Unreal Tournament ('99) issues?

[sedrosken]

I installed UT99 on my AXP, its normal routine for my systems.

It's GUI runs dreadfully slow, I can't even start a game. I can literally wait tens of seconds for the mouse to move.

I could see this happening on a Pentium 133, but on an Athlon XP with a GeForce2 MX card that worked perfectly in a slower (1.9 GHz) Pentium 4, it has no right at all to be this slow.

Any ideas on why this would be occuring? Some help with this would be greatly appreciated. I followed the main rule of the internet, that is, RTFM, and lurk moar, but I could find no insight into this frustrating situation. UT99 is patched to version 451. OS is XP Pro SP3.

 

[sedrosken]

(mental facepalm) I just realized there's a tech support forum. Should I repost this there or something?

 

[CougTek]

From a thread on HardOCP regarding a similar issue in UT 2004 :

set the affinity to 1 cpu

do this by selecting the process in the task manager

 

[sedrosken]

but this is on my AXP - - All it has is the one CPU. Now, if this were happening on my 1545, which it is not, then that'd be applicable. But I'll give it a whirl.

 

[sedrosken]

I'll be deep fried and dipped in chocolate - - on a whim I set it to Software Renderer (I was using Direct3D support, as I always - -

WAIT! I just realized why it wasn't working okay with Direct3D! My DirectX version is still 8.1, I'm sure of it! lemme check...)

and it runs great.

 

[sedrosken]

Quality is terrible and max res is 512x384, but the fact that it runs at all is much better than it was. It's framerate is really high - - it's still playable but all the animation is fluid.

 

[sedrosken]

Weird. My DX version is 9.0c. Guess with this I'll just have to stick with software rendering, not the end of the world.

 

[Chewy509]

I assume you've read this: http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/ut/print.shtml

Also, ensure that:
1. You have the latest DirectX runtime.
2. You have downloaded and installed the latest nVidia driver. (which I believe is the 96.x driver series).
3. Try setting UT to use 16bit colour.
4. Try setting UT to use OpenGL rendering inside of the DirectX one.

PS. You should be getting 60-100fps at 640x480 with your setup, and should be playable at 1024x768... http://www.anandtech.com/show/751/7

 

[Chewy509]

Oh, also ensure you have the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard, especially those related to AGP. Athlon chipsets and AGP could be a little flakey** in certain combinations.

Oh, and you did know that UT'99 was ported to Linux (by LokiGames): http://www.lokigames.com/products/ut/updates.php3 and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Games/Native/UnrealTournament

**. Let me clarify - AGP chipsets on the AMD side were actually very strict on the AGP specification which lead to issues with video cards that took certain liberties in regards to the AGP spec. These cards would work fine with Intel chipsets but would have issues with AMD chipsets all because AMD chipsets were more strict on the implementations that Intel... (A really good example was the AMD-8151 AGP-HT Bridge and some nForce4 chipsets... Real AGP cards would work fine in them - but newer cards such as GeForce6 based that used a PCIe-AGP brigde chip would utterly fail. Also some ATi cards would have similar issues as well).

 

[sedrosken]

Went there, did that, and something weird is afoot.

I can run it fine in D3D mode as long as I keep it windowed.

I have no idea what's going on here.

 

[Mercutio]

A machine with those specs should be fine for original UT (which I still play sometimes). UT2004 should also run sorta-acceptably on a GF2MX from what I remember of running support at LAN parties. Are you using the original, retail install media or did you get it through a service like GoG.com?


nVidia says this is the last supported driver revision for the GF2MX. I don't know what you're using or where you got it, but gaming systems are always tricky because there are so many subsystems that all need to be in some kind of harmonious configuration.

And yes, getting your motherboard chipset right (probably also an nVidiadriver for a machine of that era, or possibly Via) and getting on DirectX 9c are also good ideas. As I recall you should also have the ability to use an OpenGL renderer on original UT as well. You might try that as well.

 

[sedrosken]

A machine with those specs should be fine for original UT (which I still play sometimes). UT2004 should also run sorta-acceptably on a GF2MX from what I remember of running support at LAN parties. Are you using the original, retail install media or did you get it through a service like GoG.com?


nVidia says this is the last supported driver revision for the GF2MX. I don't know what you're using or where you got it, but gaming systems are always tricky because there are so many subsystems that all need to be in some kind of harmonious configuration.

And yes, getting your motherboard chipset right (probably also an nVidiadriver for a machine of that era, or possibly Via) and getting on DirectX 9c are also good ideas. As I recall you should also have the ability to use an OpenGL renderer on original UT as well. You might try that as well.

I am running the latest supported driver (my best guess is 93.71 or something like that, don't have it on hand). I installed all my drivers. I dont know how one gets an opengl renderer working with UT, but I did install UT from an ISO of the original install media (never had an issue with that before, didn't have an issue installing so I figured it was fine). The chipset is a VIA KT333.

I never liked UT'03 or UT'04. I loathe UT3.

If I can get the opengl renderer working, it should do rather well. Minecraft, after heavy graphical tweaking (which I have to do for the laptop as well, come to think of it the GeForce 610 GT was the only one that ran decently with normal settings) runs pretty okay on the GF2MX.

 

[Mercutio]

Take a look at this.

 

[sedrosken]

Interestingly enough, with the Radeon 9550 and Windows 7, I no longer have these issues. It was only with the GeForce2 MX and Windows XP.