Easy Fix for Unreal Gold (or Other Unreal 1 Engine Games) Running Too Fast

[xifu]

This is an easy fix that does not require any third party/fan made patches or renderers:

1] Go to the Unreal Gold folder, find the System folder and open it. Open the file Unreal.ini.

2] Go to the section titled [D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]

3] Change UseTripleBuffering to False

4] Run the game and go to Options -> Preferences. Change the Video Driver to Direct3D.

This fix drops the frames per second to 25 - 30 on my computer which is fine. If the game runs faster than 30fps, certain elements of the game break:

1] In the Rrajigar Mine map, trying to cross the bridge with the fans trying to suck you in is extremely difficult (impossible for me) if the fps is very high. When the game is running at 120fps or below, the difficulty is manageable.

2] If the game is running at or below 30fps, the Nali that open secret doors for you walk around for a bit then teleport out after helping you. If the game is running faster than 30fps, the Nali never teleport out. They just continue to walk around. This one is not a game breaker, but it does add to the mysteriousness of the Nali.

3] In game versions prior to 226, if the game is running faster than 30fps, you cannot swim against the water current in levels like Nyleve's Falls.

The Unreal 1 Engine was made before computers had GPU's fast enough to run it at 30 or more fps. I also run the game at a resolution of 1024x768 since the game was made before 16:9 monitors were a thing.

My computer is a laptop with an Intel i5-4210U CPU and Intel HD 4400 graphics. If triple buffering is on while using Direct3D, the game runs at 200+ fps. If I use software rendering, the game runs at 100+ fps. If I use nGlide, the game runs at 60fps.

One last thing:

If the sky in the Dark Arena map is not a nighttime sky, change UseMultitexture to False. Source:
http://www.kentie.net/article/multipass/

[Shallex]

i used Nvidia's control panel to frame limit my game to 120 or 150 or so (and i think AMD has the same feature), i think 160 FPS is the maximum frame rate you can achieve before the game starts speeding up. the game ran perfectly great and i had no problems with it. i also played on 640x480 for not only period authenticity, but because the HUD becomes too small for my liking on higher resolutions.

i would not be able to handle 30 fps in a game like this, let alone 25. it's just not viable in my opinion, not just in terms of gameplay, but the visual strain that would come from watching such a slideshow in a fast paced, reactive game like this. that's even lower than the original Doom which ran at 35 maximum. i can handle it in Doom, but that game is simpler and is a lot more manageable and controllable on 35 fps, with simpler aiming and simpler maps. and even then, you are still occasionally reminded of how low the FPS is. 25 in Unreal would just be not viable for me.

even some DOS games from the 90s could run at 70 FPS maximum, like System Shock and Wolfenstein, though i heard that most people's performance on System Shock back in the day was pretty bad.

as you mentioned it in this thread, i do wonder what most people's performance was like in this game back in the 90s/early 00's. surely with a 3dfx voodoo card, there were some people getting 30 or more FPS right? well even if somehow nobody on day 1 of unreal's launch was capable of running the game at more than 30 fps, i'd rather larp as someone who played the game a few years later when such a thing was possible, rather than justifying playing at 30 fps because no one on day 1 was capable of such a thing, even though i'd bet there probably were some people who could.

we have the technology, playing a game like Unreal at 25 FPS in the current day is quite unreal. and i'm the kind of guy who autistically tries to play games authentically the way they would have been played back in the day, but i think 25 FPS might be going too far backwards than actually was the reality. and while i am sure many people did only run it at 25 fps back in the day, if we are just using our imaginations here to pretend we are playing it back in the 90s, why not pretend we are one of the minorities of people who had a high end graphics card and could get a good FPS on day 1. for me i think it's a balancing act, you have to balance back-in-the-day authenticity, vs modern day technology, and if even 10, or even 5 percent of people back then were able to play Unreal at over 30 fps, then i will play it at over 30 fps as well and just pretend like i was one of those people

there is no point to this rant by the way, just having some fun, and advocating not to play Unreal at 25 fps, unless you specifically want to RP as someone back in the day who had a low end computer

[xifu]

Originally posted by Shallex:

i also played on 640x480 for not only period authenticity, but because the HUD becomes too small for my liking on higher resolutions.

For me, 640x480 is too low a resolution. The HUD becomes too big. I think 800x600 would be the lowest I could go, but 1024x768 is just right for me.

Originally posted by Shallex:

i would not be able to handle 30 fps in a game like this, let alone 25. it's just not viable in my opinion, not just in terms of gameplay, but the visual strain that would come from watching such a slideshow in a fast paced, reactive game like this. that's even lower than the original Doom which ran at 35 maximum. i can handle it in Doom, but that game is simpler and is a lot more manageable and controllable on 35 fps, with simpler aiming and simpler maps. and even then, you are still occasionally reminded of how low the FPS is. 25 in Unreal would just be not viable for me.

I prefer my games run at 120fps, and the lowest I can handle is 60fps. But, with this game it's different for some reason to me. When I played it last night with my tweaks, the animation seemed smooth at 25 - 30 fps. Also, like I said in my original post, some things break in the game if it runs faster than 30 fps. Watching a Nali teleport away after opening a secret closet gives them a mysterious aura. Why didn't they just teleport away instead of being captured by the Skaarj? Nali don't teleport away if the game runs faster than 30fps.

I also made the original post for people that don't want to install unofficial patches and renderes, but find the game running too fast.

I played the game when it first came out back in 1998. I had a Pentium II running at 450MHz, with 32 or 64MB of RAM, and one Voodoo 2. It's been a very long time ago, but I think I couldn't get 30fps at 800x600. Having two Voodoo 2's in SLI was a year away for me at that time. Good times. Good times.

[IceCreamSandwich]

Running this game in old D3D mode is a sin.

[Shallex]

Originally posted by IceCreamSandwich:

Running this game in old D3D mode is a sin.

why

[(T:S:B)IceLizard]

Not really sure why you would want to use 226 or anything below though ... 227 may be unfinished but it exists for a reason.

[Shallex]

Originally posted by (T:S:B)IceLizard:

Not really sure why you would want to use 226 or anything below though ... 227 may be unfinished but it exists for a reason.

what is wrong with 226

[(T:S:B)IceLizard]

Originally posted by Shallex:

Originally posted by (T:S:B)IceLizard:

Not really sure why you would want to use 226 or anything below though ... 227 may be unfinished but it exists for a reason.

what is wrong with 226

You won't be able to connect to servers with version 226, and it's less optimized to run on more modern hardware.

You also won't be able to run any maps/mods that were made after the release of 227, because that custom content will support the new modding features of 227.

It's also no longer supported, and I don't think Epic are planning to fix any bugs with 226 any time soon, which is why they transferred that endeavour to the community.

[Shallex]

Originally posted by (T:S:B)IceLizard:

Originally posted by Shallex:

what is wrong with 226

You won't be able to connect to servers with version 226, and it's less optimized to run on more modern hardware.

You also won't be able to run any maps/mods that were made after the release of 227, because that custom content will support the new modding features of 227.

It's also no longer supported, and I don't think Epic are planning to fix any bugs with 226 any time soon, which is why they transferred that endeavour to the community.

i see, thanks

[Blake]

This game needs a new version making and we wouldn't have to fiddle around with all this nonsense