Unreal Engine 3 Tweaks for Smoothness

[144HzGamer]

So this has been bothering me for a while now, UE3 games are some of the most frustrating pieces of software/games out there, not because of how they look or perform (raw FPS wise) but because of the damn micro stuttering these games tend to have.

The latest example is Killing Floor 2.

Game looks great, plays even better, but the micro stuttering is just too annoying to enjoy the game at its fullest.

So I ask you guys, what are some of the key tweaks I need to be implement on these games for them to perform smoothly without micro stuttering?

Thanks!.

 

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[Prey2big]

I play KF2 at max settings with a GTX 780, and it runs flawless.
(variable framerate enabled and v-sync off)

 

[BFG10K]

Game looks great, plays even better, but the micro stuttering is just too annoying to enjoy the game at its fullest.

Are you overclocking anything?

 

[shortylickens]

Still waiting on Unreal 3.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Sounds like you guys need to force triple buffering. D3DOverrider, RadeonPro, and (I assume) Nvidia Inspector can do this. I'm amazed it's 2015 and we're still wrestling with this.

 

[CP5670]

Most UE3 games have a 62fps cap by default, which looks nasty if you have a 120/144hz monitor. However, it's easy to disable this. Look for the flags bSmoothFrameRate and MaxSmoothedFrameRate in the game's config files (UTEngine.ini for UT3, but the filename/location varies with the game) and set them appropriately. This is the first thing I do when installing any UE3 game, including for example all the Mass Effect games. One or two games don't expose these flags at all and cannot be fixed, but most do.

 

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[Gonad the Barbarian]

I'd still certainly recommend always making sure triple buffering is enabled with vsync. And I second CP5670's suggestion and disabling all those frame smoothing options. Terrible settings at any refresh rate.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

When they ported the engine to work on consoles the engine itself got a barrage of updates related to smoothing out frame rate and trying to maintain an acceptable range of frame rates.

The problem is that this feature is absolutely horrendous, it seems to create input lag and is heavily messes with the relationship between control input and what you see on the screen, it also limits the frame rate which is never good outside of vsync usage, and it also in my experiences causes really inconsistent frame times and wild fluctuations in frame rate to maintain the target frame rates.

You want to search the game ini files for the following

bSmoothFrameRate=[True|False]
MinSmoothedFrameRate=[#]
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=[#]

Make sure bSmoothFrameRate is set to false, this feature is what creates the utter nightmare of an experience on the PC, it's almost universally left on with Unreal Engine games because the developers tend not to care about PC game experience.

Once the cap is gone you'll get a really smooth frame rate which will simply run as fast as your GPU and CPU can kick out frames, that will decrease input latency and make everything as fast and responsive as it can be.

 

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[CP5670]

Yes, this is irritating. The games typically have a bunch of "default" ini files in the game folder, where editing has no effect, while the real files are somewhere in Application Data or My Documents in the user profile, or the Steam app settings folder. A few games like Mass Effect 2 and 3 have them in a scrambled format that you need to decode with a third-party tool.

At least UE3 is tweakable like this though. Most other games are totally locked down and there is no way for you to fix such issues.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Unless you use V-Sync at 60Hz, in which case it would be neither here nor there because the smooth framerate cap is 62fps right. I always disable it regardless, but that's mostly habit from running >60Hz refresh rates.

It mucks things up at 60Hz as well. I had forgotten about it since it's been so long since I've run a UE3 game, but it still causes stutter I suppose when it does whatever it does with MinSmoothedFrameRate.

 

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[futurefields]

In my experience it helps with UE3 games to disable in-game vsync, and force it in your GPU control panel while at the same time putting a 60fps cap on with either RadeonPro for AMD cards or whatever NVidia users do that with (inspector I think?)

Try that and see if it smooths things out. I got a NVidia card coming soon and will be going through all this junk for the first time since Im used to tweaking AMD cards.

 

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[futurefields]

What do you use to put the frame limiter for Nvidia cards? Is it in the control panel?

I've got like 15 games I do this with on AMD with RadeonPro, I imagine I'll have to do the same on Nvidia.

 

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