Performance questions

[Kinga]

:?

Thivery runs much slower on one of my computers than any of the UT levels. Can anyone point me to the reason why? It seems Theivery runs slower (in terms of fps) even when the map is simply two rooms and a door created in UnrealED. Is it the whole light/visibility calculation thing?

Also, what sort of ping should I expect between two PCs connected by a 2 metre LAN cable running Thievery? One PC is an AMD K6-233 and the other is a Duron 1.1ghz. I get a ping around 200 in the Find LAN games window...does that seem too high? It does to me.

The AMD is fine playing UT with Medium Textures at 800x600 but struggles with Theivery with low textures at 512x(whatever that other number is).

Can anyone explain why please?

[Machine]

Whoa, 200 ping IS way to high your right, even on a 10 base network.

My guess is that the older slower PC is only just up to spec to run Thievery, It's not like regular UT, much more has been bolted on top of UT to make this great modification, and as a consequence it will run slower than it used to.

My only suggestion would be to upgrade, as there is very little you can do otherwise, you can try going into the ThAux.ini (I think, or one of the ini's) and altering the settingings under the display mode you are using, otherwise it's just a case of upgrade if you can :erg:

Sorry I couldn't be of more help. :? :D

Edit.. Over my network which is a 100 base, I get a ping of 8-10 with 3 connected. (obviously the server has zero ping) but the clients have 8-10, jumping to 50 maximum during any especially explosive scenes of unspeakable violence! :twisted:

[Kinga]

:)

I found the spyware program DSSAGENT.EXE running in the background on that computer and killed it. My fps imediately jumped even with textures set back to medium and screen res set to 640x480 and the ping dropped (but still around 115 which is too high).

Apparently that spyware can hammer servers pretty badly AND suck huge CPU resource so that may have been all that was the problem. It may be that Thievery's extra resource needs were the straw that broke the camel's back with dssagent running (compared to UT's lesser requirements).

So I am a happy camper. Thanks for your reply which inspired me to investigate further.

[immortius]

If you have a Geforce based card and are running Thievery in Direct3D mode, I suggest turning on 32bit Z-buffer. This seems to increase performance greatly in normal UT, and although the effect is less in Thievery it is still there. This can be done by typing in preferences in the console and looking under Rendering -> Direct3D I think.