Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Maelman · Nov 1, 2003, 09:58 PM

I am running UT2003 (the recently updated version) on 10.3 on a 17 in. iMac 800 mhz 256 ram with a GeForce 4 MX. Here is the deal, at 640x480 with all of the graphics settings at the lowest I am only able to get on average (with at least 5 bots) around 14-20 fps. What gives. I know the GeForce 4 MX is no radeon 9000, but come on 14-20 fps. Any help on getting it to run faster would be much appreciated.

dantley · Nov 2, 2003, 12:49 AM

Seriously, the only thing I can tell you is get some more ram and and a better video card. Your card is very outdated. UT2003 would run like crap on a P4-2ghz with the same card.

DBvader · Nov 2, 2003, 01:22 AM

im sure you would know how it runs on a 2 GHz pc...

my family's 1900+ (only 1600 Mhz), 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 MX 440 runs it fantastically well. on antalus, i get around 30-40 FPS at least, and it runs much better in the indoor levels. I am also running it at 1280 x 1024 with everything on high. on my mac, i get a little slower speeds after panther and the patch (its a dual 867, ATI 9000, 1 GB RAM) at 1024 x 768 with settings on medium.

maelman, i would reccomend getting 512 MB more RAM...its bound to help. that new patch has the vectorized code for sound which is supposed to drastically improve performance on single proc machines. When i updated to panther i saw a HUGE increase in performance. your performance isnt much worse than what i would expect on a system like yours (compared to mine which isnt much faster).

dennis88 · Nov 2, 2003, 04:10 AM

If you have 64mb on your geforce card, remember to change the varsize in the unreal.ini file to 64 instead of 32.
Go to library, then application support, then unreal, and then system.
Open the ut2003.ini file with textedit.
About half way down you will see "OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice"
And a bit longer down you will see "varsize=32"
Change it to 64 instead of 32.

Now the graphic card will use all the 64mb on your card instead of just 32mb.

Hope it helps.

Thinine · Nov 2, 2003, 07:51 AM

Bots take a lot of CPU so you'd be better off online, at least performance wise.

RooneyX · Nov 2, 2003, 12:01 PM

Originally posted by dennis88:
If you have 64mb on your geforce card, remember to change the varsize in the unreal.ini file to 64 instead of 32.
Go to library, then application support, then unreal, and then system.
Open the ut2003.ini file with textedit.
About half way down you will see "OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice"
And a bit longer down you will see "varsize=32"
Change it to 64 instead of 32.

Now the graphic card will use all the 64mb on your card instead of just 32mb.

Hope it helps.

Damn. I've been running it with 32MBs for months. Now the game has got to rock even more.

Grrr · Nov 5, 2003, 10:58 AM

Originally posted by dantley:
Seriously, the only thing I can tell you is get some more ram and and a better video card. Your card is very outdated. UT2003 would run like crap on a P4-2ghz with the same card.

More ram? yes..
Better video card? No.
Unless you want to try changing one on an iMac. Basically, it isn't possible.

madmacgames · Nov 5, 2003, 11:18 AM

Originally posted by dantley:
Seriously, the only thing I can tell you is get some more ram and and a better video card. Your card is very outdated. UT2003 would run like crap on a P4-2ghz with the same card.

Please don't speak of things which you know nothing about. You proved this very clearly with that statement.

a2daj · Nov 5, 2003, 03:13 PM

Keep in mind that the G4 iMacs use the slower G4s with internal 256 KB L2 cache and no L3 cache. With that size L2 cache and no L3 cache, gaming performance can be greatly affected. In some benchmarks, a PPC 7450 at 800 MHz with no L3 cache was about the same speed as a PPC 7400 at 500 MHz (1 MB backside L2) in the same machine.

The new PPC 7457 in the current line of PowerBooks has an internal 512 KB L2 cache so it gets a decent performance boost over the old G4s with 256 KB internal L2 caches. I'm a little curious how the 7457s will run with an L3 cache compared to the 7450s and 7455s.

madmacgames · 05:28 PM

along the lines of what a3daj is saying about the L2 cache...

if you look at the system requirements for the mac UT2003, you'll notice it says "except the 2003 12" powerbook"... this is because the January 2003 12" powerbooks had no L3 cache (not sure if the Sept ones do or not) which causes the performance to drop to an unacceptable level...

so if you don't have an L3 cache, dont expect good performance from UT2003... in fact expect very bad performance.

PS. an L2 of 512KB would probably make up for the lack of an L3. Though as a3daj pointed out, your machine's L2 is only 256KB.

macenthusiast · Nov 5, 2003, 06:39 PM

any chance you could change the amount of megs your video card handles for return to castle wolfenstein?

Hydra · Nov 5, 2003, 09:29 PM

Originally posted by madmacgames:

so if you don't have an L3 cache, dont expect good performance from UT2003... in fact expect very bad performance.

Ouch, my dual G5 has ZERO L3 for each processor . Funny the performance seems OK

-Jerry C.

madmacgames · Nov 5, 2003, 09:35 PM

Originally posted by Hydra:
Ouch, my dual G5 has ZERO L3 for each processor . Funny the performance seems OK

-Jerry C.

I doubt it has a 256KB L2 cache though

A combination of small L2 cache (256KB) and no L3 cache (like found on revA 12" powerbooks and iMacs) makes for poor performance with UT2003. We had a customer ask us about this same issue, so that is straight from the developers mouth.

Hydra · Nov 5, 2003, 10:01 PM

Originally posted by madmacgames:
I doubt it has a 256KB L2 cache though

Yeah, I was only having some fun with your statement

The G5's architecture means the main memory bus effectively has almost as much performance as the small L3 on older Mac's. But on a G4 with a slower bus it could be a huge problem. W/o L3 something like Virtual PC probably runs like a molasses up a hill on a cold day.

-Jerry C.