I went home last night and sat down to try out the new setup. I formatted the second (larger) partition of my driver, installed SP1, the newest video drivers, UT 2004, then Doom 3. I then promptly jumped into UT to see if the driver was in fact the problem. As soon as I started, it was just as choppy as it had been before. After trying UT for a bit, I decided to try Doom. I started it, just running through, shooting, not actually trying to play. It didn't boot me out like it had been doing before, but the lines across the screen were still very apparent. My brother informed me that it looked like the problem he had with another game, when he installed Direct X 9.90b. I'm hesitant to believe that's the problem, because everyone else is running 9.0b w/ Doom 3 and UT just fine, as both games require it.

I went into my BIOS and changed two settings, allowing for 128 megs of ram on the card (the default was 64), and changing the PCI graphics to AGP graphics (default was PCI). Neither of these made a bit of difference. I then went into my actual card settings and started turning off AA and AF. Neither of these helped either. Just to make sure I didn't have the card pushing too hard, I bumped EVERY setting down to the lowest possible, making UT look like the original Wolfenstein. Still had choppy gameplay. I started to check how much RAM and processor time was being used when UT was running. It uses ALL of my ram, I literally have anywhere from 6-20 mb left when UT is running. It also keeps my processor maxed at 99-100%, constantly.

As another test, I tried different maps and gametypes in UT. I can play small DM maps perfectly. I can play any small map perfectly, as a matter of fact. It seems that only when I load a larger map, that this problem becomes obvious.

I then took an old 64mb Nvidia card and threw it in my new machine, after uninstalled the ATI drivers. I ran UT with this card and the game wasn't choppy. I even turned all settings to high and ran at 1064x768. It just slowed down, like the card was simply unable to handle it. It still wasn't the choppy gameplay I had been receiving before. I couldn't get Doom 3 to even load with this card so I could test it. I put my card back in...same problem as before. One other thing I noticed is that my desktop will do weird things with this card installed. When I exit a game, the game will still be visible where the taskbar is. There will be black lines on random parts of the screen when something is loading or when Windows boots. This shouldn't be a regular thing. I doubt it's caused by the drivers, as I have installed two different sets to no avail. This is why I'm leaning more towards the video card than another part of the machine. I'm not overclocking anything. the machine is running the defaults.

I ran Memtest for about 3 hours as well, it found no errors. As far as I know, my ram looks perfect, I just replaced the hard drive and the problem still exists. These games should not be eating away all of my resources. My brother runs this game with a 128 mb GeForce Ti4200, and 512 megs of Kingston. I'm trying to run it with a Radeon 9800Pro and 512 megs of Corsair XMS. My machine should NOT be choppy during gameplay. I have no clue what could cause this problem, as it acts like it could be more than one thing. I'm basically down to sending parts back to Newegg and replacing them on a one-at-a-time basis. To beat it all, Newegg is showing that I've never ordered from them, and lists no invoices under the RMA section....wonderful.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I've read numerous posts where people are having the exact same problem. I thought it was my video card, but I'm not sure now.

One other person was using the exact same mobo as myself. I'm thinking about buying a sound card, trying to turn on DMA if it already isn't, and uninstalling speechredist. Any other suggestions as to why the choppiness would appear in unreal?

I had to read that WHOLE thing before you mentioned what video card you're having trouble with...& you never did mention the model of the nVidia card that you tried.

Remember that system resources has nothing to do with the amount of physical RAM you have installed...they are two completely different things...

Try hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del...go to Task Manager & click on User Name...that will sort all your background apps. Now "end process" all apps associated with your user name, except explorer.exe & taskmgr.exe...now try your game & see if there's a difference

Lol, me to. What a long post without a real question!

My question is, what's causing the choppiness in UT 2004?

Have you tried what I suggested to see if it makes a difference??

May also want to make sure you update your motherboard's chipset drivers and video drivers. I didn't notice that anywhere in that post, but I admit I had to skim it quickly. I'm not a novel reader. ;-)

MCSE, MCSA Messaging, baby!

Ok. I think you need to do several things.

Firstly go into SYSTEM and then change your swapfile size to 1000 minimum and 1000 maximum (static size)

Secondly you should go to startup, then RUN then type MSCONFIG and hit enter. Go to the startup tab and unselect anything you feel is unnecessary.

Thirdly, run ADAWARE and SPYBOT to make sure your system is not running crap in the background.
ADAWARE

http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10045910.html?part=69274&subj=dlpage&tag=button

SPYBOT

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22262,00.asp

Fourthly and this is why it's tough to help you at the moment, we need to know your motherboard model, and which ATI card you have.

to do that you need to open your computer and write down all the lettering you see on the chips of your video card and mother board

I've got all the newest drivers. This pc hasn't even been online, period. I just put it together this past Friday. The only programs installed on a 160 gig drive are Doom 3 and UT 2004. The only app running on boot is an ASUS tool to monitor system temps and the like.

Last night I kept getting an error, and UT would just quit. Then my machine would just reboot randomly. It acts like it's overheating, but I'm at a constant 38-42 Celsius and I'm not overclocking anything.

My brother just bought a new machine P4 3.0Ghz, 512MB ram, SATA Hdd and an ATI video card(not sure exact spec) his machine has choppy jerky play with those games too.

My own P4 2.66Ghz, 1GB ram, Geforce 4200Ti plays these games nicely.

I suspect these games are coded better for Nvidia than Ati.