I'm sure we've all experienced a noticable increase in lag at the start of a match from what I would assume to be the textures being loaded from the HD onto RAM for the BW. However, I don't see why this is because, after looking at the textures in unreal ed, I noticed that the BW have the same texture resolution as the stock UT weapons. Given that, would the increase in lag (at the start only) be caused by the fact that the BW textures have more layers to them, or multiple textures per weapon? I know that "shinyness" on a texture incrases the computing power required as well as the capacity the file requires, so is that why BW weapons cause a burst of lag just before you first spawn into a match? I've heard about how BW textures are designed for a more modern age than 2004, where it is expected the average computer can handle more, but I'm just curious if someone can give a nerdy explenation of why this is so. I have to say, though, that the BW are about 10 times prettier than the stock weapons (-:

there are ALOT more weapons, and item skins, more weapons kins, etc

That shouldn't cause a lag for people that have 2+ GBs of memory and a Core 2 Duo E6xxx processor.

i find tinkering with processing priorities help

I think Disk Defragmenter works.

I'm sorry, I wasn't specific enough. I'm referring to a 1:1 weapon swap (one weapon replacement for each stock weapon with no cycling using Worm2k4). I furthurmore understand than my piddly 1 gig of RAM is largely to blame, as well as my not-so-fast HD. However, I was just getting at the question of why the same number of BW take longer to load than stock weapons when they both have the same texture resolution(1024x1024)? It is obvious that BW are much prettier than stock weapons, so does that mean that the BW textures take up more space, even though they have the same number of pixels, or is it just the added shinyness that makes all the difference? On the other hand, could I be "barking up the wrong tree"? Could the increase in load time be attributed mainly to the increased poly count? I realize we're all weary this topic, but I was just curious if there was a nerdy explenation of what about the BW make them heavier than stock weapons?

Oh, and when you talk about playing with priorities, KylinRage, do you mean something similar to the attached pic, where you go to the task manager after starting up UT04 and set its process priority? When I change it from normal to high, I could be convinced that there may kinda be a difference in performance, perhaps. Is my understanding correct that I should avoid Realtime priority? I think I heard from someone that it is used only when you want to dedicate all processing power to UT, which means it boots up straight into UT and you can do anything else without rebooting. Is that true?[br][img width=405 height=460]../../files/public/1176433753_244_FT34442_priority.jpg[/img]

Yes, if you want to risk getting a BSoD.
Try turn off explorer.exe and then run the game with the New Task feature, might improve things a little.

my system specs arent even close to that lol friken 548 mh of prosesor speed can berly run ut2k4 and
im lucky it runs unreal2

u need an upgrade lol

i'm on a 1.1 GHZ Celeron.. nad BE is on a 33Mhz.. meh

there is a Weapon Texture Detail in the BW config menu.. turn that down AFTER texture and character detail in the Display menu of UT

Woah, he'll be lucky to run Wolfy 3D with that thing.