[kman42]

I have a stock G4/867 with 896MB RAM. I'm trying to play UT2003, but it is really slow. In particular the mouse response is poor. I don't want to spend a lot of money, but I'd like ot make the game playable on my machine. Are there things I can change in the settings that will help? I tried increasing the mouse responsiveness and reducing it to 16-bit color, but it didn't seem to help all that much. Do I need a joystick and new video card? I'm not a big gamer, but this seems pretty cool.

kman

[wataru]

Change all of the texture and geometry settings to low, turn off all the extras like decals and lighting effects... It's all right there. Just turn stuff off and see if it's any better.

Oh, and make sure you're running 10.2.6. Or does it not even run on anything less than that?

[krove]

What kind of graphics hardware do you have?

I have found that it runs great on a Dual 800 with 768 MB RAM and a GeForce 3 card!

[daydreamer]

Originally posted by krove:
What kind of graphics hardware do you have?

I have found that it runs great on a Dual 800 with 768 MB RAM and a GeForce 3 card!

Yeah UT2003 is smp aware partly, the sound and some other stuff run on the 2nd CPU.

I have a Dual 800 with GF2MX and 640mb ram it runs really nice to.

[JKT]

I think I read over at XLR8yourmac.com that removing USB devices other than your mouse can reduce the mouse lag. It seems that polling for other devices can affect the responsiveness and hell, it's easy to try...

[kman42]

I shut down iTunes and that helped quie a bit. I think I need a two button mouse with a scroll wheel or a joystick. Hmm... Any suggestions?

kman

[mindwaves]

kman42, try to keep the game questions in the Mac Games forum and also try to consolidate your threads next time. Thread moved.

[Leonard]

Originally posted by kman42:
I shut down iTunes and that helped quie a bit. I think I need a two button mouse with a scroll wheel or a joystick. Hmm... Any suggestions?

kman

You shouldn't have any other applications running while your playing 3D games.

UT2003, like UT and Quake 3, work best with a two button scrollwheel mouse or better (you need 2 buttons for the fire and alternate fire). I've never used a joystick with them, but that would probably work great as well.

[MindFad]

Originally posted by krove:
What kind of graphics hardware do you have?

I have found that it runs great on a Dual 800 with 768 MB RAM and a GeForce 3 card!

Hmm, same specs and it's not great at all really. Sure, if there are no players around and I'm looking at walls and stuff. I'll save really getting into this game for Apple's new hardware, whenever that should come. 20FPS or below when battling people online is barely playable or fun. I'd much rather be getting 200-300 FPS with a precise and constantly smooth aim, but I'm not buying a damn PC. It's still an awesome game, despite the lackluster performance.

[::maroma::]

Create a new OS X user. Keep it completely clean of any extra stuff (haxies, deamons, etc). Use it to play UT2k3 (don't run anything else in the background). Works wonders for me. I see a dramatic frame rate increase.

If there is a way to shut down even more processes in the "clean" user account, that would be good too. Maybe quitting the Finder somehow or something.

[reader50]

I use a separate partition rather than a separate user account. The only unusual thing installed is TinkerTool, used to add a Quit command to the Finder. When launching UT2003, I click to the Finder before the cursor is turned off, and Quit. UT2003 launches as the sole GUI application - other than the Dock. Perhaps I'll figure a way to kill the Dock too - and keep it killed.

I'm going to experiment with turning off other things for this partition's OSX install. 'top' already shows UT2003 demo getting 98% of CPU, but I can probably tweak it further. For example, the unreal.ini file gives 32MB working space to the graphics engine. I bumped that to 256MB.