Tweak UT graphics/sound to the max

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The greatest mystery of all: OpenGL or D3D (Including the D3D8 one)?

  • OpenGl

    Votes: 108 64.7%
  • D3D (or D3D8)

    Votes: 41 24.6%
  • Software is the best!

    Votes: 4 2.4%
  • They all suck!

    Votes: 14 8.4%

  • Total voters
    167

Ironword300

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Mar 2, 2016
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After an absence from playing Unreal/UT of nearly a decade, I'm going to fire the game up again for a whole bunch of single-player levels (which I'll play via Oldskool) and MonsterHunt. Where can I find an updated guide of this nature?

This one hasn't been updated since 2006, but I've done various searches and it's the only one I could find aside from https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=373&start=195 . But that guide, though last updated in 2013, is deliberately aimed at low-end systems; even the 2006 guide here has more intensive settings! One respondent to that UT99 guide said that he had a different guide which "has higher-res stuff (along with sky high requirements lol)". That sounds more along the lines of what I'm looking for, but the link which that guy (moniker Lee_Stricklin) gave, http://www.unrealtexture.com/UT/Web...ing/S3TCServerPackages/S3TCServerPackages.htm , is dead. And I'm afraid to use the guide here because comparing, for example, the OpenGL portion of the UT99 guide, there are a number of settings that the two guides don't share. For example, this guide has "UseCVA=False". But there is no "UseCVA" line in the UT99 guide. Conversely, the UT99 guide has a "SceneNodeHack=True" line that this guide lacks. And those are only two examples of a number of mutually exclusive items between the two. Makes me scared to implement either of these two guides in case they specify some setting or other that my specific hardware might not support, and thus will cause problems in the game--but I'd sure like to get the best-looking UT that I can. (Nali Weapons 3!)

Is there another high-end UT guide available that my searches just aren't turning up? Please note that I'm quite aware of the S3TC UTRP textures, and that to use the extreme-ends you have to install the high-ends first. What I need are good recommendations for high-end OpenGL and D3D10 settings. My machine isn't high-end anymore but it was when I built it in 2011, and IMHO it still smokes--and it certainly smokes anything UT could possibly ask of it. (16G RAM, ASRock z77 Extreme 4/A/ASR mobo, Intel core i7 3770K quad-core).
 
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Ironword300

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Thx for the reply--much appreciated. However, I already knew about the utglr page. The problem with that page is that if you're not already a computer-graphics expert, it doesn't tell you enough to make intelligent decisions about settings. Just take the first setting, "UseTrilinear - [True/False] : Controls the use of trilinear texture filtering." If you don't know exactly what trilinear texture filtering is, you don't know whether it should be T or F. If it filters out high resolution to give you better performance, for example, I'd want to disable it; but if it sharpens resolution, I'd want to enable it. But the page doesn't give me any info on which to base such a decision. And most of the other entries suffer from a similar lack.

The second link makes me salivate, but beyond generating wishful fantasy, isn't very helpful for my present situation, as I don't have an Nvidia card...
 

dr.flay

Dr.Flay™
Sep 19, 2011
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The guide at UT99.org is not aimed at any high or low end PCs, only to explain what everything does, so you can make that choice yourself.
The same guide is valid for UT200x

Ignore that obsolete renderer. Many people have not kept up.
Chris handed development to Smirftsch years ago, and new versions are still made at OldUnreal, where new audio renderers are also available.
Old Unreal wiki covers more of the new switches and options and is more relevant for a modern setup.
As you have noticed old guides still mention switches that were removed.

If you want the Ultramega in shiny UT99, then you will find my guide useful.
It breaks it into sections of patches , updates and must install, optional installs, and Pimp my UT.
Alternative links for the replacement textures are also there.
http://hooksutplace.freeforums.org/...and-new-settings-and-updates-how-to-f104.html
Most of section 1 can be skimmed for what you are missing, as it covers the stuff that Steam users will need.
You don't need everything in all sections, but everything is worth grabbing.
 
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Ironword300

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Mar 2, 2016
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everything is worth grabbing.
Well, I certainly grabbed a lot! :)

OK, it took a long time but I've gone through your pages line by line and have a few questions. First let me say that there's a lot of great info there, especially re the audio tweaks, because my first response (#1 below) may seem a bit critical. Therefore I want to make it clear that I'm most grateful for all your hard work, and ask that you please not get too angry with me. I do appreciate what you've done a great deal.

OK, having made that clear...

1. When you answered my post, you wrote, 'The guide at UT99.org is not aimed at any high or low end PCs, only to explain what everything does, so you can make that choice yourself.' Well, if that was the goal, the UT99 guide fell short. And certainly one high-end user felt that the author of that guide had aimed at low- and mid-range systems (see post by Lee_Stricklin Mon Apr 07, 2008 9:47 pm, https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=373&sid=ac151d15b3102ca01ae8452ef77f56e2#p3182). I think More importantly, that guide does NOT "explain what everything does, so you can make that choice yourself." The most important part of the guide is "Part Four[,] Advanced Engine and OpenGL Settings". And in that all-important section, nothing at all is explained. The settings are merely given, and as there is already good evidence that they are not high-end settings (both from a comparison to the 2006 guide posted in this thread that we're currently writing in, and from the above-mentioned Lee_Stricklin) I don't want to use them. And your recommendation to go the OldUnreal Wiki didn't prove very helpful. For example, http://www.oldunreal.com/wiki/index.php?title=OpenGL_/_D3D8_/_D3D9 simply reproduces http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/settings.html or, more likely, the latter reproduces the former. Either way it doesn't much matter; the criticism of that material which I made in my post #406 (above) still applies. Finally, your page (https://www.ut99.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3750) has no settings but only refers people to the manufacturer of their video card, or to third-party utilities. But neither of these sources are likely to have tweaks that are specifically best for UT99. Do you have any high-end guidelines for the settings in the Console > Preferences > Renderer? Guidelines with lots more information, on at least some of the settings, than http://www.oldunreal.com/wiki/index.php?title=OpenGL_/_D3D8_/_D3D9 ? That's what I was looking for, and still, after having spent hours going through your pages, I remain empty-handed. The wiki page does give you good information on some settings, but on others, such as the trilinear filtering which I described in my post #406, it does not.

