Unreal 2-What's holding me back? Edit:The verdict is in. Need more RAM. See in for details.

[FishTankX]

I'm absolutley shocked.

My rig is as follows

i850 Asus P4T-E
1.7GHZ Williamette
Radeon 8500LE 64MB
256MB Samsung PC800

This setup gets a shocking 20-30FPS outdoors and, outdoors in heavy battle, 10-15FPS. Which part is holding me back the most?

By the way, to all those, including BFG10K...

25FPS average is playable, and it can be enjoyable if you *really* love the game.

Edit:Using XP. Stupid memory hog...

On my special 'gaming' desktop I can get XP down to 120 megs commit charge.
By the way, am I right in thinking that this game is a *total* RAM hog? My upgrade to 768MBs should stop the horrendous swapping problems i'm having. And the awful load times. 1 minute? WTF? (This is with everything low, shadows off. Except for medium skins detail. The rest is low/off.)

P.S.

Using catalyst 3.1 and the latest audigy drivers, with DX9.

Edit:Well folks, after tweaking it UR2 is playable, but I think i'll wait till my RAM upgrade to play again. I would rather play with a smoother experience. I'm going to install 98 before I try that though.. and see if it changes my mind.

 

[Guga]

huum weird..
I'm playing Unreal 2, with a P4, 2.4 - Asus P4S533, 512 DDR333, Radeon 8500 (not LE) and at 1024*768*32bits with everything at maximum details, in outdoor it goes as low as 25 fps, but normally 40-60 fps is the average...

last drivers installed. The OS is w2k server..

Don't you have antialiasing enable or something???

 

[FishTankX]

Anti Aliasing and Anistropic disabled.

I think it's strongly CPU bound and I notice during the battles it swaps badly and sometimes pauses up for as much as half a second.

Could one of the few people with 256MB of RAM tell me how the game does under such circumstances? This is driving me crazy.

 

[Guga]

Try this:

Go into your Unreal2 directory, System directory, and open Unreal2.ini with notepad.
Go to section [Engine.GameEngine], change CacheSizeMegs to 128 (default is 8).
Go to section [D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice], change UseCompressedLightmaps to True.

 

[0roo0roo]

1.7ghz kinda low. 512mb has been necessary for most games for a while.

 

[FishTankX]

Yes, I know 1.7GHZ was kinda low but I was hoping it would be enough for this year for the generation of games. I guess not.

You guys think upgrading to a 2.4A and 768MB PC800 would help my situation enough to be worth 250$?

 

[DX2Player]

I would try overclocking first, than if that doesnt work get 256 more ram.

 

[microAmp]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
Yes, I know 1.7GHZ was kinda low but I was hoping it would be enough for this year for the generation of games. I guess not.

You guys think upgrading to a 2.4A and 768MB PC800 would help my situation enough to be worth 250$?

1.7 GHz is fine, your video card is holding you back. Here is an article, but 1 year old. that does CPU scaling with sub-$200 video cards (at that time). The 8500LE is in there, with others and the best is the Ti4200. Look at the graph and see the 1.7 GHz area, see what a higher end video card can do you for you?

The CPU isn't the problem, video card is, and if you were thinking about $250, that's almost a 9700 Pro, just think of the leaps and bounds

Edit: The scaling is on the Athlon, so look at about 1.5 GHz Athlon to be the same as your P4 1.7 GHz.

 

[FishTankX]

Eh.. well, I don't know if Unreal tournament 2003 is quite the same as unreal 2.

Can anyone playing Unreal 2 with 256MB of RAM tell me if they have the same chunkiness problems?

 

[DX2Player]

motoamd is right the biggest help would brobably be a video card but I can still rum most games good with my Geforce2 Ultra with 2.5 P4 and 512 RIMM 4800 RDRAM. The thing to do is decide how much you are willing to spend. The free was is to overclock you CPU, GPU, and ram. If that doesnt work the ~$50 choice is to get 256 more ram, the ~$150 choice is to get an ATI 9500 pro, ~$200 choice is to get both the added ram and the 9500 Pro, the ~$250 choice is to get the 9700 Pro, the ~$300 choice is to get 9700 Pro with 256 more ram. Anything over that would be for new CPU than a new mobo than newer ram than newer harddrive in that order of importance.

