Optimizing UT2004 for Win10

[captainsnarf]

I followed this guide

https://miasma.rocks/index.php?topic=1477.0

I was getting ~280 fps when playing offline. After following the guide, my fps offline was 1200fps! On some screens it would shoot up over 8000fps! I'm not even sure what all I changed

I set my fps cap online to 250fps (I have 240hz monitors) like they suggest and everything seems super smooth now. Even though I would get ~280fps previously, it was not as consistent as it is now.

The only thing I did different from the guide is to not check the 'disable fullscreen optimization feature' like they suggest. I get more fps with the default unchecked setting.

[YEAAAHHHHHHHHHH]

Man I've been rockin the default 85 or whatever so 1200 sounds completely foreign to me!

[pooty]

Are you using DX8 or 9?

Some of those aren't right for example:

Right click on ut2004.exe, or the desktop shortcut, open Properties.
Go to Compatibility.
Check "Disable fullscreen optimizations".
Make sure everything else is unchecked.

I end up with 115fps max if that is checked, 165fps without it.

I can't seem to get higher than 165 no matter what I set. Doesn't much matter as my monitor is 165 hz. I wonder if the GSync caps it? My hardware (i7-6700k, GTX 1080 ) should support it.

[captainsnarf]

I'm using DX8 with that converter from here

The MaxClientFrameRate value seems to only affect online play. It's set in orders of millisecond increments, so it can only result in fps values of 100,112,125,142,166,200,250,333

In order to apply a limit of 100 fps, you should use your desired FPS +1 for "MaxClientFrameRate"

So I set my MaxClientFrameRate=251 for 250 fps cap online.

-----
I have an AMD video card, so I set Radeon Anti-Lag on.
In UT2004 -> Settings -> Input, I turned off 'Reduce Mouse Lag'. It was on, thinking it helped, but it's much better without it.
In User.ini I also changed 'MouseSamplingTime' to 0.001 like the guide suggests.
----

I'm guessing these last three tweaks are what uncapped my fps to the ridiculous values I see now.

[Anonymous.]

I have an AMD video card, so I set Radeon Anti-Lag on.
In UT2004 -> Settings -> Input, I turned off 'Reduce Mouse Lag'. It was on, thinking it helped, but it's much better without it.

Antilag is extremely broken with UT2004, just leave it disabled and check the box for Reduce Mouse Lag. It's probably the equivalent of FinishCurrentFrame (or OneFrameThreadLag, unsure) on the newer UE versions.
https://blog.csdn.net/pizi0475/article/details/50423885

[captainsnarf]

I have an AMD video card, so I set Radeon Anti-Lag on.
In UT2004 -> Settings -> Input, I turned off 'Reduce Mouse Lag'. It was on, thinking it helped, but it's much better without it.

Antilag is extremely broken with UT2004, just leave it disabled and check the box for Reduce Mouse Lag. It's probably the equivalent of FinishCurrentFrame (or OneFrameThreadLag, unsure) on the newer UE versions.
https://blog.csdn.net/pizi0475/article/details/50423885

That's how I had it before. I got ~280fps offline.

Turning ON antilag and UNchecking the Reduce Mouse Lag and I get 1200fps offline. If I'm just in menus it can get up to 8000fps. It's ridiculously fast now.

[Anonymous.]

Yeah, but once you become CPU bottlenecked (onslaught) you're going to have an extra frame of delay, and those extra frames when not CPU bound are next to useless because online FPS is capped. Regardless, you shouldn't be getting such low FPS without it. Did you lock your GPU core clock to make sure it doesn't downclock? AMD thinks we buy high end graphics cards (I'm being generous here calling AMD "high end") just to save on our energy bills.

You can try increasing your minimum core clock to 2000MHz with this tool, it should help with CPU bound games. While you're in there, disable fan stop and make sure your GPU doesn't cook itself to death by using the stock fan curve.
https://www.igorslab.de/en/the-morecloc ... wattman/3/

[pooty]

I'm using DX8 with that converter from here

Cool Running DX9 figured newer was better....well mostly since in the past I had issues with NVIDIA drivers causing issues with UT2004.

My real goal is to just keep sustained 160 or so given limits of the monitor anyway, no point in having more frames than the monitor can display is there?

I didn't see much difference with the NVIDIA settings Low Latency in particular, I had already set it at maximum power (like Anon said, why would I want to have a beefy (at least at the time) GPU card and then hobble it?

[pooty]

So the other thing I played with was the UT Settings:

Best is to set all graphics settings to Lowest or off.

I played with them and the Texture Detail seems to have the largest impact followed by Physical Detail. For example while specing Minus-KitchenSink, my fps dropped with Texture Detail set to highest, and shot way up when put on lowest. So this told me two things, one your set up on your game, your computer can really affect fps/lag, not just the server. Two, Server was doing pretty well even though my fps were lower.

I wonder if any texture/map build texture settings on map could make a difference DXT3 vs. RGB8?

[pooty]

FYI.

If you're already using d3d8.dll the one that's ~102kb. That's the DX8 to DX9 converter, you can go back to DX8 by just renaming it/removing it. I didn't have any issues with maximized windows, didn't need that other DLL in the thread -- in fact that one just made my UT GPF on startup.
Going to try DX8 setup as I do get better framerates now...it was hard to push the DX9 over 165 for me.


I did see slightly higher frame rates on DX8, I've capped it now about 225 fps. There's no point in having higher fps unless you have a monitor to match (I did some tweaking and got 250-300ish but got some clipping type visuals on the monitor on some of the texture edges).
Having too high fps will per that article just increases your network traffic...but I can't imagine even at the highest the UT poses any bandwidth on modern connections (kb vs mb) in my case stat net showed about 3-5kb more per second. Which on my 300-400 Mb connection shouldn't matter at all.