First post, by d1stortion
This is an issue that I believe deserves a thread here. Despite the game still being reasonably popular, I haven't seen it being covered specifically anywhere, short of the occasional anecdotal reference.
To sketch the issue, the game basically has a 85 FPS framerate cap for online matches. There are suggestions that setting a MaxClientFrameRate higher than the default 90 and changing the netspeed ingame can raise this, but none of that ever altered the framerate cap for me. In online play, the game subjectively feels VERY stuttery when being played on a 60 or 75 Hz monitor. This is most easily noticed during fast mouse movements or when moving in parallel to walls. The issue is obviously exacerbated due to the overall fast pace of the game. Now, during offline matches, there is no framerate cap and the game suddenly feels a lot smoother at 200+ FPS; even though the monitor is still running at 60/75 Hz, all the same. The fluidity is more interrupted by some occasional screen tearing rather than said judder, but overall the game feels reasonably smooth in offline mode.
Since I've again acquired a monitor that can do 85 Hz not too long ago this issue came up on my mind again and I decided to give UT2004 another shot. It's a world of difference to where I'd say the game is unplayable and headache-inducing on the vast majority of LCDs, online at least. The interesting part about it is that the issue seems to be only present in this installment (and UT2003, maybe); UT w/ UTGLR has the FrameRateLimit setting which allows to easily alter this for both offline and online play. Setting that to something like 58 seems to give the most fluid motion on a 60 Hz screen, presumably due to lack of dropped frames, but in my case there was a consistent screen tear that was quite annoying, so I'd usually set it to about 65 which seemed to give a decent balance between fluidity and lack of screen tearing. In general the result seemed similar to offline play in UT2004, with maybe a bit more screen tearing overall. Setting this too high will cause the offline mode to run too fast however due to the speed sensivity of the game.
I should also probably mention that VSync would be a panacea for all of this; that is, if one can deal with input lag in a game that requires precise mouse aiming...