 

[Dulanic]

Its not so much its a 1.7Ghz P4... its that its a 1.7Ghz Williamette and that you only 256MB of ram.

 

[apoppin]

I am also running a "slow" system - a 1.2Ghz Tualatin Celeron @ 1.5Ghz and 384MB RAM and a Radeon 8500 - 128MB (retail) . . .

I was using Win2K and the load times were insufferable (although frame rates are playable at 1024x768 at mostly HIGH detail and no AA/AF) . . . simply reverting back to WIN98SE cut the load times IN HALF . . . so my "conclusion" is that system RAM does make a big difference (after all they recommend 384MB of RAM).

I'd also say that textures must be "pretty big" in UII - your video card's 64MB RAM might be maxing out . . . Also, the game's AI is pretty demanding (at times) . . .

What I have noted . . . DX9 has some "bugs" with UII (DX 8.1 is "more stable") . . . and Catalysts 3.0 seem to work better (with 98SE) than 3.1 (I have played with several new installs of my OSes and "combinations" of drivers to get my current best results with UII and no more BSODs or protection faults).

 

[FishTankX]

That's what I thought. The lack of cache really hurts it, doesn't it?

So at this pont the it seems that the main factors are CPU and RAM. (Turning down the resolution doesn't help much, at all.)... (And the videocard too, just not as much as the RAM/CPU)

Is 512 enough to play the game without much paging?

And what CPU should be 'Minimum' for a game like this, to enjoy the game? 2.2A and up?

 

[Brian48]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
I'm absolutley shocked.

My rig is as follows

i850 Asus P4T-E
1.7GHZ Williamette
Radeon 8500LE 64MB
256MB Samsung PC800

This setup gets a shocking 20-30FPS outdoors and, outdoors in heavy battle, 10-15FPS. Which part is holding me back the most?

By the way, to all those, including BFG10K...

25FPS average is playable, and it can be enjoyable if you *really* love the game.

By the way, am I right in thinking that this game is a *total* RAM hog? My upgrade to 768MBs should stop the horrendous swapping problems i'm having. And the awful load times. 1 minute? WTF? (This is with everything low, shadows off. Except for medium skins detail. The rest is low/off.)

P.S.

Using catalyst 3.1 and the latest audigy drivers, with DX9.

To be perfectly honest, I think your whole system is holding you back. The game is a HOG. However, I do agree with you that 25-30fps is still very playable. They designed the game to be very slow moving to help compensate for the lack of fps in slower systems. I find that my earlier gripe regarding the slow "always run" speed actually helps when running the game on my 2000XP + GF3 box, which is the slowest machine I'll bother to install it on.

For now, I suppose you could speed things up by reducing the eye candy and resolution. Overclocking the video card would probably yield better results than the CPU, but even then it won't be a dramatic increase.

EDIT:
By the way, I've found that when I only had 256mb, some of the little memory saving tweaks I did helped somewhat (ie. no wallpaper, minimize the number of icons on the desktop and systray, disabling needless services at startup, etc. etc.). I didn't catch whether you were using Win2k or not, but starting the game from the run command using the set high priority might help also (i.e. "start /high unreal2.exe").

 

[Wiktor]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
That's what I thought. The lack of cache really hurts it, doesn't it?

So at this pont the it seems that the main factors are CPU and RAM. (Turning down the resolution doesn't help much, at all.)... (And the videocard too, just not as much as the RAM/CPU)

Is 512 enough to play the game without much paging?

And what CPU should be 'Minimum' for a game like this, to enjoy the game? 2.2A and up?

On my:
P4 1,8A
256RDRAM
GF3 Ti200

the game is perfectly playable. I use the default settings that the game generated (no .ini tweaking and detail level changing). I run the game at 800x600. The load times are short, though if you add the 'initializing' part - it can be up to a minute. Higher res. textures take longer to load, turn them down.

I don't think it is worth to upgrade (IMO the game is not worth upgrading/overclocking), but you should get 2x256 more RAM someday...

