Unreal Tweaking 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 is one of the most popular games around at the moment. Great gameplay and graphics, heaps of content and highly customisable. But it doesn’t always run as smooth as you’d wish, especially if your hardware is getting a bit outdated.

Don’t despair though, even on somewhat older systems you can get the game to run smoothly, provided that you do some tweaking. This article will guide you through your journey to squeeze those extra frames out of Unreal Tournament 2004. Before we go on, always make sure you have the latest patch for the game and also the latest drivers for your video card and other hardware. This might already give a crucial increase in performance on most systems.

Be aware that most of the options discussed in this guide will have a direct influence on the quality of the graphics. Of course, putting everything on the lowest possible setting will give you the best performance, but I'm sure not everyone wants to make such a sacrifice for the sake of performance, so it’s up to you to decide how much detail you want.

Basic Tweaking : In-game Settings

Detailed Shadows versus Blob Shadows

First of all, let’s take a look at what we can do in the in-game settings. We’ll be able to do most of the basic tweaking here without having to fear we might “break” things. These settings aren't hard to do, so everyone should be able to follow along nicely.

Fire up UT2004, and open up the Settings-menu. You should be looking now at the Display settings. Let’s take a closer look at what we can do here to get more frames per second.

Resolution
This setting determines how many pixels you’ll “see” on your screen. The higher the resolution, the more CPU/GPU power you’ll need and the fewer frames per second you’ll get.

Color Depth
This option determines the colour range. You’ll get the nicest graphics if you set this to 32-bit, but if you want the highest frame rate possible set this to 16-bit. But keep in mind that 16-bit colours can look a bit bland sometimes.

Texture Detail
Here you determine the amount of detail in the textures. The higher you set this, the more (video) memory you need and the slower the frame rate you’ll get.

Character Detail : Here you determine the amount of detail in the character skins. The higher you set this, the more (video) memory you need and the slower the frame rate you’ll get.

World Detail
This option determines how many objects will be shown in the world. The higher you set this, the more detailed the surroundings will be, but again you’ll sacrifice frame rate speed.

Physics Detail
This option determines what kind of physics will be simulated. On the lowest setting you will only get the basic ragdoll physics, higher settings include extra effects (such as ripples when walking through water). If you want the highest possible frame rate, set this to the lowest setting.

Dynamic Mesh LOD
This option determines the amount of detail on objects far away. Because most of the time you won’t notice any details on these objects, you can set this to the lowest setting to gain more frames per second.

Decal Stay
Determines how long decals (see below) remain on surfaces. This option can be crucial for your frame rate, especially when there are lots of players shooting at each other in your field of view. The longer decals stay in view, the more detail UT2004 will have to render, thus the slower the frame rate you’ll get.

Character Shadows
This option determines how detailed the player shadows are. Again, the higher you set this, the less frames per second you’ll get.

Decals
Decals are the scorch marks or bullet holes you’ll see if you shoot something. Untick this option to get a higher frame rate.

Dynamic Lighting
This option determines the quality of the lighting in a map. Untick this to get a higher frame rate at the cost of some graphics quality.

Detail Textures
This option determines how nice textures look by adding extra details to them. This may reduce your frame rate quite a bit, so disable it to get the best performance.

Coronas
If this option is enabled, some light sources might cast a glare when you look in their direction. Disabling this option can improve performance.

Trilinear Filtering
This makes textures and colours look much smoother. Untick this to get a higher frame rate, especially if you have an older graphics card (GeForce2 and older).

Projectors
Examples of a projector are shadows cast by characters or objects. Unticking this gives you a higher frame rate (be aware, you won’t see any shadows or other decals anymore though).

Foliage
This option determines if details like grass are shown or not. Disable this to get the best possible performance.

Weather Effects
Disabling this option will remove all weather effects (such as rain, snow, etc.). This can improve performance quite a bit, especially on older systems.

Fog Distance
This option determines how far you can see until your view is blocked by “fog”. The further you can see, the slower the frame rate you’ll get.

Foliage ON versus Foliage OFF

Next, go to the Audio tab. There are some options here that can help improve the performance of Unreal Tournament 2004 on most systems. Let’s take a look at them.

Audio Mode
This option determines the quality of the audio. To get the best performance, set this to “3D Audio”, even if you have a high-tech card (such as the Soundblaster Audigy cards).

Low Sound Detail
If you are really desperate, you can try enabling this. The quality of the in-game audio will degrade, but you might be able to get an improvement in frame rate on some older systems or soundcards. But for most systems, it is recommended to disable this option.

Finally, disable every Text To Speech option to get the best performance. You might consider enabling the Voice Chat option, because this doesn’t affect performance (or not much anyway) and might be handy in matches.

Decals ON versus Decals OFF

Now go to the Input tab. Here we’ll find some options to improve performance even more.

Reduce Mouse Lag
This option does exactly what it says, it reduces the on-screen mouse lag you might experience. On most systems though this option is a huge performance hog and disabling it will improve your frame rate quite a bit.

TouchSense Force Feedback
The options in this category can be fun when your mouse supports force feedback, but can effect performance a bit. Disable these if you don’t have a Force Feedback enabled mouse or if you want the best performance.

