Try the official unofficial 227 patch. 😉 It brings in support for D3D8 and D3D9 and seems to be faster than OpenGL on some cards with the patch.
http://www.oldunreal.com/oldunrealpatches.html

Well my system, is only a DX7 system. Do you still think that would help?

Yeah. Read up on the patch from the link I sent. It fixes bugs and brings in performance improvements across the board. If in doubt, make a backup of your directory before installing so you can roll back if you wish. I've tried it on various systems and only have good things to say about it. Oh, if you plan on installing this on a Win9x system, the latest version of the patch that is compatible with Win9x is 227d, so you'll have to scroll down a ways to get the older patch. If you're installing on XP or later, then the latest (227i) version is what you want.

Great! I'll give it a try.

I am still wondering about an overall problem though, since both UT99 and Unreal are doing the same thing with D3D.

For science, I downgraded the geforce2 from Forceware 71.84 to 29.42. After that, it started working beautiful. I do not think 29.42 is even called "Forceware". Need for Speed III also started working correctly in D3D.

If anyone has some input on why, I'd be interested. I suppose at this point, I can start upgrading the drivers and find the newest one that works.

You might also want to benchmark it, to see which one gives you good performance.

To do this press

~

at the castle sequence at the start.

Then type

timedemo 1

Write down the second or third loop result.

There could be quite the differences with driver version, on older machines every FPS matters 😀

bytesaber wrote:

For science, I downgraded the geforce2 from Forceware 71.84 to 29.42. After that, it started working beautiful. I do not think 29.42 is even called "Forceware". Need for Speed III also started working correctly in D3D.

If anyone has some input on why, I'd be interested. I suppose at this point, I can start upgrading the drivers and find the newest one that works.

What I've read is that in general, drivers are tuned to the graphics cards that were available during their release. So it may not always be advantageous to run the latest driver with an older card.

Which nvidia card are you using?

There was some bigtime regression for the Geforce2 after 61.xx, in Win9X at least.

leileilol wrote:

There was some bigtime regression for the Geforce2 after 61.xx, in Win9X at least.

clueless1 wrote:

What I've read is that in general, drivers are tuned to the graphics cards that were available during their release. So it may not always be advantageous to run the latest driver with an older card.

I have actually wondered this! But I have not tried confirming the claim. This does seem to support it and I'm sure you are both completely right.

clueless1 wrote:

Which nvidia card are you using?

It is a Pine Excalibur geforce2 TI 64MB

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

You might also want to benchmark it...
There could be quite the differences with driver version, on older machines every FPS matters 😀

I do enjoy running the timedemo. Now that it's actually working, I will look into testing it with different driver versions 😀

Sorry to resurrect another old thread, but I also got my Win 98 machine up and running recently, and gave UT a go. First, the demo (v348), and picking D3D, the game runs like a dream, smooth 60 FPS on my 4200 Ti. However with the full game (v400), D3D does like you say, 0.5 frames per second. Installed the latest patch, made no change to it. Why does the demo just work properly and full retail doesnt?

Seem to remember this being the case back nearly 20 years ago when I got my first ever PC. Demo was perfect, but the full game I had to stick with software rendering. Was this ever figured out why?

Unreal 1 also runs horribly in D3D 🙁

Fixed this also, using drivers v44.03 has brought back all the performance, in both Unreal and UT. Forgot Win 98 had so much driver issues like this, having to chop n change based on what your playing 😀

BoozerDawg wrote:

Seem to remember this being the case back nearly 20 years ago when I got my first ever PC. Demo was perfect, but the full game I had to stick with software rendering. Was this ever figured out why?

The Direct3D renderer was still an experimental work in progress! Version 420 is when it pretty much "finished".