UT2Kx Engine CPU Heavy?

I would hazard a guess that it is a design feature, and not a bad mistake on Epic's part. Simply because, that engine has been in development, like, forever, and during that time, it would have been kind of hard for them to miss a problem that big, if they actually considered it a problem.

Although I could be wrong, as I'm just guessing there.

I fail to see how this is a design "problem" or a flaw in any way. Nowadays, the video card is often the most expensive part in a computer and so not everyone is willing to upgrade it every three months. A new AthlonXP 3000+ will only cost you $150 whereas a new ATI X800 will cost you $450. A new CPU can also be easier to justify, since it will speed up everything to some extent, and not just games.

Ok, well i really find UT2K4 for instance far too CPU bottlenecked, well that is i guess memory bandwidth. When im at ~3GHz (400FSB) (with a 9800 @ pro) im not satisfied with the way it performs, however if i overclock my CPU FSB wise, to say 460FSB whilst even downclocking the gfx card, there is a vast increase in performance.
A CPU performance of this caliber is not required by other similar-generation FPS games and so what I'm asking really is...does anyone know what features in the UT2k4 engine result in this performance characteristic?

I'd bet on heavy AI, that isn't exactly runing with head in walls...

CPU is the bottleneck in all the engines out there, its just a question of: to what extent?

The sound driver (at least under Mac OS X) appears to drag down the framerate more than anything else. Try turning it off; I'd love to see if sound is stupidly handled entirely on the CPU under NT or Linux.

Ok so if we look at AI as a cause ... in a MP game (I'm talking of online play) there is no AI needed in the conventional bot sense so it can't be that.

Quote:

CPU is the bottleneck in all the engines out there, its just a question of: to what extent?

Exactly my point but the question then is why is the CPU a bottleneck in UT2k4 to an extent more than other games?

I'll agree with MadMan on that one. Of course, now you've got me curious. I get a steady FPS of much higher than 30 (haven't actually measured in a while, but it's definitely smooth motion) with the graphics turned all the way up on my dual Xeon 2.4GHz box with a Radeon 9700(non-pro). Here's a way to test our hypothesis: do you have the same problem while playing with only human players or while playing with AI on a separate server?

{Edit: so if it's not the AI, then what happens when you turn the graphics all the way down?)

well, when the graphics are turned all the way down, there is definitely an increase in performance, though not as immense as i would like for sacrifice in candy. In general i run at 1024x768, with medium textures and pretty much all the other settings set to "off". I do get a lot more than 30 fps, but im just surprised that when at such a high FSB/CPU clock (over 3GHz with 400FSB) as it is, a small increase FSB can make such a drastic performance difference to the game (and that includes multiplayer with no bots involved)

AP: I'm pretty sure that the Unreal script gets compiled to bytecode that is JIT compiled to native assembly (which is why the load times for onslaught maps are so much higher than those for regular deathmatch maps).

FSB and RAM access are tightly bound. Maybe the bottleneck you're seeing is a RAM bottleneck? Unfortunately, I can't think of any good way to test this...

Yes yes, sorry what i should say instead of merely "CPU Heavy" is that i mean it is bottlenecked by the CPU/Memory subsystem infinitely more than by the graphics card.

could it have anything to do with it's heavy use of unrealscript?
edit: d'oh didn't see Apocryphiliac's reply!

so if unrealscript is not the problem, any other ideas?

mmh maybe software occlusion map rendering for geometry culling ?

I believe that the engine uses the software renderer to a very large extent. It was targeted at those people that have fast CPUs but lower end GPUs. So, a lot of the rendering calculations are handled on the CPU. This would explain why in benches on a 6800 Ultra, you'll get framerates that hit 75 and stop. CPU limited.

framerates hitting 75 and stopping sounds like a vsync issue. There is also the issue that online play caps framerates to 85 as well I think. If a large part of the engine does graphical calcs in software that could explain a lot but I would have though epic would have made the engine more scalable than that and branch into hardware calc when good enough hardware was present?

I find it hard to believe they would choose to do things in software that they can do in HW, especialy on such a high profile engine. Now there is a software rendered to at least one of the UT2Kx versions, but that's optional, not forced.
A 3 GHz and 400 MHz buss sounds like a Celeron CPU (with the new P4s being 800 MHz and the old 533 MHz), and while the new Cels aren't as bad as thier predeserors they're in no way a top of the line CPU. The game could very well be bandwidth starved seeing as you have a large increase in performance when overclocking the FSB.

It's DirectX 7. As in, no shaders. As in, no GPU.

It's DirectX 7. As in, no shaders. As in, no GPU.