# Unreal Tournament 2004 running problems



## drunkmac (May 3, 2004)

I downloaded the demo awhile back for UT2K4 and it ran slow as piss on my tiBook. 

I have 512mb of ram and 1ghz G4 processor in my tiBook. Halo ran, but not so hot either until I got rid of alot of nice graphical things. 

I realize a mac is not a gaming system, but its fun to play a game once in awhile. In the past Unreal Tournament 1 through 2003 never ran too great on my PC when I had a PC (a kick ass one too I might add). So I dont get it. Is it just that UT2K4 is a resource hog? Whats up?


----------



## Lycander (May 3, 2004)

Your video card is the bottleneck.


----------



## Zammy-Sam (May 3, 2004)

I have to say: wrong
Turn off sound by the game and you will see a miracle. Your video card is good enough.
The sound processing is handed to the cpu and causes it to slow down dramatically. Dual systems have the benefit, that one can calculate the sound and the other does the wireframe and the rest of the scene calculation. Let's pray for a good patch


----------



## Lycander (May 3, 2004)

Sam you said the same thing in the other thread which I replied, hardware accelerated audio processing is available in OSX, it depends on the game developer to use it, or the audio library they use to support it. Dual processors won't magically make your game better by splitting the work. Again, it's all up to the game developers.


----------



## drunkmac (May 3, 2004)

Good point. Sound should help. I only have a GeForce 5200FX GO! card but still...


----------



## Zammy-Sam (May 3, 2004)

Lycander said:
			
		

> Sam you said the same thing in the other thread which I replied, hardware accelerated audio processing is available in OSX, it depends on the game developer to use it, or the audio library they use to support it. Dual processors won't magically make your game better by splitting the work. Again, it's all up to the game developers.


I just read your post in the other thread, Lycander. I am not familiar with the cpu and sound card usage for certain games. There was a thread on UT2004, where you can increase the performance incredibly much with turning off the sound. I suppose the UT2004 developers kinda shifted the sound processing to the cpu then


----------



## Damrod (May 3, 2004)

In the UT2004 demo, it works like a charm with sound turned off. I saw that there was a patch released for the full version, but I have not played it.

To threadstarter: Do we speak about the demo or the full version here?


----------



## Zammy-Sam (May 3, 2004)

it's the demo


----------



## dlloyd (May 3, 2004)

Just to clarify, you actually have to turn the sound off IN THE GAME PREFS, right? Just turning down the speaker volume won't do anything.


----------



## a2daj (May 4, 2004)

The UT2K4 demo contains a bug that causes the sound code it eat up a ton more CPU power than it needs to.  Turning off sound will provide a big performance boost and give you a glimpse as to what performance could be.  Normally, the sound should only be taking up 3-7% of the CPU time, but due to a programming error dealing with usleep() and microseconds, the demo sound code takes as much as 50% of the CPU.  The retail version of UT2K4 does not perform as bad as the demo because the usleep() bug was fixed.

In case some of you haven't read the other thread, there is no audio hardware acceleration in OS X.  CoreAudio handles all of the sound processing using software.  Hardware is used strictly as a means to output sound, not process it.  The recently released OpenAL codebase that Apple released is just a thin layer of code on top of CoreAudio.  There's currently no way to relieve the CPU of sound processing.

While theoretically, one could create a driver that intercepts the sounds before CoreAudio processes it no current card does so that I'm aware of.  I have a Revolution 7.1 and allit does is output the sound.    However, CoreAudio is fast.  It gets a high priority thread.  So as long as a developer writes efficient sound code, sound should not eat up a lot of CPU.  The guy who ported UT2K3, 4, America's Army, and the upcoming Postal2, spent a lot of time on his 12" Rev A PowerBook optimizing the sound code to use, according to him, about 3% of the CPU.  In my experience those numbers vary from 3-7% depending on OpenAL lib I use.


----------



## a2daj (May 4, 2004)

Lycander said:
			
		

> Sam you said the same thing in the other thread which I replied, hardware accelerated audio processing is available in OSX, it depends on the game developer to use it, or the audio library they use to support it. Dual processors won't magically make your game better by splitting the work. Again, it's all up to the game developers.



When it comes to audio, OS X will spin it off into a separate thread, so dual proc machines will get a slight benefit from audio being processed on the other CPU.  This is why dual proc machines don't suffer from the same UT2K4 sound bug which single proc machines suffer.


----------



## Lycander (May 4, 2004)

Gah! I'm an idiot. Could have sworn there was hw-accel. audio processing. I even Googled for info about it before making those stupid posts. *sigh* Well what I did find was the use of AltiVec for signal processing for 3D effects.


----------



## Lycander (May 4, 2004)

Maybe I can redeem myself. I found this review: http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=156

Apparently Creative Labs did release a SoundBlaster Live! card for the Mac back in 2001. The problem? It sucked ass. Quoting the review author: "This product does not work at all in Mac OS X and is extremely disappointing in Mac OS 9.x. Don't buy one."



