I agree, I ruled out switching to Vista.

You know, I always get hit with bizarre freak problems when I work with computers, you may have a point there. Kills me that this is one of their The Way It's Meant to Be Played games, what a crock.

Oh wow. You're really going all-out with this.

The Way It's Meant to Be Played.

There are two words omitted for the sake of brevity, just like they drop articles in newspaper headlines. The full slogan is:

By The Way, It's Not Meant To Be Played.

Sounds good. I'm sure lots of UT mods would benefit, not just BW.


No.
Unless you want to make a Russian language version. But I would rather that is done on the current wiki...I know there is a way to make the wiki multi-language, I've just never implemented it. But we can chat...


Sounds very good. Do you need some hosting space? PM me if you do

We do have hosting space, almost unlimited bandwith, so on, so forth. Currently trying to get on terms and run a few regular UT2004 servers
just to prove there's some hardware out there that can host our stuff indeed, allows good ping and works all right.

Once it works, we'll pass to installing BW. Once that works, we'll pass to installing anti-cheat. Then the forum and the site, step after step. So on and so forth. Hope will have a few demo UT2004 servers running in about 20 days.

Hah! That sounds about right!

Nvidia Level Two Support just sent me an email today saying they are "aware of th issue," but being that ut2k4 is "not very well optimized for the architecture in the 8800GTX/GTS GPU," the they will "not have a fix in the nearby future." He doesn't mention the Ultra model, I wonder if he left it out, or there isn't a problem with it, perhaps that's why yours works.

Ultra is just an overclocked GTX. I mean, some of the GTX specimen turn out to be better than the rest when they leave the factory. Those are collected and turned into Ultras by writing higher frequency values into their BIOS. But in real life, almost any GTX can be easily overclocked to become an Ultra. You can use driver settings or a BIOS editor to edit the card's firmware and give it higher clocks. According to my observations, the maximum frequencies a GTX can stand are 685 / 1150. If you've got a newer revision (A3), these can be higher, probably up to 710 / 1200. The card will be working fine even with the default cooling system provided that the air circulation in the case is good enough. However, Nvidia and their partners employ their own criteria to tell if a card can be an Ultra or not... And I may be mistaken, maybe only a certain percentage of GTX cards can stand the frequencies that the Ultras have. I still don't know how this happens, but indeed two chips thought to be identical often turn out to have slightly different properties... I'm not a technology expert but that's really true. E.g. I dealt with two specimen of the Core Quad Q6600 CPUs, both belonging to the same shipment, both having the same revision and stepping (G0). One of them easily worked at a frequency of 3300 Mhz and the minimum needed voltage at that frequency was 1.32, while the second one only beat the 2900 Mhz barrier and took about 1.4 V to achieve a stable state. The motherboard was the same, I mean physically the same one item, not the same model. So I guess such differences apply to all kinds of chips, video cards included.

But if we don't consider these unpredictable differences in overclocking potential, technically GTX and Ultra are the same chip, with the only different part being the information written into BIOS. I'm not sure, but most likely the regular 8800 is also the same thing...

As for the tech support guy, he just lied. There's no such thing as hardware incompatibility between a game and a GPU, they just can't find out in what exact hardware environments their *drivers* screw up UT2k4, so they can't fix it.

But one thing I know for sure is that Nvidia is much better than ATi when it comes to compatibility. I don't feel like typing some five extra pages of explanations, but as a former ATi user, - and I've had about 4 different hi-end ATi cards over the previous years, - I can assure you that ATi is the world's leader in terms of game-specific, unique glitches. Because of that, more and more game developers are taking Nvidia as a standard, so in turn this results in games being more friendly to Nvidia cards. It often takes a patch or two to make a game stop freaking out on an ATi...

Ah, I wasn't sure of all the technical differences between the Ultra and GTX, been a long time since I did any research.

I don't think the tech support guy really meant to be misleading (there's the possibility that he just thought I was an idiot and wouldn't understand anyhow), he did mention the XP driver model vs the Vista model, that's what they're having trouble with, apparently.

I'm currently of the mind that, whichever company I go with, I'm going to get driver-screwed at some point down the line. I used to have an ATI card, but I started buying nvidia after all kinds of driver problems (and it seems like nvidia cards are always performing better when I go to buy a new one). Now, I just have different driver problems. Such is life, I suppose. I'll probably keep buying nvidia, but I guess I should be more careful about it in the future.

Presumably, anything bearing GTX or Ultra labels is just an overclocked version of the standard issue with higher clock values written into BIOS. 8800 Ultra itself comes at least in three different fersions - SHD-9, SHE-9 and SHF-9, all three with different clock values, SHF9 being the fastest (though the frequency boost hardly approaches 6-7% as compared to the regular Ultra). GT, GL, GX2 and other abbreviations often indicate a real difference between chips. However I won't recommend buying a regular version and changing its BIOS / employing driver tweakers to overclock the card to GTX or Ultra frequencies - who knows, maybe it's true that only a limited number of 'regulars' can correctly function after the transformation, and most are detected and transformed into GTX and Ultra versions by the manufacturer company in the earliest production stages. Most user accounts of Normal->GTX->Ultra overclocking seem to be successful, yet it's still nothing but a hypothesis.


That's it! If the game is really poorly optimized for a certain GPU, which is just a chip, it's likely to behave in the wrong way regardless of the driver and OS you're using, since the chip stays the same even is software changes, obviously.

If the Vista driver works for you all right, that can only mean that the XP driver has a bug that comes into play only on certain hardware/software configuration, and Nvidia guys just fail to track it because it's very intermittent and they don't feel like taking the pain.


Right you are. Most games have trouble at least with a few models by one or either of the two manufacturers. Bugs native to ATi just seem to be more annoying and numerous. And it's true that on some occasions a certain game works normally only with a certain number of driver versions, and sometimes upgrading your drivers may incapacitate certain games. For me, Timeshift will never start on drivers above 163.75, but when I downgraded to 163.75 the game worked so fine that I never had even the slightest glitch or slowdown. Battlefield 2 turns into a real freakshow if you have any card from the 8000 series or one of the latest ATi cards like 2900. Well, I got used to objects changing their shape and geometry, huge black spots running across the terrain and a whole bunch of other oddities. Unfortunately they never tried to fix that - neither Nvidia nor ATi.

Any news on the decsion ?

Nope.

It will be front page news when it is made methinks.

Story of Archon Universe is interresting for me

That's cause Epic went and designed the basic outline for the game, made a few maps and mutators, few models, provided the editor and said "okay, we've given you the base foundations for the game, finish it off yourselves"
It sucks I can't get a whole bunch of maps and things for it like I can 2K4, since UT3 uses such a crappy and buggy folder system, not to mention even the smallest of maps are massive in filesize.

Anyways, if Runestorm made Ballistic Weapons mods for UT3 (which I would really enjoy ^^), why should they change it? Because it's Unreal Tournament, and not Unreal enough? Last I checked, so was UT2004, but it's here, and we love it. Why change a winning recipe?

imo bonus pack 4 is as polished as a mod can get. And ut2k4 just wasn't that successful for bw to get the popularity it deserves.

edit: oh god I'm soooooo slow!