UT3 Benchmarking
UT3: UTEngine.ini Tweaks Performance
Tweakguides.com has created another comprehensive review of Unreal Tournament 3 full of solid tips and educated conclusions, but I wanted to make sure nome of the compatibility tweaks were taking away from my enoyment of the game. Also, if something like UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization created a performance gain without any noticeable reduced image quality, I wanted to get the best performance possible!
So far, I only have a handful of tweaks measured, but expect more as I get time to do further testing. These UTEngine.ini tweaks include:
- UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization=False with AFR2
- UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization=False
- UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization=True
- V-Sync Enabled (UT3 Menu)
UT3 and the UTEngine.ini
This is the main configuration file of UT3 containing most of the user's engine preferences with respect to detail levels, screen size and network settings. If you have a problem or make a change that renders your .ini file invalid, simply delete it and the game will generate a new one with all default values set. For more information, visit my Troubleshooting Page.
Test Results: A Good Start
These results show the complexity of the engine and the vast opportunities one has to optimized its performance.
As the name implies, using minimal shader optimization will reduced your nVidia graphics card performance. The only reason to use this option is to fix crashing issues. Curiously, enabling v-sync in the game settings menu did not only fail to cap the frame rate, but resulted in the best performance overall according to my benchmark data. More testing is necessary!
Scroll down to see the summarized chart of findings, or view the raw data.
UT3 Benchmark Final Results - UTEngine.ini Tweaks
| Tweak Employed | Avg FPS | % Above 30FPS |
|---|---|---|
| UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization=False with AFR2 | 59.84 | 89.84 |
| UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization=False | 61.59 | 89.13 |
| UseMinimalNvidiaShaderOptimization=True | 56.40 | 92.50 |
| Enable V-Sync (UT3 Menu) | 64.20 | 93.25 |
