UT2003 Performance problems

Given my system, I thought I could run UT2003 in pretty much maxed details in 1024 * 768 resolution. The game runs pretty poorly and I must say I'm a little disappointed at its performance. Even when I turn down the texture details and world details, there's still not much of a performance gain. Also, even when I turn the texture details to the max, I can't really tell that much of a difference in the image quality... the grass in the game gets pretty blurry up close, and some metallic surfaces have some pretty bad textures when compared to other things in the game. But, who knows, maybe the grass isn't supposed to be incredibly detailed up close (perhaps those of you with a Radeon 9700 can tell me what your graphics are like) but I must say that the skulls on the floor in the Inferno level look amazing! Oh well... guess I was just expecting Halo-calibur graphics (MAN-- I really, REALLY wish there were fancy bump-mapping effects in UT2003!)
Another thing I'd like to mention: I get pretty good benchmarking results from running the benchmarker that came with the game; however, the game tends to slow down like its running in slow-motion sometimes while playing it. I know that my current graphics card isn't exactly top of the line, but is the source of this slow-down coming directly from my card, or is my processor perhaps a bottleneck (I find that unfathomable though).
Anyways, those of you with similiar systems: I'd like to know how well UT2003 plays for you. And those with Radeon 9700's: Does putting texture details at the max significantly improve image quality compared to normal setting textures?

i have come to the conclutions dude that its the demo on my 1.4ghz system it runs slow as crap and on my game rig it dont run bc it lockes up every 5 min or less.Every one is say that they have the same problem (slow downs screwed up FPS etc.....). I really hope that the full version is WAY better than this bc i will not be buying this game if it indeed is like this.

That is why it is called a demo:) Although my bro with his 2.6G and G4 ti4200 didn't experiece any of that though:p

no *hit thats like 3 times faster than both hour systems.

In response to Dimitris and Ace, this IS the full retail version of the game (NOT the demo) I'm using. I just got it today in the mail from EB. The textures look a little better than in the demo, but I was expecting them to be mind-boggling, especially since the game almost took up 3 gig's of HD space with all those textures. Thats why I'd like to know if people with a Radeon 9700 are getting MUCH better textures when they crank up the settings.
Hmm...maybe its time for me to get a Radeon 9700....or just wait impatiently until I go insane for the NV30 to hurry up and be released.

The demo ran great on my machine. But the full version preforms worse, bi slowdowns at spots.

XP 1700+
ASUS A7M266
Gainward Geforce 3
256 DDR

When it's not crashing with nvid_4 errors, it runs pretty damn poorly on my system too. 12 - 24 fps on average at 1024 x 768 full details, 2 fps at times when there are a lot of things going on. I'm not too impressed with the move to d3d from opengl either. OpenGl looks way better.

OrcWarrior, those errors youre getting is from not cleaning out all the old drivers when changing drivers... but you already knew that didnt ye? :D

Lol .. actually I didn't change my drivers until I couldn't play the game without it crashing. Not much difference after new drivers :p

UT2003 is a peice of crap.


Play Soldier of Fortune 2 instead.

I saw this on another site and tried it, it seems ut2k3 doesn't have texture precaching enabled by default, go into the ut2003.ini file and set it to true, and enable triple buffering, also set minimum desired frame rate to 60 fps. I got about a doubling in my min framerates, Plunge used to run at 12 fps now it's about 25. Inferno and Tokara Forest are way faster now. I didn't notice any drop in detail in setting min desired framerate to 60 fps and it still hits 2 fps at times so I don't think it had any effect anyway. Also running at 640x480x32 speeded it up, although I'm amazed at how much my Geforce 3 is hurting from this game, forced to run at 640x480 with highest detail or 800x600x32 with high detail. 1024x768x32 is a no go, doesn't matter what settings I use. Using a T-bird 1.33 GHz, 512 MB PC2700, Asus A7V333. The game is complete CPU and vid card hog, the min spec on the box is a joke, it'll run it at 3-5 fps.

As for the textures, the demo version was already very good, and the retail version makes it sharper and less blurry. It is noticeable. Some maps have better textures than others: Chrome, Curse 3, Flux2, Magma, Insiduous and Phobos 2 have a higher level of texture detail
than the demo Antalus and Asbestos maps. Face 3 has superb texture detail and Tokara Forest as well with some great lighting effects that look cool through the mist. That's looking at with no aniso or FSAA at 800x600x32. I can only imagine how good it would look at 1024x768x32 with 4x aniso and 2xfSAA and mipmap and LOD bias set to very sharp settings. Too bad I would get less than 5 fps at those settings.