> The arrival of the Sound Blaster Live! to the Mac platform is a significant event for Mac users--particularly for gamers. It supports EAX--the most popular 3D audio technology used in games today--as well as OpenAL, the forthcoming open standard for enhanced audio. These technologies improve on audio in the same way that the hardware acceleration provided by 3D graphics cards has improved over software-based 3D rendering.
> 
> The Sound Blaster Live! card is not just for gaming, of course, but since that's what we do here at IMG, that will be the main focus of my review. It's also not the only sound card available for the Mac, but it is not really comparable to any of the others, because it is aimed at consumers, not audio professionals, and it is the only card that supports EAX and OpenAL.



It's been 3 years, you think Creative Labs got their acts together by now and deliver a decent gaming sound card for the Mac platform?


----------



## a2daj (May 4, 2004)

Lycander said:
			
		

> Gah! I'm an idiot. Could have sworn there was hw-accel. audio processing. I even Googled for info about it before making those stupid posts. *sigh* Well what I did find was the use of AltiVec for signal processing for 3D effects.



Yeah, CoreAudio makes heavy use of Altivec if it's available.  Add to that the high priority thread CoreAudio gets and you get a pretty darn fast software audio system.  If anything, game porters should rework their audio porting libraries to use CoreAudio rather than the Carbon SoundManager.  Then they can get things like 3D audio.  Apple's OpenAL would make that transition a bit easier.


----------



## dlloyd (May 4, 2004)

Gah, not only does my iBook not have an Altivec, because it doesn't have a G4, but it also doesn't have the capability of an audio, or video card, upgrade. 

*goes off to sulk*


----------



## a2daj (May 4, 2004)

dlloyd said:
			
		

> Gah, not only does my iBook not have an Altivec, because it doesn't have a G4, but it also doesn't have the capability of an audio, or video card, upgrade.
> 
> *goes off to sulk*



There's no audio card that would help with performance in Macs, so that's not a total loss.  You can always get a USB or Firewire audio device to get 5.1 sound.  But the lack of video card and Altivec is a bummer.


----------



## a2daj (May 4, 2004)

Lycander said:
			
		

> Maybe I can redeem myself. I found this review: http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=156
> 
> Apparently Creative Labs did release a SoundBlaster Live! card for the Mac back in 2001. The problem? It sucked ass. Quoting the review author: "This product does not work at all in Mac OS X and is extremely disappointing in Mac OS 9.x. Don't buy one."
> 
> ...




Gah!! I had a really long post but the forum didn't post it...  I'll have to shorten this one.

I had a SBL in my Mac until I bought a Radeon 9800 Pro.  Since the R9800 doesn't accelerate OS 9 graphics and the SBL is an OS 9 only card, it went into a drawer.  Creative support sucked.  They had one patch released 1.25 years after the product shipped and it didn't fix some of the glaring bugs like it claimed to fix.  There are a couple of employees who are real cool, one of which is still trying to get some OpenSource OS X SBL drivers going but hasn't had any luck.  However, some key uppermanagement folks suck big time.  They're pretty much responsible for lack of Mac support.  They probably point to poor sales of the SBL, but the poor sales of the SBL were due to the fact the drivers and support sucked.  

As of 10.2.3 there's been some limited USB Audio support with some Creative USB devices.  I think much of it has to do with generic USB audio support.  10.3.3 apparently has the best "support".   But it's by no means a supported configuration.  

Someone claimed that Apple and Creative are working together to get generic drivers for all of Creative's cards but further interrogation led to the person making the claim disappearing.  Maybe he was making an assumption based upon some comments in the link above (CreativeOne is a Creative marketing guy who is trying to get opensource SBL drivers going).  I can see it possible that Apple and Creative are working on USB drivers together, but haven't heard anything about PCI card support, which I think is more important when we're talking about hardware acceleration.


----------



## Lycander (May 5, 2004)

Well there's a EMU10K1 driver for Linux. Was hoping it could be ported, however I also found out that it's not hw accelerated either. Just basic sound support. For a minute there I was tempted....


----------



## a2daj (May 5, 2004)

Lycander said:
			
		

> Well there's a EMU10K1 driver for Linux. Was hoping it could be ported, however I also found out that it's not hw accelerated either. Just basic sound support. For a minute there I was tempted....




Those developers who were(are?) working on the opensource drivers are trying to use the Linux drivers as a starting point.  If I had time I'd try and help them but time is one thing I cannot spare.


----------



## Lycander (May 5, 2004)

Even if they got the Linux EMU10K1 driver ported we'd only get basic sound support. But if it's stable and works in OSX that just might make up for all those years and all those angry customers.


----------

