Hows the framerate in Unreal Championship?

sergio_r

Newcomer
Ive heard some negative comments in a few other message boards. Thought Id ask the guru's ;)

Besides RAM limitations, what other factors could justify a flacky framrate? Its not acceptable right?
Is it just caused by HD swapping?
 
Framerate isn't the greatest. Its fine in enclosed levels, but outdoor areas chug like mad.

Perhaps this has something to do with taking a (bloated) PC engine and squeezing it into a console? shrug!
 
It's probably CPU limited. Unreal engines have always been very CPU dependent and don't scale well with graphics performance. So the X-Box's slow CPU relative to PC is hobbling it.
 
Here's a few quotes from reviews:

Gamespot said:
The character models are well defined and the environments are detailed, and for the most part the game runs at a playably smooth frame rate. However, large areas and areas that are full of other players tend to bog down quite a bit, which will making aiming difficult with those analog controls.

Games Domain said:
The game doesn't seem silky smooth to begin with, and every now and again, that rate seems to drop slightly. It's not problematic and has no real effect on gameplay, but it is noticeable.

Eurogamer said:
The only real gripe we have with UC is the occasion frame rate stutter as the Xbox accesses data from the hard disk. This kind of thing really shouldn’t be happening a full year into the Xbox life

So basically it depends on personal preference I guess. The occasional stutter will definitely happen in the game it seems, but some find it hardly noticable while others find it very distracting. Better judge by playing for yourself at a retailer or something...

PS: no typos were added to the review quotes, those are genuine ;)
 
zurich said:
Framerate isn't the greatest. Its fine in enclosed levels, but outdoor areas chug like mad.

Perhaps this has something to do with taking a (bloated) PC engine and squeezing it into a console? shrug!

chugging in open areas, that doesnt sound good :-\

Im still lookig fowards to it though, gotta look adn run better on xbox than my geforce 1 sdr :) .(???)
 
Yeah the outdoor levels do chug pretty bad in many areas, which is a shame because some of them are really well designed and look great...until the action begins.

Given the choice, based on framerate issues I would much rather play indoor levels in this game, which is a shame because I generally prefer outdoor levels.
 
Hmm, this is interesting, taken from the IGN Review:

The noticeable lag pops up occasionally when you get into multiplayer games, Xbox Live or otherwise, and can often be mistaken for choppiness. But the framerate is in fact consistent throughout.

Anybody with the game care to comment on wether the game suffers more from choppiness or lag or rather both? Maybe there's a cheat code to enable a framerate counter or something. Maybe its like the mouselag I had on the old UT sometimes, good framerate - laggy mouse, just with a controler this time... ;)
 
I don't have Xbox Live, and haven't played the game in multiplayer yet (LAN next weekend), and so far in single player mode, it's 100% chop. The only lag I see is when you respawn after being gibbed.
 
The UT2003 engine is god-awful, performance wise. Its cpu limitation is UTterly insane, no surprise that a 733 MHz Pentium III can't handle it.
 
So is there a technical reason why the Unreal engines are always so CPU hungry, as opposed to other engines (Quake, et all)? Is it doing some of the graphics or geometry processing that normally would be done in hardware on a videocard?
 
I've never personally worked with the Unreal engine, the following is my understanding of what was relayed to me by people who have.

The Unreal engine was originally designed as a software renderer.
It does a LOT of work to reduce overdraw, the net result is that it's almost always CPU limited (specifically limited by memory accesses).
 
Actually I heard that UT2k outdoor is actually kinda brute force, with octree type scheme.

Anyway, the framerate is quite horrid for me anyway, so I don't think I'll pick it up.
 
So are there any benefits at all to the Unreal engine's CPU appetite (assuming you have the resources), or is the Quake engine just the better designed engine for the current state of computer architecture?
 
IMO neither are particularly optimal for large polygon count scenes or for the case where GPU > CPU.
Both are really tailored towards having to run on relatively low end GPU's. Quake 2 onwards probably less so than the Unreal engine.

You have to look at what the bottlenecks were on the GPU's of the time, the engines are engineered to work around them.
 
Would the new Doom engine count as a significant change from this precedence? Any other 3D engines of note that are "more up-to-date"?
 
All I know about the new doom engine is featureset, rather than what's been done from a performance standpointm so I can't comment.

My opinion on game engines in general is they don't really save you much in terms of technical development you'll probably spend as much time and money tweaking and debugging the engine as you would have writing one of your own.

What they do do is allow you to start content creation from day 1, that in and of itself can be well worth the investment.

You don't buy an engine to get better technical performance, you buy one so you can start development tomorrow.
 
I appreciate the honest response vs. an unqualified "yes" which would have left me suspicious that it was more hype motivated than genuinely true. :)
 
randycat99 said:
So are there any benefits at all to the Unreal engine's CPU appetite (assuming you have the resources), or is the Quake engine just the better designed engine for the current state of computer architecture?

Karma physics engine.

Play the Am. Football like mode and fall down one of those pits under the goal rings, and watch how realistically your character's corpse bounces off the bars... :LOL:
 
randycat99 said:
So are there any benefits at all to the Unreal engine's CPU appetite (assuming you have the resources), or is the Quake engine just the better designed engine for the current state of computer architecture?

Karma physics.

Play the Am. Football like mode, and fall down one of the pits under the goal rings. Watch as your corpse bounces realistically off the bars! (that in and of itself is far too addictive)
 
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