12 FPS wth?

[Guest]

I thought this thing was supposed to be faster than XP.....yeah right.

I'm play a 5 year old game, UT 2004, and it runs like hell. My FPS has been cut by 2/3rds to 12 FPS. Also every time I start the game I have to minimize it and turn the volume up. It always reverts back to this...

Besides upgrading my system anyone have any tips?

I'm on a 2.0 P4 with 1 gig of ram and an ATI X1300 GPU.

[DigeratiPrime]

What operating system are you referring to? Is that screenshot of Vista or Windows 7 and what service pack.

What video card and drivers do you have installed?

Also what version of Unreal are you running.

Was UT2004 installed previously on a separate partition which you are trying to use under a different OS, or is it a new install?

[Guest]

The drivers are MS approved, digitally signed, etc that setup installed. They even have these pretty certificate icons next to them.

As I said in the OP, its an ATI x1300 card. I'm in the Windows 7 forum so its Windows 7. I also said it's UT2004. That's the version 2004.

As for your last question, it makes no difference. Trust me. I dont think I ever even installed it. I just unzipped the Winzip self extracting archive. The only files that get modified are 2 ini files in UT2004\System. No registry entries, nothing.

[mara-]

Since I did not use Win 7 I don't know is your RAM amount enough. I know that for the game, 256 MB of RAM is recommended, but if Win 7 uses same amount of RAM as Vista, then you don't have enough. 1GB is just for running Vista, nothing more, although minimum for Vista is 512. But, this may not be the problem. In my opinion your problem is in drivers for graphic card. In my experience drivers which you get from Microsoft always gives very poor performance. Try updating to latest ATI drivers (they already made drivers for Win 7).

Cheers

EDIT: It seems that drivers are not available for you card. Try using latest drivers made for Vista. It should work fine.

EDIT2: For the volume problem, try what I showed on screen shot:

Edited April 26, 2009 by mara-

[Guest]

Sweet that speaker thing did the trick.

I saw what you saw. Vista but no Win7. I gave them a try but they wouldn't install. I even tried a manual driver install instead of running setup and it told me my current drivers blah blah. I'll get them in there somehow.

I mucked up some folder after I posted this and reinstalled and it's not that bad anymore. FPS is hitting the 20's which is playable. Just every now and then you feel it bog down like something in the system is starting up and zapping some CPU. UT2004 needs CPU above all else.

Thanks a lot for the tips. Much appreciated.

Edited April 26, 2009 by -X-

[DigeratiPrime]

I did not notice your specs at the bottom of the first post.

Otherwise I would have pointed out that they might be insufficient.

What I meant by version was if you had the latest patch v3369.

http://www.beyondunreal.com/main/ut2004/ut2004essential.php

OK, I should assume people are using the official Windows 7 beta.

Settings files (ini) often have operating system and hardware specific settings.

IMO the only significant factor UT2004 has on CPU usage is the number and difficulty of bots (AI).

What graphics settings are you running the game on?