I must say, however, that your treatment of audio was exactly what I was looking for. So can I find the same for video somewhere?

OK, from here on out, I have various questions about following your recommendations (no criticisms of any kind--this is all helpful and important stuff):

2. On http://hooksutplace.freeforums.org/1-what-do-i-need-to-update-first-t2167.html you say, "Disc 2 contains some broken textures and mutator." The mutator (DE) is easy enough to replace, but I'm more worried about the textures you mention. When I installed UT, I did use CD2 (GOTY) but I deliberately refrained from checking the box that asked if I wanted to install textures. Did I install the offending textures anyhow? Do I really need to copy all the CD1 textures back into the directory?

3. Also on the same subject of textures: I have two purposes for returning to the Unreal universe. One is to play with Nali Weapons 3 in normal UT. But the other is to play single-player missions in Infiltration (which, as with normal UT, is done via coop). And there's a problem with Infiltration and the S3TC textures.
The Infiltration folks don't give any details, but https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/perfect-installation-of-infiltration-2-9-2009.186405/ says not to use the S3TC textures with Inf. If you do use them, he tells you to do the following: instead of doing the normal thing and just copying the high-end/extreme-end textures into your UnrealTournament\Textures dir, create another special dir, this one called "HiResTextures". Then open System\UnrealTournament.ini. Scroll down a bit and find a list of "Paths". At the top of that list--the line MUST be prior to the entry for the path of the normal Textures folder--type a new entry, "Paths=..\HiResTextures\*.utx" (sans quotes, of course). This should force UT to look there for *.utx files, and it'll do so before it gets to the regular textures--but Infiltration will not, so everybody's happy.
Is this going to work? When I'm playing regular UT with NW3, am I really going to get the S3TC benefit, or is this Infiltration hack going to rob me completely of S3TC?

4. Ashamed to say it, but finances don't currently allow me to get even a piddly sound card so I'm using realtek onboard. On http://hooksutplace.freeforums.org/audio-on-modern-past-20-years-sound-chips-t2658.html you say, "Since Win95/98 days all new sound cards have had at least 32 or 64 dedicated hardware channels."
However, the PCwiz app you recommend on your page does not show this on my system. In fact, it doesn't show much info about my onboard sound at all. The closest thing I get is when I choose the Multimedia icon in the left pane and get a bunch of entries for such entities as "Device Audio", "Mixer Device", "Device Multimedia", and so on. The most relevant entry is presumably the first one, "Device Audio", whose description is "ASRock 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller". But there's no other info. When I right-click, I can save information (to a text file), and in that file there's more. There it has an entry about a Microsoft wavetable synth which has 32 voices and 16 channels--but that's as close as I get to being told how many channels my Realtek audio supports. So at this point I'm assuming that I can't follow your recommended audio tweaks for 28 channels because Realtek onboard audio only offers 16 channels. Is that correct?

5. Your ENB pack, mentioned at http://forums.blackcatgames.com/showthread.php?t=13642 , is no longer available. One of the links (https://files.myopera.com/dr-flay/unreal/U1-ENBSeries75e.7z) is broken, and the other one (link https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-AaAvhNMtRNYUdUV0dRYU9uMnM/view?pref=2&pli=1) is corrupt; when I download U1-ENBSeries75e.rar, it's only 5.8mb (which can't be right) and refuses to open (7zip says it's not a valid archive). 7zip does handle RAR files, so that means the fault is not on my end. Can you repost a working version?

6. Your post suggests that you can use ENB with the D3D10 driver (see very bottom of http://forums.blackcatgames.com/showthread.php?t=13642 , post from 6th Nov 2013, 02:00 AM). However, the ENB site itself (on http://enbdev.com/download.htm) seems to imply that ENB is not compatible with D3D10: "Convertors to dx10 or d11 are useless, because graphic modifications not existing for them." Am I misunderstanding something?

7. I am very intrigued by your suggestion at the bottom of https://yourunreal.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/tweak-windows/ to redirect things like the swap file and temp directories to a separate partition. I can certainly create different partitions, but on Win7 how do you tell Windows to look elsewhere for the swap file & these temp folders? Can you point me to an online guide that tells how to do this?

I'd be most grateful for your thoughts on these issues.
 

Ironword300

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Mar 2, 2016
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OK, doesn't look like Dr.Flay is tuning in to BeyondUnreal anymore. I'm reposting these queries in his home forums, separating out #1 from the rest to make 2 separate posts. See the subforum he linked to in his post above (#407).
 

Ebok

Player
Sep 9, 2016
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You can change the max resolution of the games by editing unrealtournament.ini, and changing
FullscreenViewportX and FullscreenViewportY to the resolution of your scree1x.pngn.
 

leilei

ANIME ELF'S !!
Jan 20, 2008
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....or one can just type 'setres 1920x1080' in the console while playing. It can't be any easier than that and it's common knowledge by now.