G200 and Unreal

[jcwagers]

Hey everybody! It's me again! *LOL* I have a problem with Unreal. I have an 8 meg Matrox Millennium G200. When I run Unreal.....it's VERY slow....the frames kinda jerk around......and I when I start it in safe mode.....it won't go full screen.....I can't even MAKE it go full screen. When I do get it going....and go to advanced options.......I get kicked out of the game.....EVERYTIME! It
gives me an error and closes the program. Any ideas why? I've reinstalled windows.....and reinstalled the drivers for the video card......and reinstalled Unreal too. I used to be able to play it......but I can't remember what my resolutions was......the game runs fine in safe mode in the window.....but when I make it full screen......it's AWFUL! Also......I can't seem to patch it. I've tried several patches and when I go to put them in and it asks for the Unreal CD...it tells me that the version that I have is not the version that was
expected....and it won't install the patch. Anybody got any suggestions? The last time I did anything with it......I was going to benchmark it.....(my card is NOT great...I got 13 frames per second) but forgot to shut the background stuff off when I started the game. It was starting the Castle scene and I hit CNTL-ALT-DEL to bring up a window to close the game. Instead of bringing up the window....it rebooted the computer.....and it has never run the same since.
I have tried just about everything that I know to try.....with no success so far.
Any ideas, hints, or suggestions would REALLY be appreciated! I have a V770
non-Ultra.....that I'm going to put in my system(K6-300....soon to be a 450 :-)
running on a FIC 503+ M/B) but I'd like to get this card running better before I
do......it's a challenge. Thanks for taking the time to read and respond!

jcwagers

[Voyd]

i am a heavy Unreal player and i have tweaked the G200 for maxiumum performance over visual quality, since i only play Online. here is what i reccomend you do if you want Unreal to run acceptably on your 300.

first and foremost , you NEED Unreal patch 2.25F. get it from epic's site. epic.unreal.com.

when you have 2.25F installed go into Safe mode and go into the advanced options and make sure in the Drivers section you have SOFTWARE rendering selected. (bear with me this is an essential step). exit safe mode.

Now, change your desktop to 16-bit color, running it in 32-bit color is a waste of time, you hardly see any diffrence at all and it EATS fps like crazy in games. reboot if neccesary.

from the sounds of things you might be using *gasp* OpenGL to play. i know for a fact that opengl doesnt go full screen with the 4.33 drivers (it does with 5.13 tho, but it still sucks). what you NEED to do is use Direct3D as your rendering device. to do this you need to go into advanced options and in the Drivers section change it to Direct3D. <<*NOTE* keep this in mind but dont do it right away, keep it till the end of eveything as Direct3D and going into advanced option crashes your computer.>>

now for tweaking performance. go into the Video/sound section and pick a resolution of 640x480. turn the texture detail to LOW and the sound quality to LOW.

now go into advanced options and in the Rendering section find the entry for Direct3D and turn everything except UsePalettes to False.

Now go back to the Drivers section and pick Direct3D as your rendering device and exit. you should now be in Direct3D rendering and it should run ALOT faster. the G200 is not a fast card so dont expect much. i am on a 450a, 128mb running a Millenium G200 and with all the tweaks i gave you i only achieve 34 fps on the Flyby, and about 45fps in deathmatch maps

but nevertheless you WILL see a MAJOR improvement in frame rate and the game will be very playable. post back with any other questions you may have. i went thru it ALL with Unreal


[This message has been edited by Voyd (edited 07-14-99).]

[motub]

hi, voyd, nice to meet you. Hi again jcwagers! You might want to drop in on the "Good news for a change" thread at the top of the main gaming page...we're wrestling with Unreal over there too...

------------------
Holly

Who can now put her V2 in her roomie's new (in a way) K6-266 (be quiet, she doesn't play games! well, not like Half-Life, anyway, she's a bleem! kinda roomie) because now her [Soyo 5EMA, K6-2 333 not o/c, 256MB PC100 , Millennium G200 8MB SGRAM, Win98] works plenty good enough 'til she's saved the moolah for the G400/Athlon rig [drool, pant, drool... ]





[This message has been edited by motub (edited 07-14-99).]