...other than buying a PC!!!!

I've got a G4 400, 256MB RAM, and Radeon, and my UT framerates still suck! Quake rocks, but UT and its damn RAVE barely changed at all with the Radeon. I've got 180 MB allocated to UT, and in the unrealtournament.ini file, I set the engine cache to 25MB. Is there ANYTHING else I can do short of throwing this damn G4 in the junk heap that will give me a bit more for UT?!?! Do I have to do something extra to enable Radeon drivers to work with UT? Any suggestions greatly appreciated. (oh, I already know about turning off decals and volumetric lighting and stuff. If I wanted to do all that I'd just get Doom and play at 250 fps. No, I wan't framerates without sacrifice!)

[dinero68]

UT? Glide card. Get a voodoo5 and you'll be happy. Rave sucks for UT.

Ca$h

[Evinyatar]

Originally posted by dinero68:
UT? Glide card. Get a voodoo5 and you'll be happy. Rave sucks for UT.

Ca$h

Heh. He just got himself a Radeon, I doubt he'll be switching 3D cards any time soon again.
What you CAN try is downloading OpenGL 1.2.1 (which comes with the Cro Mag Rally demo) and run the OpenGL version of UT (which is somewhere on the cd. I believe in the Goodies folder or something). This just might speed up things a lot, esp as OpenGL 1.2.1 is optimized for Altivec and all.

[Jsnuff1]

why what kind o frame rates are you getting? i get 30-50 with my 500 mp radeon with all the settings maxed out in UT

[seanyepez]

Get a PC.

I get 120 frames per second on my PC that costed two-thirds of what your friend's MP G4 costed.

In Unreal, there's not much you can turn off. Turn off 32-bit color. It doesn't make things look that ugly. I don't even notice it in a fierce battle.

Pretty graphics make you see pretty guts on the floor when you're fighting against someone who has unrealistic smears across his screen laughing at your sucky framerate.

Turn off some stuff.

I've got the latest version of OpenGL, and I tried running OpenGL with UT 436. No good, its worse than RAVE.

Framerates depend very much on the map. On small, tight maps, I can get around 30-50, dropping to the low 20s in action. But on large maps, they drop down to 5 or so during action. That's even using Medium world and skin detail at 832x624. I guess the true problem is that UT is very CPU-dependent, which would explain why a 500MHz G4 is so much better than a 400MHz G4. I just wondered if there are any other settings I can muck with to boost framerates (like some hidden cache that is set by default for Macs w/ 64MB RAM).

Now, with Quake3 its another story. I've got everything maxed out and framerates never drop too far for action. OpenGL rocks my world!

Anyways, I thought about getting a Voodoo, but Radeon whoops its arse even now in most any comparison (except glide)--imagine a year from now when Apple and ATI have optimized the drivers! I'm cautiously optimistic that once ATI implements FS antialiasing and hones the drivers a bit, the Radeon will be a giant can o' ass whoop...

I max out texture and detail and such but then run in 640/480 and I am getting High 50's low 60's while moving mid to high 40's while in action and 70's if I stare at a wall Averaging about 52fps

G4/500 256MB VooDoo 5 5500

See below for some interesting info


The Radeon VS Voodoo 5 comparisons all compare a PCI VooDoo to the AGP radeon

The Voodoo cards (4&5) easily and continually saturate the pci bus. SO the Voodoo has more data than the PCI bus can move. The Radeon sits in the faster AGP slot.....hmmm and still the V5 and Radeon are almost equal

What this means is that a PCI radeon (when available) and a V4/5 will have almost identical performance!! Because both cards are so fast that the limiting factor is the PCI bus.

One Review I read **speculated** that an AGP VooDoo5 card (if available) would easily whip a Radeon.


I recommend that if you have only PCI slots then decide between these 2 cards based on features and how they suit your needs

If you have an AGP slot USE IT! Use a V5 agp (when available) A radeon or wait and hope nVidia gets into the Mac world


BTW 3DFX IS still selling their complete line of cards but they have stopped building the cards and have outsourced the actual card production 3DFX designs the cards, pays someone else to build them then 3DFX sells the cards

[TimmyDee51]

The problem with a Voodoo (don't take this the wrong way -- they are great cards) is that 3dfx is dropping the Glide standard, so future games will not see the sorts of differences (or possible differences) between ATi and 3dfx. I think that Glide is the one thing that 3dfx has over ATi. Oh, yeah, FSAA. Boy, it must be nice to have an awesome graphics card. . .

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Well, if you wanna start comparing graphics cards, then just go look at the Peecee world, where they DO have AGP models of everything.

There have been so many vid-card reviews it's not funny. Basically, the Radeon seems to be second only to nVidia's top offerings. As far as I can remember, even the 32 DDR Radeon (the only model available for the Mac) was deemed faster overall than the Voodoo5 (though there probably wasn't much difference).

NOTE: You all know that 3Dfx got out of the production end of vid cards. There has been some speculation that the AGP version of the Voodoo5 isn't going to make it to the mac, I think...didn't whassisname say that "we are re-evaluating out position and will yadda yadda yadda...."???? That usually turns out to be less than promising for us Mac users, hmmm?

Also note, however, that ATI SHOULD have more driver optimizations on the way than 3Dfx, since theirs is a newer card, and that you get DVD support while freeing up your 3 PCI slots. Personally, I'd go with the Radeon, since ATI is working in conjunction with Apple and they ARE the officially supported card, but hey....

Your choice.

Greg

------------------
Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

One of the best things I have done to improve UT performance is to do a disk copy of the UT CD to my hard disk. The delays I was experiencing obviously related to the slow performance of my DVD drive. The game runs 100% better with no delays.

[Leonard]

Len, I think most people have the Max install and play with a disk image file, which is the same thing. I know I've created a disk image.

By the way, I noticed an odd thing one day. I started up UT 436, and forgot to mount the disk image,... well the game started and played. No CD inserted (or mounted) and no disk image mounted. Did they take out the requirement for the CD in version 436 or is there a bug in my version?

[blingblingin68]

Heh. Yep. They did take it out, so you no longer need the CD.... which was pointless anyway, since you don't really need it... all you need is a disk image with one folder and the textures.utx file in it.

Ca$h