-=Tech Tips & Tweaks=-

There are two things you can do to improve framerates (while maintaining reasonable visual quality) with UT when using D3D, one involves opening the unrealtournament.ini file and the other can be done from the preferences menu in UT.

Unrealtournament.ini

Open up the .ini file and locate the D3D settings and change it as in the example below.

[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
UsePalettes=False
DetailTextures=False
UsePrecache=True
Use32BitTextures=True

Setting UsePalettes to True is pointless if you have an nVidia card as they do not support them (so just leave it set to False). Also the Detailtextures don't seem to function properly so set them to False as well.
Precaching will cause the framerate to stutter less when in game but will cause longer loading times, after a few seconds the framerate should be fluid on both settings.
I didn't notice significant slowdowns after setting Use32bitTextures to True so there you go.


Preferences Menu in UT

When UT is loaded go to the preferences menu and change the following.

I noticed that the world textures on both geforce and TNT2 are far too bright when running in 16bit colour. You can fix this by using 32bit colours which does not seem to cause any slowdowns at all.

The world textures should be fine at medium quality as you don't really see the effect at high quality and low quality is far too ugly.

Another big improvement can be obtained by lowering the skin detail, high detail does look great but it's a pretty heavy framerate killer.

Originally submitted to UTInferno. (Since edited)

For those victims of D3D chop, frame skips, and the other abnormalities caused by the framerate dropping below 30 FPS under D3D, try the following:

Hit tilde [~] to bring up the console and type preferences.

Locate the display item and open it up.

Set 'ScreenFlash' to 'False'.
Set 'Decals' to 'False'.
Set 'NoDynamicLights' to 'True'.
(All three of these can also be changed under the normal preferences menu).

Then find Rendering, D3D and set these options.

VolumetricLighting=False
HighDetailActors=False
DetailTextures=False

If your FPS rate was really bad you may also wish to set 'ShinySurfaces' to 'False'. ('Coronas' seems to have an insignificant effect on performance, but feel free to try setting it to 'False').

You can manually edit these in the UnrealTournament.ini file under the headings of [WinDrv.WindowsClient] and [D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]

'Lighting' seemed to have the most notable effect, and if, after using the above tweaks, you still suffer a slow FPS rate, then under 'Display' is an option for 'NoLighting', set it to 'True'. This will make the game incredibly ugly, however, it has enabled some machines to break the 50 FPS avgerage rate (admittedly these PC's have equipment such as a GeForce DDR, a P2-450, 128MB RAM etc).

An FPS rate as low as 30, should be good enough to prevent being killed by 'invisible' rockets :)

Remember to always ensure that you are running the latest driver for your video card. If your card manufacturer's driver doesn't seem to help you too much, go get the nVidia reference driver (the Detonator drivers) and try that.

Originally written by Daniel Hudson & submitted to PlanetUnreal. (Since edited)

You can disable the intro-flyby sequence (movie) by making one small edit to your /unrealtournament/system/unrealtournament.ini file.
In the first section of the file, replace LocalMap=CityIntro.unr with LocalMap=UT-Logo-Map.unr.