eric1992 wrote:

Ran Unreal Gold 640x480x32 but the game doesn't run at a good framerate unless I drop it to 300x240 or something like that. Is my CPU bottlenecking the card or did I download the wrong driver?

Make sure that you are not running it on software renderering mode.

I'm running on OpenGL.

how it perform in direct3d?

You might want to try running it using Direct3D, it is certainly better than OpenGL. Although, to be fair, both D3D and OpenGL implementations for the original Unreal Engine games are pretty bad, the game was primarily written for software mode and Glide was added in as the game was ending development AFAIK. As far as I recall, D3D wasn't even part of the initial release and was added in later (as was OpenGL).

So what do you do if you don't have a 3Dfx card to play this game? Simple, try a newer renderer. On modern computers you can play the game using Direct3D 9.0 and even Direct3D 10.0 renderers, but for older systems, there's oldUnreal's patches. I recommend installing OldUnreal's 227 patch for Unreal Gold which should give you a much better OpenGL renderer, as well as a D3D 8.0 renderer that you can use on your card, provided you have DX8 installed (although I'm not sure if that'll run well, perhaps it expects something later than a GeForce3.

Forget about running it in 32-bit mode. Tried that on my Pentium 4 (1.3 GHz) with a GF2 GTS and I got about 1 frame every 10 seconds or so... Couldn't even really move the mouse any longer in the menus.

I did some benchmarking with this game a little while ago. I tried it on my Geforce2 pro, Radeon 8500, Geforce4ti and Matrox Parhelia. There were some settings that made a big difference on some of the cards. Make sure AGP textures is disabled, that cut the performance in half on the Geforce cards and it was even worse on the Radeon. It didn't seem to do anything on the Matrox. I ended up also disabling trilinear filtering on the Radeon also, it was very slow. On the Geforce cards I was using the 40.72 drivers.

It's good advice to install the oldunreal patch btw, but I found you could get the game playable without using it.

Edit: I should add some info, I was running the GOG version of the game. I ran it on XP32 SP2 and most of the testing I did on my asrock board with a core2 cpu @ 2.66GHz. I did try the game on a 3GHz P4 though with these cards and it was still playable on all of them even at 1280x1024x32. The Matrox and Geforce4 were playable with AA and AF even.

Hmmm... I use Unreal (classic) patch version 226. Waiting for a complete cycle to finish in timedemo 1, I get all of 7.2 fps using a Voodoo2 on a Cyrix 5x86-133. I don't recall if I ran it at 640x480 or 800x600, but I would imagine that a P3-800 w/GF3 could achieve a substantially higher result. What do you get for the timedemo? At the game's command console when first loading the game's executable, type: timedemo 1 and wait for a cycle to complete.

It's running better but I can not get the 227 patch to work. It says it expects a newer version of Windows. I think the card just needed a different set of drivers and to reinstall Unreal Gold. I'm mainly getting 60 FPS occasionally 50 or 45. I would've gone with a VOODOO card but they're too expensive and even then I don't think they'd be better.

What do you get after one or two cycles of timedemo 1?

The lowest I got was 35 FPS and the highest was 100 FPS. Is that good for Geforce3 or do I need better drivers?

When the cycle is complete, it shows a single frame rate value - is that not the average frame rate? If not, what is it?

96 FPS average when I started the game. In the outside part it went down to 60-70. That should be pretty good for a Geforce3, right?

I don't know. I've only tried this game on an under powered system.

Hi again, I didn't realize patch 227 was that new and required a newer version of Windows 😊 . If you don't mind, you could try applying some of the patches/renderers from this website, they were made for earlier versions, including the original retail release and your Unreal Gold release.

The GeForce 3 should allow you to play the game even with AA and AF enabled, it's a high end card from 2001 and Unreal is from 1998. The CPU will hold you back somewhat, but I still think you should get above 60fps at all times with minimal drops if at all, provided you use one of the newer renderers. The original ones are pretty bad.

F2bnp wrote:

Hi again, I didn't realize patch 227 was that new and required a newer version of Windows.

That explains why I could only install up to 226 on my Win95 Cyrix system. What OS is 227 intended for?

Which video driver are you using ?

I am using Voodoo2 drivers v3.03.00 and Matrox G200 v4.33c.