UT2004

One of the games not widely focused on anymore for benchmarking at Phoronix is Unreal Tournament 2004, though this afternoon I decided to fire up UT2004. With the X1800XT and the proprietary ATI Linux drivers, Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor's Choice Edition v3369.1 had performed well during the time I had spent gaming. The experience was satisfactory but there are a few thoughts to share.

Contained in the Mac OS X and Linux v3369 patches for Unreal Tournament 2004 were a few visible fixes -- such as the Hellbender license plate, DM-Morpheus3 scoreboard, and vehicle headlights. In order to benefit from these UT2004 changes, the GL_EXT_framebuffer_object OpenGL extension is required, which luckily the fglrx drivers have supported for some time now. To see these changes, UseRenderTargets must be set to True within the UT2004.ini file.

One of the changes though that hadn't worked as planned with the fglrx drivers was the UT2004 realistic shadows. As the realistic shadows option isn't yet integrated into the GUI, bPlayerShadows must be set to True while bBlobShadow needs to be False in User.ini. Unfortunately, the realistic shadows weren't working with UT2004 when I had tried them with the fglrx drivers and the X1800XT. The most detailed shadows available were simply blobs. UPDATE (06/06/06): The realistic shadows with ATI fglrx drivers are able to work in some situations but not all. As noted by the second image above, in some environments such as CTF-Face3, or when using the Manta vehicle, the shadows do work correctly. UPDATE (06/06/06): Deleting the Unreal Tournament configuration files from ~/.ut2004/System/ and then re-enabling the appropriate options seem to correct the previously mentioned problem with ATI. I am still trying out a few things, but if any ATI users continue to have these realistic shadow problems please send me off an email.

Another peculiar problem I had run into with the ATI drivers was when enabling Full Scene Anti-Aliasing and specifying the FSAA sample quantity from aticonfig, the in-game UT2004 screenshots would corrupt. When removing the FSAA options, the in-game screenshots would save correctly. With the ATI FSAA driver options enabled, other than the screenshot issue the game itself had operated accordingly.