Unreal Tourny. Speed vs. Windows

[KarrottoP]

Ok, after finnally getting my gpu set up correctly and Installing unreal I decided to give it a test run with the most taxing map that I have. DM-DUSKTILLDAWN, its an extremely detailed map that depicts the bar in, you guessed it, From Dusk Till Dawn. It is so detailed that of all my friends I am the only one who can run it smoothly...and I do, verry smooth indeed, but when I ran it on Linux I didn't like my results. it was extremely choppy. Does anyone have any ideas why this is? and how I can get it running as fast as its windows counterpart? FYI I am using a NVIDIA Geforec 2 ti (and yes I finally installed and configured the drivers correctly, whipee)

[bwkaz]

If you turn on the UT timedemo stats, you'll get a display on your screen of FPS, stuff like min, max, avg over last minute, stuff like that.

Turn it on in both Linux and Windows, and compare the numbers; that's usually a better comparison than "it feels choppy" -- while choppy is definitely bad, hard numbers are better.

Where can I get this map? I'd like to see how well UT works with it on a GF4 Ti4200, and with the preemptible kernel patch (which reduces the latency of kernel-scheduled threads, i.e. all processes -- with normal 2.4 kernels, when one process calls the kernel for any reason, no other processes can run until that kernel call returns; with the preempt-kernel patch, that same kernel call can be preempted if its timeslice runs out or an interrupt happens or whatever).

[KarrottoP]

I am not sure where I picked it up, if you can't find it (I think maybe fileplanet) shoot me over an email karrottop@fuse.net and I will email it to you, it is a cool map....and I know that its frame rate is slower, it is verry slow infact, I didn't need any other tools to tell me that something was wrong.

[sasKuatch]

thanks for the info on the preemptive kernel patch, i'll have to look into that

[bwkaz]

sasKuatch -- you can get the patch for most 2.4 and early 2.5 kernels at ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/preempt-kernel

It's included in like 2.5.4-pre6 or so, so if you're running 2.5 for whatever reason, it might already be there.

iKarrottoP -- thanks, I'll look there (and probably on Google too). Huge emails wouldn't be a problem here, but I don't want to bother you if I don't have to ;)

<edit> Google found it pretty quick. 5.5MB compressed? That is pretty huge... this ought to be fun. :D </edit>

It might be an AGP speed thing... If you're using a Via chipset, the nVidia drivers turn off AGP 4x because of observed problems. You can override it if you compile your own nVidia driver from their .tar.gz. It might also be SBA and/or AGP Fast Writes; these are changeable (on/off) when you insert the NVdriver module. To see the current state of all 3 of these, check the contents of /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status (cat it in a terminal would be easiest). This is the location for the current drivers (1.0-2960). Older versions had the same info under /proc/nv somewhere, but they moved it to make a little more sense.

[bwkaz]

Well, in Linux, GF4 Ti4200, with timedemoing on, AGP 4x, SBA, and FW enabled, I get this after a me-and-5-bot 30-kill deathmatch:

28097 frames rendered in 511.79 seconds. Min 8.76 Max 239.01 Avg 54.89 fps.

The max frames is pretty good, but that was when I was in the small hallways off to the sides of the main room; not much detail there. The average is pretty good too. In the bar and outside, though, was where I got the 8.76fps... that was the first time I've seen lag in quite a while on this card. Impressive. ;) I haven't tried it in Windows yet, I'll have to do that sometime fairly soon to see if it'll work any differently. It'll be 98SE, so, yeah.

[sasKuatch]

i read somewhere to use OpenGL instead of SDLGL. i just did that, and i must say, the FPS went from 20~30 to 50~80. right now it looks CRAPPY, but I havent' had time to tweak it yet.

do this by changing under the [Engine.Engine] or whatever from

GameRenderDevice=SDLGLDrv.SDLGLRenderDevice

to

GameRenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

and any other lines right under it that mention SDLGL, just change to OpenGL

[KarrottoP]

Ok, I have Unreal running realativley smooth now, with a few minor exceptions that I can tweak later, but I do have one small other problem with Unreal's graphics. In the drop down menu's that uneal has I can not specify wether I want to use 16 bit or 32 bit..... Edgewise its lookin pretty good and playing at a good speed. Thanks

[bwkaz]

Bit depth is controlled by your X server. In /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, down in the Screen section, there's a DefaultDepth line. Change it to whatever you want the color depth to be ("16" == 16-bit, "24" == 32-bit on nVidia cards, "32" seems to bomb out, for me anyway). Restart X, and then load up UT in your new color depth.