UT 4 Pre-Alpha running slow

[_Lynx]

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2048 MB here, and the few times the game actually booted without crashing at boot, even with all settings turned to minimum, it was completely unplayable... kinda like playing at 6 or 8 frames per second

That's definietly a matter of drivers and general optimization on Mac. Due to circumstances, I ended up using GeForce 8800GTX card on my PC. To save you the time, it's the top level GeForce from 8.5 years ago. Except for the two fully meshed maps (Lea and Outpost), I'm getting 120+ fps at 1366x786 with minimal settings and none of the config editing. On meshed maps it drops to 30, but it's more or less playable. So GTX 775 should be more than enough for the game. Right now though, development focus is not on optimisation, but on adding other important features. Also, like it or not, Windows is the lead development for the new UT, so Mac and Linux do have some issues that are not present on Win.

the game runs really slow for this bad graphics and why need the developing so long? the hype goes slowly down in 2 years nobody want ut we want it now

The game development is always quite slow. In this case the team at Epic is also much smaller than usual.

Firstly, I know the game is in dev' but it IS available, so it isn't really relevant to tell people they should "consider themselves lucky to even know about it"... We are LUCKY? Why? because we could be playing our consoles and having fun?... but instead, as previous PAYING customers of EPIC's previous titles we're sitting at a desk (our work-desk in most cases) trying to get a game to work and/or trying to learn to build maps because EPIC announced they want people to 'get involved'

The game is available but it comes with lots of yellow tape and warnings (emphasis is mine):

Unreal Tournament is still very early in development, so the build is incomplete, buggy, full of placeholder art and therefore is not in any way representative of the ultimate vision for the game. You really shouldn't play it now! We’ve made it available to Unreal Tournament forum members so they can try the game out and offer constructive feedback on these forums, or maybe even jump in and start contributing.

[nasty]

yes, i fully understand all the caveats, but:

We’ve made it available to Unreal Tournament forum members so they can try the game out and offer constructive feedback on these forums

well again yes... but if people cant actually "try it out" it's sort of self defeating... it's like offering a bunch of vegetarians a free coupon to try out the new steakhouse and give feedback

[code187]

It does seem currently to be running better on pc's than macs. Seems people with latest macs are having issues but older pc's on lower setting get away with it. It is early it will be optimized sooner or later. It's not fair yes but it's a pc game after all. UT 99 wasn't playable on a mac for a long time too almost 10 years...

[DigitalMenace]

Now Flikswich, i have the greatest respect for you. I have spent quite a bit of time watching your vids actually and btw i think your DM-ERASE is one of THE great UT maps across all the series. But that sort of edge to some of the comments that i read around here... these sort of dismissive remarks in response to criticism... well they aint that helpful tbh & i think we're possibly avoiding some forthcoming issues the game will face.


Firstly, I know the game is in dev' but it IS available, so it isn't really relevant to tell people they should "consider themselves lucky to even know about it"... We are LUCKY? Why? because we could be playing our consoles and having fun?... but instead, as previous PAYING customers of EPIC's previous titles we're sitting at a desk (our work-desk in most cases) trying to get a game to work and/or trying to learn to build maps because EPIC announced they want people to 'get involved'? We're trying to even run the game without it crashing on boot (which has been the state of play on my mac for months & across 2 engine releases). If the game actually boots, then we're trying to play basic maps with almost no detail and they run so staggeringly slow it's like playing in stop-frame animation.

I DON'T have outdated hardware. I have a latest gen 27" 3.4ghz iMac with a 2 gig Nvidia AGP (that's the pc i've designated to use for this). I've spent 4.5 grand on computers & screens just this year alone, so i don't really want to have to build myself some windows box from new egg parts just to join in something i was invited to join in... I'm already sitting here surrounded by 3 windows boxes and mac pros and raid arrays & i've got 2 more windows boxes in the bloody kitchen cos there's no room for them in my work room This is what i'm left with after chucking 6 more windows boxes & 5 printers in the skip 2 years ago & i've still got two rack servers & my industrial-grade 19" server rack in the shed


Now... I like the rest of the world don't need a desktop to:

1. browse the web.
2. do Fb & other social meeeja sites (not that i do, there's nothing sadder imo)
3. email
4. watch youtube
5. book train & flight tickets & hire cars etc
6. do iplayer etc


Your TV now covers all the iplayer/itv-player/ch4-player etc

Your mobile does the email, text, social-media and basic 'looking stuff up' while you gouch on the sofa ("dammit! wtf was that other film he was in"? "I wonder if they have that in-stock"? etc).


So like most people, when & IF i buy a desktop it's for serious stuff - work/study/college/uni - because NOBODY needs a desktop for the other social stuff nowadays.

i buy macs & ancilliary equipment for video editing and music (& some PS) work. i retain some windows boxes for server/web work cos certain dev apps arent on mac... and some windows boxes i retain for reasons of nonstalgia and cos i cant be arsed to copy all the stuff off them... years of old intranet & websites i dev'd etc etc etc.


