Frame rates in UT

[Jonathan Beilin]

I have a P2-400, Diamond MX300 using 2040 ref drivers, Matrox G400MAX using PD 5.30, and 128 MB RAM. I used G400 Tweak to turn on Sub Pixel Accuracy, 32-bit Z-Buffer, and force Bus Mastering, Write Combining, and AGP2x. Vsync is off.
Problem: When I tweak UT for max image quality (everything true except Gamma Correction, 3DFX support, and Mipmapping) and run it at 640x480, I get framerates averaging 46 FPS (Turbine, no bots, just running around and firing stuff like a maniac). That seems a bit low, but I would like to see how that compares with other's benchmarks.

Also, what are paletted textures?
Thanks.

[This message has been edited by Jonathan Beilin (edited 05 November 1999).]

[seven]

ok i,ll try to put it this way
i don,t play ut in anything less than 1024*768 at 32 and i get over 46 constantly
i have a 466 c o/c to 525 128 megs and a g 400 max ok
does this help?
cya seven


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hell yeah i love this g 400 max

[Evil Cubed]

Hi.
I think that the most major factor to the frame rate is the number of Bots there are participating in the massacre with respect to the resolution and color depth. I tried running UT with 16 Bots at 1024*768@32bit and I was getting framerates of 15FPS when the game got busy. (16 bit wasn't much better)

I have a Cel 466@525
128MB RAM
G400Max
7200RPM HD
BE6

I was a little disappointed by the framerate scores of the G400Max as I was trying to compare it to a friend of mine that has a V3 3000 card (AGP 16MB), and with a similar computer, that is getting 46Fps with 16 bots, 1024*768@16Bit.




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"... Some people are alive ONLY because it is illegal to kill them"
--Some really bitter guy

[Scytale]

Yep, that's what I see too. Avg framerate may be up to 80, but drop to below 20 when in a crowded fight, even at 800x16.

[absalom]

Running cranked details and a 32-bit desktop is a huge performance hit. Unreal obviously starts fetching across the agp bus for those large textures. At higher resolutions, the performance issues become more a fill-rate problem.

3dfx has always been using palletized texturing in it's glide API. And now, many of todays cards will probably support it too (g400 and geforce). Palletized texturing is sort of like texture compression. In crude math terms, using it cuts the memory requirements of textures in half by storing only the colors really used in color lookup tables, and then discarding all the excess data. From a programmers perspective, it's really only effective with 8-bit art. If you start using it on 16 or 32-bit art, the compression is almost negligent.

In UT we have 8-bit art so palletized texturing is a GOOD thing It's also one of the reasons 3dfx cards perform so well... it improves texturing fetching/swapping speed. Now, using an actualy texture compression algorithm (like s3tc/dxtc or fxt1) is a much much more complicated issue... palettized texturing is almost a "free" feature to exploit since it requires very little effort to add and maintain in a game engine's code. Hope this makes sense...

As far as bots are concerned, on my dual ppro @ 233 I run a dedicated server. Even with 4 bots the cpu usage on one of my cpu's can get up near 10% at times ('tis a shame not even the UT dedicated server is multithreaded). I don't think the network traffic can account for even 1% of that, so the bot code in unreal is a little taxing. But you shouldn't be seeing huge framerate drops due to this.

[This message has been edited by absalom (edited 05 November 1999).]

[Scytale]

Well, I don't think it's the bot code either, because I see the same (extreme) performance degradation online or with a recorded session. When many characters (either human players or bots) come into play there's this rediculous performance hit.

And note that I'm talking about a P3@558, 128MB, G400MAX, 800x600x16, medium texture quality (world/players), detailed textures disabled, 32 bit textures disabled, palettized enabled, medium audio quality, and 3D sound disabled. Also VSync is disabled, 16Z, and double buffering. These are 'quick and dirty' settings!

I cannot believe that those ugly cartoon characters could be demanding that much bandwidth/resources!