So I finally bought UT3...

[rmcollins3]

Yeah who cares? Anyway, I have a decently beefy rig and a 9500GT Nvidia card. I've updated all the drivers and downloaded the latest patch (but not titan pack yet), and it still runs like molasses flowing uphill and doesn't look any better than UT2K4.

So is this normal, or are there any other steps (besides Ronin's post) that I need to do to get this heap playable enough to review some maps?

At least I got it for under $10 I guess.

 

[i_hax]

*I'm not trying to be an ass, just going straight to the point*

To be very blunt: The 9500GT is bad. It's equivalent in performance to the top graphics cards of 2004/2005.

It's approx equivalent to an 8600GT - meaning slightly better than a 7600GT, and I bought one of those for like $95 in 2006. You can not really expect to (fluidly) run UT3 higher than 1280x1024.

 

[Fuzzle]

I was pretty impressed by how ut3 ran. I get 60 flat on my 8800GT with everything maxed out except AA which it really hates.

 

[rmcollins3]

*I'm not trying to be an ass, just going straight to the point*

To be very blunt: The 9500GT is bad. It's equivalent in performance to the top graphics cards of 2004/2005.

It's approx equivalent to an 8600GT - meaning slightly better than a 7600GT, and I bought one of those for like $95 in 2006. You can not really expect to (fluidly) run UT3 higher than 1280x1024.

No problems with being blunt...if it sucks, it sucks. I hadn't bought a vid card in about 10 yrs until I got this one a couple months ago. Still can't believe how much they've come down. That said, I can run UT2K4 with nearly all settings maxed out (except AA) and still get upwards of 70FPS in most places. I wouldn't think there would be THAT much of a difference between the two games, but maybe I'm wrong. Of course, I'm not going to go spending hundreds on a new video card just to play a 3 (4?) year old $10 game.

 

[Fuzzle]

UT3 is still up there in terms of best looking games today. Hardware has stagnated a fair bit recently, and most games are made to be able to run on a 360 or ps3.

Edit: I'd call the visual upgrade from ut2k4 to ut3 pretty significant. 2k4 didn't even use bump/normal mapping afaik.

ut3 hellbender vs 2k4 hellbender

 

[Bi()ha2arD]

decently beefy rig

9500GT Nvidia card.

No, you don't

 

[rmcollins3]

lol, okay so my rig isn't beefy at all. I guess I'm going by the recommended specs of the game itself, which I exceed afaik...?

Recommended System Requirements
•2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
•1 GBytes of System RAM
•NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card
•8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

 

[pine]

Your proc is fine, but you could use more memory and like people said, that video card is a bottleneck.

UT3 runs perfectly well compared to the newer "next gen" games out right now. Try playing Dragon Age, Borderlands, or Mass Effect 2 on that computer and see what happens.

UT3 is still up there in terms of best looking games today. Hardware has stagnated a fair bit recently, and most games are made to be able to run on a 360 or ps3.

This is an interesting point and quite true. Have there been any new games in the past couple years that honestly looked better than Crysis, which came out like forever ago? For example, I was watching Gametrailers' review of GoW3 yesterday and it's a pretty graphically impressive game (probably at the top echelon of what's coming out these days), but compared to Crysis it only seems stronger in terms of visual design, not necessarily technical sophistication.

 

[Firefly]

Processor
Model : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+
Mainboard : ALiveNF5SLI-1394

Chipset
Model : AMD Athlon 64 / Opteron HyperTransport Technology Configuration
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 840MHz (1.68GHz)
Total Memory : 2GB DDR2
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 390MHz (780MHz)

Video
Driver 182.50
Adapter : 2 (SLI) x NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT (512MB DDR2, PCIe 1.00 x16, PS 3.0, VS 3.0)

I get around 40 to 50 on most stock maps

 

[Benfica]

Play with weapons hidden, it helped when I had a 8600gt

 

[UBerserker]

Is 9800 GT good for UT3?

 

[BITE_ME]

my $399.00 laptop plays this game.

 

[GreatEmerald]

my $399.00 laptop plays this game.

My one can barely play UT:GOTY.

 

[BITE_ME]

My $1500.00 lap top will not play it. (Bought it about 6 years ago)

 

[ambershee]

Is 9800 GT good for UT3?

It's what I'm using, and I usually get 120+ fps when uncapped.

 

[UBerserker]

It's what I'm using, and I usually get 120+ fps when uncapped.

Thank you. It's all fine now.

 

[oldkawman]

No problems with being blunt...if it sucks, it sucks. I hadn't bought a vid card in about 10 yrs until I got this one a couple months ago. Still can't believe how much they've come down. That said, I can run UT2K4 with nearly all settings maxed out (except AA) and still get upwards of 70FPS in most places. I wouldn't think there would be THAT much of a difference between the two games, but maybe I'm wrong. Of course, I'm not going to go spending hundreds on a new video card just to play a 3 (4?) year old $10 game.

You can get an nvidia 9800GT or an ati 4850 for right at $99 now. Those cards are great for UT3 and perform better than many higher priced cards.. They will gone soon as new high priced cards join the lineup.

Do not even bother with any card that has 128 bit memory or less. Same deal with all those 8600, 9600, and 9500GT cards with DDR2 memory. Those are just overpriced cards with very low performance.

You could play ut2004 max out with an old 6600GT card and a single core athlon XP 2800+ cpu, but that was a long time ago.

 

[razer121]

man my dell mini 9 could play ut2k on high settings lol...that game does not exspect much now....ut3...well i remember when it came out i hada 7600gt and that ran it pretty darn good

 

[WedgeBob]

It runs a lot better in Windows 7 than it ever did in XP/Vista, mark my words.
I have this configuration, and this can run at max settings with little to no hiccups:

AMD Phenom II x4 955
8GB DDR3-1600
Gigabyte 790GX AM3
Sapphire HD 5850 1GB
128GB SSD (Corsair P128)
640GB HDD (WD Caviar Black)
8x Blu-ray Burner (LG BH08)
Win 7 Ultimate x64

With a config like that...no problem. My old config was okay, but I did get some BSoDs (mainly because of the nVidia card I had before).

Old config:

Windows Vista Ultimate x64
ASUS M3N78 Pro
Phenom I x4 9550
6GB DDR2-800
640GB HDD (no SSD in old config)
22x DVD+/-RW (LG)
eVGA 9800GTX+ (I believe it was 1GB, could've been 512MB, can't remember now)

It does run better here, imo. Definitely wouldn't accept less than max settings from this game.
I built this rig right when Windows 7 was launched, btw, so I've ran this for approx. the last almost a half a year. With my old config I was more comfortable with UT2004, since that ran without hiccups nearly as much.

 

[Bi()ha2arD]

It runs a lot better in Windows 7 than it ever did in XP/Vista

Better than Vista maybe, but not XP.

On my main machine I got 2 FPS LESS on 7 than XP. But on my laptop I got a huge performance boost as soon as I switched from Vista Home Premium x32 to Win 7 Pro x64