As submitted to http://acanac.org/blogs/geek/

As many of my regular readers know, I haven't been very happy of Unreal Tournament 3 since it's release in November of 2008.  I have posted on a few occasions identifying some of the shortcomings of the release and my opinions towards Epic in general.  Well, not this time.  This time I have a positive post for you.  The information contained below may just change your gameplay forever.

From a performance standpoint, the game has challenged me the most.  I run a GeForce 7800 GT, which is far superior to the GeForce 6200 that is the game's minimum requirement for video cards.  Due to this fact, I have an expectation that the game should run well.  It hasn't though.  The game has often appeared to be choppy or laggy and I could never really pinpoint the cause.  I'm also not a gaming guru, so I may not immediately know where to look.

All of that changed last night.

Last night I was playing for a couple of rounds and whenever the game was switching levels I would turn to my laptop to finish up some research that I had on the go.  My gameplay was horrible last night, so I decided to look further into the issue between rounds.  I came across a post on the Epic UT3 forum site that was full of things to try.  Most of the fixes that were mentioned were things that I had already tried.  Most of them were settings changes of varying levels. 

I was just about done, when I discovered a suggestion to turn my Textures setting down by one.  It's a scale from one to five and it had been set at four.  I changed it to three and reloaded my game.  BAM!  I didn't experience on more instance of chop for the rest of the night.  I am beyond happy.  While I appreciate that I had to sacrifice some quality in the name of playability, I must confess that I am much happier playing now.

For those of you that are going to try this one, Textures can be found in game by clicking on the "Settings" menu, then Advanced, then Advanced again.  Happy hunting!