UT/DirectX/Video Card problems?
 

I recently installed Unreal 2003 and have been having a lot of problems with it. At some points it will run perfectly smooth with no problems, but at several random points it will slow down and is seemingly in slow motion. When this occurs, its not even necessarily in a graphics intensive area, i.e there could be 10 guys in a room firing everywhere and there is no slowdown, but when turning around a corner it just starts to slow.

I downloaded the newest Nvidia and DirectX 9 drivers, I've tried turning down the resolution, upping the refresh rate, turning off a lot of the acceleration, etc, to no avail. This is the only game its done it with, and the laptop should be more than capable of supporting it. Here are my specs:

Dell 5150
P4 3.06ghz
Gig of ram
Nvidia GeForce 5200 64mb
UXGA display, and Win XP Pro

Any ideas as to why this is happening and what I can do to fix it? I've fiddled with everything I can think of but don't consider myself very compute literate so I'm sure there's something I've overlooked. Thanks.

Is it hitting the hard drive when these problems occur?

If this is over the internet it may not be your problem. On UT the server controls the speed of the connection and also limits the speed of connection. What also might a problem is DL of a map or skin. If there is no redirect on this on the server then the map and skin the person connected don't have will come from the server.

But you also might have some hog sucking your bandwidth on you DLS or Cable line. Plus I do know that the new driver of Nvidia are crap and you should not use them..

Here is a little trick to check your connection go to a command prompt and ping the ip of the server and see if you get packet loss......

Not that I can hear, though it may be. Any possible solutions if it is?

This does it even when I am in single player mode. So much for Nvidia's unified drivers? Any other suggestions?

A big gun!!!

LOL

If I rember in the unrealtournament.ini file in the ut system folder. there is a setting "CacheSizeMegs=" set this to like 128 and see what happens

Tried setting it to 128 and then 256, no improvement.

Ugh, I've about given up. I can't for the life of me figure out what the problem is. UT is still doing the slow-mo deal, and other games are still freezing up on me repeatedly.

I uninstalled DirectX 9 and went back to 8.1, no improvement. I checked my IRQ's just for the heck of it. The video card and a bunch of other things were all using IRQ 11 (not uncommon for laptops I assume), so just for the heck of it I disabled some of the other stuff, no improvement.

Does anybody have any other suggestions? I'm getting really frustrated and cant find anything like this online :(

The only thing I can think of is the fact that your videocard is downright horrid. I can't say it any other way, but it is. The old GeForce 2 Ultras are more powerful than the GeForce FX 5200.

Even with that card, UT2k3 should run at least sorta decent. If it doesn't fix, you might as well buy a new videocard anyway -- it's bottlenecking your lovely P4 very badly. :(

-Lasereth

You're absolutely right, I hate this f'ing nvidia card, and I would have gone with the radeon 9000 if I had the chance. Anyone know where I can order a 64mb ati 9000 card to fit a 5150 inspiron laptop?

I had no idea you were using a laptop! The Radeon 9000 would be an upgrade if you got it though. My friends both had to buy $3,500 1.8 GHz P4 laptops from Dell for their college, and neither one supported upgradeable video. What a waste. :(

-Lasereth

Well, I found out I can get a Radeon 9000 card for the 5150 for $125 through Dell (I wont even BEGIN to talk about the runaround I went through to find this out). This way, I'll have the better card, and I may have the ability to change the chip on the card in the future to 128 bit.