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
That's what I thought. The lack of cache really hurts it, doesn't it?

So at this pont the it seems that the main factors are CPU and RAM. (Turning down the resolution doesn't help much, at all.)... (And the videocard too, just not as much as the RAM/CPU)

Is 512 enough to play the game without much paging?

And what CPU should be 'Minimum' for a game like this, to enjoy the game? 2.2A and up?

I'd say the "realistic" minimum CPU for enjoying U-II is a 1.2Ghz CPU with 512MB RAM for 2K/XP (or 384MB with 98SE/ME). I am really enjoying UII on my system (but I spent a LOT of time "tweaking" it for smooth framerates).

BTW a 1.2Ghz Tualatin Celeron @ 1.5Ghz and a 1.7Ghz Willy are "pretty equivalent" . . . I'd say get MORE system RAM or make a partition for Win98SE and "tweak" your system . . . Have you tried O/C'ing your videocard (or CPU)? (my Radeon gets 301.5/603 without artifacting but doesn't really "need" it to play U-II ok).

 

[CraigRT]

You could definitely use more memory.
my friend said when he went from 256 to 512, UT2K3 ran alot better.

 

[FishTankX]

I'm planing to sell my CPU soon and it's still a 'virgin'. (Never gone over stock speeds) so I'm planning to keep it that way for the next 2 or so months I have it. I'm moving up to a 2.4A for about 100$ (my current CPU's worth about 100$) but i'm going to see if I can get another 256X2 or atleast 128X2 because playing the game like this depresses me, very much so. I've turned down all the texture details and it still swaps and dips in FPS.

Thanks for all the input, people. I'll try 98SE and see if the swapping stops.

On a side note, if I have XP on D and install 98 on C how would I go about repairing the damage 98SE did to the booting sequence? I assume after I install 98, 98 will be the only boot option and i'll have to go about using the recovery console some how...

 

[apoppin]

Partition Magic might be the (easy) answer for repairing your installation . . . anything else is gonna require a clean install of both O/Ses (the "free" way is to FDISK, install 98SE and then use XP to create a NTFS partition . . . you will then get the boot screen with the choices).

Just buying more RAM might be easier (considering it's current low price).
(I'm in a similar situation - 384MB RAM is plenty for Win98SE gaming . . . I'm gonna upgrade and get rid of my PC-133 so I don't feel like buying another [dead end] stick just to run XP or 2K).

 

[FishTankX]

Meh. RDRAM isn't very cheap..

That's one thing about RDRAM though. It's very immune to price fluctuations.

 

[DX2Player]

you can find 256 of PC800 rdram at pricewatch for about $55

 

[DX2Player]

How much money are you willing to spend here? thats the ultimate question?

 

[AtomicDude512]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
I'm absolutley shocked.

My rig is as follows

i850 Asus P4T-E
1.7GHZ Williamette
Radeon 8500LE 64MB
256MB Samsung PC800

This setup gets a shocking 20-30FPS outdoors and, outdoors in heavy battle, 10-15FPS. Which part is holding me back the most?

By the way, to all those, including BFG10K...

25FPS average is playable, and it can be enjoyable if you *really* love the game.

Edit:Using XP. Stupid memory hog...

On my special 'gaming' desktop I can get XP down to 120 megs commit charge.
By the way, am I right in thinking that this game is a *total* RAM hog? My upgrade to 768MBs should stop the horrendous swapping problems i'm having. And the awful load times. 1 minute? WTF? (This is with everything low, shadows off. Except for medium skins detail. The rest is low/off.)

P.S.

Using catalyst 3.1 and the latest audigy drivers, with DX9.

YES! Before I had 256MB it took forever to load, now that I have 512MB it loads in a flash, even after playing for hours. I might even go for 1GB.

Oh, my CPU is 1.7GHz also, with 256KB cache.

 

[Rhombuss]

Not too familiar with Unreal 2, but if it's anything like Doom 3, the texture packs alone are around 80MB. So you're going to need a 128MB card to fully cache the textures.

 

[Guga]

FishTankX.. did you try what I told you??

I think you can improve load times and paging with those changes..

Gime your feed back...

Cya