First post, by Sombrero
- Rank
- Oldbie
As per usual during summer I lose interest on games I can't easily pick up, play for a moment and put aside again, so I got in my head to install a selection of "summer" games on my i5-3570 / GTX 960 WinXP/7 system which has very low heat output, which is nice when you live in an apartment that has no air conditioning. Literally the first games I installed were Unreal Tournament 99/2003/2004 and as I moved from UT99 to UT2003 I realized something I had noticed before but had just shrugged off during my previous quick testing:
On Windows XP on that system both UT2003 and UT2004 judders like they are skipping frames when you move the mouse. Moving without touching the mouse just by going forwards/backwards/strafing is butter smooth, moving the camera with mouse is anything but smooth.
Since that doesn't happen on another system that has 6800 GT I figured I must have ran into a compatibility/driver issue and started going through the usual hoops trying to figure out what is causing it (GPU drivers, game settings, .ini settings, VSync etc). After spending quite a while on it without success I googled around and started to find these little hints of possible issue starting with NVIDIA G80 cards on Windows XP, apparently the unified shader architecture doesn't play well with Unreal Engine 2 games on Windows XP and NVIDIA was never able to fix that?
Can't find anything concrete, basically just this with couple customer service replies and lots of old forum posts complaining about performance that may or may not be related with plethora of possible fixes.
Apparently the issue either didn't exist on Windows Vista (and beyond) or did exist but they were able to fix it there, so I installed both games on Windows 7 on the same system and sure enough, butter smooth.
Can anyone else confirm this? I'm wondering did I stumble upon a known issue or should I keep trying to troubleshoot this.
It's easy to test:
- Have any NVIDIA 8-series or later card installed on Windows XP. Driver version shouldn't matter, the issue was (apparently) never fixed
- Try any Unreal Engine 2 game, here's a list of games that use UE2
For me while UT2003 suffers from the judder UT2004 is even worse so the severity might depend on the game, all UE2 games are still apparently affected.
If you happen to be one of those people who isn't very sensitive to judder and may have not really even noticed it (or have decided to live with it thinkin that just how the game is) one good way to test it which makes the issue VERY apparent is to start a deathmatch on DM-TokaraForest with UT2003/UT2004, fly up to the pathways above the level in the pre-match spectator mode and start doing circles around any of those small lightposts you'll find up there while keeping your camera pointing at the post. If it visibly stutters as you are doing donuts around it you are experiencing the issue, it's supposed to be perfectly smooth.
And for those who now can't unsee it, sorry 😀