Friday, November 26, 1999

D3D Problems with Retail UT -- 10:40 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Several people around the 'Net have been complaining about substantially worse performance in the full version of Unreal Tournament than they had with the demo. Epic's Mark Rein addressed this issue on the GT Interactive forums. Since it will be a slow news day, I'll post the whole thing:

There were NO differences in the D3D code between 348 and 400. What happened unfortunately is that the Safedisc copy protection, that GT added to the master disk after we gave it to them, caused our very good D3D configuration detector to time out, therefore assuming that D3D wasn't present and not setting the various quality and resolution settings to match the performance of users' PCs. This was noted in an insert GT put in the UT box. This has since been fixed in masters now in production but unfortauntely the first batch of UT's had this problem. The Safedisc process also introduced some sort of application error on exiting UT on Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems. I don't know if we've found the cure for that one yet but it's just an error message you have to cancel and doesn't cause any problems. Neither of these problems happened in the demo of course because they're not problems in our code.

Once again, copy protection only serves to screw legitimate customers. At any rate, the newer copies of UT are fixed in this regard, but if you got one of the original pressings with this error, make sure to look for the little insert from GT.

Steve Polge (also of Epic) posted a workaround for people with the original, problematic disks:

The installer for the full version fails to detect D3D for some configurations. It sounds like you are using software rendering. To change to D3D, go to options/preferences/video menu and hit the change video driver button. When UT restarts, click on select all video devices to display D3D as an option, and choose it as your driver.

Good luck! Despite these problems, I may try to pick a copy of UT up today if I can find it anywhere amongst the maddening crowds.

News for 11/26/1999

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