst drivers, and while they don't directly load, you can of course rip the dll file out. The file in question is named atioglxx.dll and lives in the \Windows\System32 folder. Now the kicker folks here is that a FireGL card uses a file called atioglgl.dll to run its OpenGL Core. Being a riskey lad, and handsome too, I renamed this file and stuck the atioglxx.dll from the 4.9Beta Catalyst drivers into my system32, made a copy of it named atioglgl.dll, rebooted, and crossed my fingers.
DNA 4.7's w/ 4.9B OGL File
800x600 = 24.6
1024x768 = 19.3
Wow, nice performence here, definetly making Doom 3 playable at 800x600, but wait! What about the IBM Drivers?
IBM Drivers w/ 4.9B OGL File
800x600 = 26.8
1024x768 = 20.7
Holy benchmark batman! We found a winner here!
To clarify how I get my numbers, I bring the console down in Doom 3 and type in timedemo demo1 to run the basic timedemo that ships with Doom 3. This timedemo is representative of the single player experiance, not the multiplayer. The multiplayer experiance actualy by default turns off some visual stuff, so its less stressful on the card.
To sum it up. The IBM drivers rule, the IBM drivers with the 4.9Beta OpenGL core ductaped in rule even more, and to get the mobility modder and Omega working, they need to talk to the maker of the DNA Catalyst set.
One final note, these numbers are achieved with a overclock to the FireGL card in my laptop. Default is 320Mhz Core, 202Mhz Memory. My max stable OC found with ATiTool is 420Mhz Core, 235Mhz Memory. The T42P my friend just got hit a 450Core, and 240Memory, so this is very achieveable by anyone with a T41P. Happy Fragging.
Edit: Damm I just keep talking. To componsate for the fact that hard drive access on the laptop sucks, and that I have enough ram to load 1/3 of this game into it, I modified the cache settings within the DoomConfig.cfg to as follows
seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "128"
seta image_cacheMinK "20480"
This could probably go higher, and prevent more reads from the HDD during a level, but it does not raise average FPS, but it simply prevents the little jumps when you go through a door into a new area. This will probably make load timers longer, but who cares. The gameplay is important, not the loading screens.