Visuals

Start by going into the Preferences menu (click on Options, then Preferences) & selecting the Video tab.

Video driver. Select your graphics renderer using this option. You’ll only have to use this if you want to change renderer, as Unreal Tournament should automatically detect the best renderer for you when you first load it.

Resolution. Selecting a lower setting will improve performance & maintain a stable (hopefully higher) frame rate. Although, higher resolutions will look better, they will run slower.

Color Depth. Set this to 16 bit if you’ve got a 3dfx card (not that you’ll have a choice). If you own an nVidia or other card you may be able to select 32 bit. This should be selected for best visual quality, although performance will be much lower as a result. Software rendering will actually run faster in 32 bit colour than in 16 bit colour. The opposite is true in hardware rendering though. NOTE - Voodoo 4/5 users can select 32bit colour.

World Texture Detail, Set it to High if you can, although a lower setting is advised if you need the performance, it will give a more blurrier look to the game though. Setting Texture Detail to High will improve visuals more than setting Skin detail to High.

SkinDetail. I’d recommend setting this to Medium, the difference between High & Medium is fairly small, added to the fact this will free up video memory & you generally won’t be too close to player models this gives quite a decent performance improvement.

Brightness. Use this slider bar to adjust the brightness level in the game. Sliding it to the right may well improve visibility (quite useful in multiplayer), although it can the game look washed out if you set it too high & vice versa. You may need to test different settings to see which results in the optimum level of brightness for this setting.

GUI Mouse Speed. Use this slider bar to adjust the mouse responsiveness in the GUI (Graphical User Interface) although will make more accurate movement awkward due to the extra responsiveness. I’d recommend leaving this set to the default unless you find your mouse to be very slow to react to input in the menu. NOTE – This setting has no effect on mouse responsiveness in the game.

Font Size. You can use this setting to increase/reduce the font size in the GUI. A useful setting as text appears smaller as you increase resolution. Set it to Normal or Double as you require.

GUI Skin. Use this setting to select your GUI skin from a short list of presets. Change this setting as you see fit.

Min Desired Framerate. Set this to equal to whatever you feel is the minimum for a playable game. 30 would be the ideal minimum frame rate for most users. This specifies the frame rate threshold below which Unreal Tournament will start dropping detail - reducing model detail and not drawing optional effects. If this is set higher than your normal frame rate, then you will never see reduced graphics almost always, but get the best possible performance. The ideal setting for this is about 10 frames below your average frame rate.

When benchmarking it would be best to set this to 0 to give a more accurate indication of real performance (see later on in the guide for how to benchmark Unreal Tournament).

Show Decals. Untick this setting to improve performance, particularly with nVidia cards. Decals are the blood splatters or explosion marks that get left in terrain during a game. Of course if you have a 3dfx based card you should be able to tick this setting for improved visuals with little performance degradation.

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