Nowadays THAT is the state of play mate, it really is. I'm older generation... Video games to me as a teenager was space invaders, galaxians and asteroids down the pub! and i've been through that whole era when a dx266 or dx4/100 or early pentium cost a grand with 16mb ram. I've been through that whole era when EVERYONE bought a family desktop system from Mesh or Dell or Gateway etc etc with speakers & mic and printer and 14" screen for a grand on credit.... i was dev-ing intranets & running servers on leased lines when the rest of the world was on dialup (if they were online at all)

I am the guy everyone comes to - family, friends, neighbours etc - for windows builds and problems, and i've got a pretty good perspective on what the state of play is in terms of the technology people use... both my generation, and the generations below me (my kids, young family relatives and their circle of friends)


Back when it was UT99 & UT2003 & UT2004 & UT3 even, ALL kids & families had a desktop windows machine running XP (i built them lol), Vista had only just come out and everyone was still on XP... the Vista debacle rolled on into win7 which was ok, then came the win8 disaster which killed MS stone dead... and that was the end... Remember all this ran in parallel with the rise of android & social media & the whole emphasis on what a 'computer' is for changed. name me ONE person you know with a windows phone for example?....


The fact is nobody is buying trad' desktops anymore mate & MS is about as hip & groovy today with the 'yout dem' as a pair of non-branded trainers from a local Spanish street market, and that cant be argued with; i'm sorry it cant. You have to get some perspective and be able to differentiate between what YOU own and prefer and what the reality is out there in the rest of the world.


if people DO buy a computer because they need more than a tablet or phone, then nowadays they buy a laptop, which by the nature of the beast isn't a killer graphics machine.... partly that is because of space (people have less of it nowadays cos of house prices), and partly it is because of the nature of highly addictive social media which requires CONSTANT monitoring, which you CANT do if you own a desktop because you can only access your computer if you are back at home & in your bedroom or wherever your desktop is actually setup.... so mostly people buy laptops IF they need above a tablet/smart-phone.

We have to remember business models have changed with the tech... who'd have thought 30 years ago that a corporation like Kodak would go bust for example? but that's what digital & cheap storage and social media and camera-phones did.


that's how it is.... soooooo... given that, as i say; unless this game runs nice on a typical laptop or imac or goes console, OR unless in reality this game isn't really any major part of EPIC's business strategy in terms of income, then UT4 aint gonna even be a dot on the map for the game-playing public because everyone uses consoles now on the whole.


But yes... i am also absolutely aware that the old Ut's and other arena fps type games cant really be played properly except on a desktop with a mouse & keyboard ... & yes, of course I sneer at my kids & their mates and tell them "your console games don't require any real skills like people used to have to have back in the day"... it's a double-edged sword, a catch-22.




Anyways, this whole thing warrants some discussion i think... at least balanced reasonable discussion... but to dismiss the whole thing with a cursory "this is a next gen game and needs next gen hardware" isn't a reasonable analysis. If that is how it is gonna be, then this game will only ever have a tiny, hardcore/specialist user base who own hi-end, self-build windows gaming desktops.


My own take on it? I would much prefer to play on basic bsp maps. the detail to me is utterly irrelevant. Your ERASE map has about the right amount of detail i consider relevant, but beyond that all the fine detail and gloss is a waste of time... Yes i like realism in console games because they are more about one's immersion in a world, but UT has always been about the gameplay and we always turn the detail & physics etc down to minimum anyways. So for me i'd like it to be about people making & sharing bsp maps & good smooth gameplay on any decent spec' machine.


sorry to go on.

Build a Hackintosh. I did, I sold my MacMini server with the i7 and 4TB hard drives, 32GB ram. The Intel graphics just isn't meant to be a gaming GPU

I have two ASRock Z77 Extreme4's with both having i7 3770's which easily overclock to 4.6 on air. The water cooled one is running just shy of 5GHz with two GTX780 SSC ACX in SLI (my PC gamer) and the other running Yosemite with a GTX 660Ti SSC. I have a macbook Pro with an i7 and no go for anything newer than older games from several years ago. It's sad that Apple got a bunch of devs to make great games available for OSX, but unless you have the last MacPro that wasn't a cylinder, you are pretty out of luck. At least the last aluminum models you could put higher end GPU's in, though no SLI.

The funny thing is, I took a 128GB SSD out of my Macbook, booted an EFI loader, and it booted without any OS install. There's some other stuff you have to do to make it PC compatible, but hey, it work and I can even play The Witcher 2 on it at comparable framerates as the PC.

Not encouraging end running Apple's OS license, but they pretty much give people who want or need a powerful OSX machine out of luck. Even their new Mac Pro isn't selling to well as the people who use them for music and video are finding the only expansion being the Thunderbolt 2 ports. Still not enough bandwidth for high end music and movie production.