Advanced Tweaking : Ini Settings

Fog helps improve framerates

You should be able to see a nice improvement in performance by now. But why stop here? We can do even more performance tweaking by editing the “heart” of Unreal Tournament 2004 : the .ini files. Ini files are basically plain textfiles where UT2004’s settings are stored. Every option that can be changed in-game, can also be changed in these files. (You might notice that some of these settings we discussed earlier, reappear here too)

There are two files that are important : UT2004.ini (which contains most graphical and engine-related settings) and User.ini (which contains all key binds and control settings). Both these files can be found in the System directory, which can be found in the main directory of UT2004.
We’ll take a closer look at both of these files to see what “hidden” settings we can alter to improve overall performance.

Don’t worry about “breaking” your game. If it should happen that UT2004 won’t start anymore after altering the .ini files, you can simply delete them. If UT2004 can’t find these files, it will automatically rebuild them with the standard settings when you fire up the game.

*splash*splash*

Let’s get started! Browse to the System directory (C:\...\UT2004\System) and open up the UT2004.ini file in the text editor of your choice (Notepad will do just fine).

After opening UT2004.ini, scroll down until you come across this line : [D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]. Here we can do some major tweaking which can’t be done in-game.

HighDetailActors=#
Set this to False for a slight performance gain, but a slight loss in Actor (character) detail.

SuperHighDetailActors=#
When set to True, this allows the highest quality of detail on the Actors in-game. Set this to False if you need the performance boost.

UsePrecaching=#
If you have 64MB or more of RAM on your video card, put this to True to lower the chance of jittering (textures get preloaded into the video memory).

UseTripleBuffering=#
If you have 32MB or more RAM on your video card, put this to True to get a performance boost. This can also help reducing "screen tearing".

ReduceMouseLag=#
Standard = True. Change this to False to get a big boost.

LevelOfAnisotropy=#
Standard = 1. Change to 0 to get a performance boost.

UseTrilinear=#
Change to 0 to get a small boost.

Use16bit=#
Change this to True to get a performance boost. Handy on older video cards!

Use16BitTextures=#
Change this to True to get a performance boost. Handy on older video cards!

UseHardwareTL=#
If you have a recent video card, set this to True for the best performance.

UseHardwareVS=#
Same as above. If you have a recent video card, set this to True for the best performance.

UseCubemaps=#
Change this to False to get a small boost.

DesiredRefreshRate=#
Change to desired refresh rate (preferably the same as on your desktop). Doesn't really give a boost in performance, but can be helpful to lower the strain on your eyes.

OverrideDesktopRefreshRate=#
Use in combination with the option above to force UT2004 to use that refresh rate. As a side-effect UT2004 also seems to shut down a lot faster.

UseCompressedLightmaps=#
Standard = True. Leave this on True for best performance.

DecompressTextures=#
Standard = False. Leave this on False for best performance.

UseVSync=#
Change to False for best performance (screen tearing could appear, but use TripleBuffering to lower the chance that this will happen).

AvoidHitches=#
Setting this to True might help reduce the occurrence of substantial hitches (pauses, stuttering) in UT2004, but it can reduce your average frame rate, so leave this option at default (False) and first try to minimise the loading/freezing issues with the other tweaks mentioned in this guide.

LowQualityTerrain=#
Standard value for this option is False. Setting it to true might give you a nice performance boost at the cost of some terrain detail.

OpenGL can't be chosen in-game as the rendering device

You may have noticed that you can’t choose OpenGL as the rendering device in the in-game options. OpenGL is currently unsupported by Epic, so use it at your own risk. But don’t worry, except for some occasional crashes and less eye candy, using OpenGL won’t cause a lot of problems.

On some machines, OpenGL will give a better performance, while on others DirectX will give the best performance. Just try it out to see what's best for you.

To change the renderer to OpenGL, you’ll have to scroll up to the top, until you see these lines :

[Engine.Engine]
RenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=Engine.NullRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

Change them to the lines below to enable the OpenGL renderer :

[Engine.Engine]
;RenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=Engine.NullRenderDevice
RenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

When you’re finished, UT2004 will now use OpenGL as the main rendering device, so let’s take a look at what we can do here to improve performance. Scroll down until you come across this line :

[OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice].
Most settings are the same as in the Direct3D section, so we’ll only take a look at what’s different :

VARSize=#
Standard = 32. Raise to 64 or more to get a small boost.

UseVBO=#
Standard = False. Leave it on False for the best performance.

There’s only one thing left to do in the UT2004.ini file now. Scroll down until you come across this line : [UnrealGame.UnrealMPGameInfo].

bPreloadAllSkins=#
If you have 512MB or more RAM (1GB or more by preference), change this to True to lower the chance of jittering when players enter the server.

That’s it for the UT2004.ini file. Close it and look for our next “victim”, User.ini. There’s only one option in here that is useful to us. Scroll down until you see this line:

[Engine.Vehicle].
In this section, we can find the following option that may improve performance.

bVehicleShadows=#
Standard = True. Set this option to False if you want to turn off shadows cast by vehicles, gaining a slight performance improvement on maps with vehicles (Onslaught and Assault maps for example).

You’ve done it! You successfully tweaked your Unreal Tournament 2004 installation for optimal performance. Remember to experiment a bit with different settings to see what’s best for your system.

Have fun playing!