Unreal Tournament Performance Tweaks

Memory

Unreal Tournament performs best with at least 64 MB of system memory.  With 128 MB of system memory, you should never see any pauses due to virtual memory swapping.  TNT 1, TNT 2 and GeForce 256 users with less than 128MB of RAM may experience heavy virtual memory swapping.  This is a known issue with the current Nvidia Direct3D drivers.   We are working with Nvidia to improve this situation.

Unreal Tournament also requires space for a swap file on your system hard drive.  We recommend you allow Windows to automatically manage your swap file.

Frame Rate Tweaks

Note that the 'advanced options' window can only be accessed by typing 'preferences' at a console prompt.

Direct3D Rendering

• Make sure you upgrade to the latest UT patch which contains improvements to the D3D code. For further details on performance/quality troubleshooting check out the UT direct3d page.
• Detail texturing and volumetric fogging have a large impact on performance, which is why they are disabled by default in D3D; to enable these, go to the advanced options -> Rendering -> D3D Support.

General

• Hardware 3D sound adds a LOT of overhead to the sound occlusion calculations.   For the fastest framerates, you should turn off 3D sound because of this.
• In the options->preferences menu, under the HUD tab, you can adjust your Heads Up Display.  Reducing what is drawn on your HUD can improve performance, particularly if you are using D3D or OpenGL.  In particular, getting rid of the player status and weapons sections will make a difference.
• You can hide your weapon to improve performance.  This also has the advantage of making your view less obstructed.  To hide your weapon, select hidden for your weapon hand in the options->preferences menu under the game tab.  If both your weapon and the weapons section of your HUD are hidden, a color coded text description of your weapon will pop up when you change weapons to facilitate changing to the correct weapon.
• In the options->preferences menu, under the video tab, you will find several settings which can be modified to improve frame rate.
  • Color Depth:  Choose 32 bits for software rendering (this is faster than 16 bits for software).  With D3D and OpenGL, 16 bits may provide some performance advantage over 32 bits.  Depending on your system memory, video card and drivers, this improvement may be significant or negligible.  Experiment with both settings.    
  • World Texture Detail:  With D3D and OpenGL, you may see some performance improvement at medium texture detail compared to high texture detail.
  • Skin Detail:  With D3D and OpenGL, we recommend medium skin detail.  High skin detail uses more video card memory.
  • Min Desired Framerate:  This specifies the frame rate threshold below which Unreal Tournament will start dropping detail - reducing model detail and not drawing optional effects..  If this is set higher than your normal frame rate, then you will never see reduced graphics almost always, but get the best possible performance.  We recommend setting it so that your normal frame rate is several fps above this value, allowing you to typically see all the effect in UT.  When your frame rate drops because of a heavy firefight, Min Desired Framerate will kick in to minimize the drop in performance.
  • Show Decals:  Turning this off will improve performance.
  • Use Dynamic Lighting:  Turning this off will improve performance, particularly with OpenGL.
• The NoFractalAnim switch can be turned on for a performance improvement with cards that slow down with per-frame texture uploads, especially with OpenGL and to a lesser extent D3D.   This takes effect at a package's loading/init time, so you'll have to restart a level to see it take effect.  The NoFractalAnim variable sits at the [WinDrv.WindowsClient] section in the unrealtournament.ini file (in your unrealtournament\system directory), and under 'display' in the advanced options.

OpenGL Rendering

• Direct3D should always be faster for TNT1 and TNT2 users. But we have had reports from some users that OpenGL runs better than D3D, so if you are unhappy with your D3D performance, it's definitely worth giving a go. If you do, be sure to set the NoFractalAnim variable to true, because per-frame texture uploads under OpenGL drivers are generally very slow.

Software Rendering

• Unreal Tournament can perform quite well in software mode, but it should be run at a lower resolution than with 3D hardware to get the best performance.  Rendering transparent effects has a significant performance impact in software mode at higher resolutions.  For the best performance, choose a resolution between 320x240 (any system with processor speed less than 300 MHz), 400x300, or 512x384 (only with processor speeds over 500 MHz). 
• In these low resolutions, software mode will usually run faster in 32 bit color than in 16 bit color.  Make sure to set color depth to 32 In the options->preferences menu, under the video tab. 
• Setting HighResTextureSmooth and LowResTextureSmooth to false ( advanced options -> Rendering -> Software Rendering ) also speeds up rendering (but shows blockier textures.) 

Networking

• If you are seeing significant lag while playing Unreal Tournament, try adjusting your netspeed.  You can do this by typing netspeed xxxx (where xxxx is a value in bytes/sec).  Your new netspeed will be saved.  Typically you will want to adjust the netspeed setting down if you are seeing poor performance, because Laggy network play is very likely because your connection cannot handle the rate selected for it.  Netspeed is set by default based on your selection of your network connection in the networking menu.  The default values are 2600 for modems, 5000 for ISDN, and 20000 for xDSL, cable modem, and LAN.   For example, some cable modems limit upstream bandwidth.  For cable modems, try netspeed 10000 or lower if you are seeing poor network performance.

Experiencing poor Internet play on your  Voodoo3 3500TV?

As Voodoo Extreme reports, the Voodoo3 3500TV's WebTV installer does some evil things to your Internet setting, causing many games (including Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena) to experience poor Internet play:

Hello, We are aware of the problems that the Voodoo3 3500TV is experiencing with online games. Many of these problems can be cured by removing WebTV, however that will disable the Visual Reality software. The problem usually can also be cured by removing the Internet Explorer 5 upgrade from Windows98. While these are just a work around, and not really fixes, both options usually will cure the problem until 3dfx releases a real fix. We are currently working with Microsoft to try and figure out whether the problem is due to Microsoft software (WebTV and IE5) or 3dfx software (3500TV drivers and Visual Reality).

Thank you for your patience,
Aaron D. Patton
3dfx Interactive Email Support

Internet Servers

• Make sure to match the maximum number of users for your server to the bandwidth you have available.  The amount of bandwidth required for each user is determined by the MaxClientRate, which is set by default to 20000 bytes/sec.  If your connection is bandwidth limited (for example a cable modem), you should reduce this value (you can edit your UnrealTournament.ini file in your UnrealTournament\system directory - MaxClientRate is in the [IpDrv.TcpNetDriver] section).  Make sure that the MaxUsers x MaxClientRate is less than your available bandwidth (in the case of cable modems or xDSL, your upstream bandwidth).
• We recommend disabling local NGStats for internet servers.  Processing the NGStats logs takes some time between levels, which may result in remote clients getting disconnected.  You can find this setting in the options->preferences menu, under the game tab.

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