[FXTR4]

I turned my iMac 27inch into a a hckintosh, it was really easy with bootcamp. UT runs perfect when I boot my mac in Windows. I just upgraded to Windows 10 the other day too. I can max all the settings out and it's still perfect. But on Yosemite.. Bleh!

Build a Hackintosh. I did, I sold my MacMini server with the i7 and 4TB hard drives, 32GB ram. The Intel graphics just isn't meant to be a gaming GPU

I have two ASRock Z77 Extreme4's with both having i7 3770's which easily overclock to 4.6 on air. The water cooled one is running just shy of 5GHz with two GTX780 SSC ACX in SLI (my PC gamer) and the other running Yosemite with a GTX 660Ti SSC. I have a macbook Pro with an i7 and no go for anything newer than older games from several years ago. It's sad that Apple got a bunch of devs to make great games available for OSX, but unless you have the last MacPro that wasn't a cylinder, you are pretty out of luck. At least the last aluminum models you could put higher end GPU's in, though no SLI.

The funny thing is, I took a 128GB SSD out of my Macbook, booted an EFI loader, and it booted without any OS install. There's some other stuff you have to do to make it PC compatible, but hey, it work and I can even play The Witcher 2 on it at comparable framerates as the PC.

Not encouraging end running Apple's OS license, but they pretty much give people who want or need a powerful OSX machine out of luck. Even their new Mac Pro isn't selling to well as the people who use them for music and video are finding the only expansion being the Thunderbolt 2 ports. Still not enough bandwidth for high end music and movie production.

[Mad IVIax]

A bit strange that the game on low settings looks worse than UT 99, UT 2004 on medium-high. But the requirements for this is through the roof.

[nasty]

Build a Hackintosh. I did, I sold my MacMini server with the i7 and 4TB hard drives, 32GB ram. The Intel graphics just isn't meant to be a gaming GPU

yeah whatever, hackintosh for some may be a good thing in a general way outside of this issue, but really the main theme of your post is really just a bit of an anti-apple post & btw the 'mini server' gpu isnt anywhere close to the 2gb one on our imacs

but that still in no way gets around the fact that the desktop is dying out like flared trousers in the late 70's. If the game requires this so-called 'next-gen specs' to even be really playable, and that meaan building a new desktop, then the game is sunk for anything other than a very small user-base (compared to a typical console game), and that cant be argued around by side issues like "build a hackintosh" cos that still means building a desktop.

Even their new Mac Pro isn't selling to well as the people who use them for music and video are finding the only expansion being the Thunderbolt 2 ports. Still not enough bandwidth for high end music and movie production.

i think you are a bit confused about that whole topic.

[Sephiroth986]

i have imac with ssd,8 gb ram and geforce gt650m....i play well under windows, but with mac osx the game have very low fps...any method for improve the performance?

[cafe]

The truth is that nobody really tests the mac releases. It's a pre-alpha game and the mac version is definitely more broken than the windows or even the Linux version. If you want to actually play the game for the time being, you should switch to windows.

[Arnoldski]

@cafe That's to bad, I decent UT in mac would be great!

[kingsi7e]

Just run it in Windows. Retina-MBP 13" early 2015 runs it very well under Windows.

[EbbyB]

Definitely not just a graphics card issue. Very choppy on medium settings but even set to epic, graphics are not impressive. In my case, I think my NVIDIA web drivers are not being utilized and, my best guess, defaults to CPU rendering.

Log shows threads crash with "Graphics kernel error: 0xfffffffc" when game crashes.

12-core 2.66Ghz Mac Pro running OS 10.11 with a GeForce GTX 970 (NVIDID web driver 346.03.02f02) and PCIe 2x based SSD.

[alextababa]

EDIT: I was complaining about the framerate and unplayableness however after detaching the second monitor it seemed to be more or less up to speed. The sound is choppy on occasion but that could be my mackintosh audio drivers. Fine in other games though.

The only real complaint is the crashes that seem to occur inevitably 5 or so minutes into gameplay. There is no warning or cause - just an inevitable crash. Heaven benchmark doesn't crash so it's not heat. And the game isn't struggling.

the_hack - Brisbane.

[WhiteGumby]

alextababa,
I have a Mac issue logged that can be seen here https://unrealtournament.atlassian.net/browse/UT-2208

Thanks,
WhiteGumby

[marksatt-pitbull]

Definitely not just a graphics card issue. Very choppy on medium settings but even set to epic, graphics are not impressive. In my case, I think my NVIDIA web drivers are not being utilized and, my best guess, defaults to CPU rendering.

Log shows threads crash with "Graphics kernel error: 0xfffffffc" when game crashes.

12-core 2.66Ghz Mac Pro running OS 10.11 with a GeForce GTX 970 (NVIDID web driver 346.03.02f02) and PCIe 2x based SSD.

The Nvidia Maxwell GPUs aren't officially supported by Apple and we aren't testing against them too often, so there may be some bugs. If you have logs containing the full details of the "Graphics kernel error" that'd be useful so we can try working out what's gone wrong.