The nostalgia is unreal with this one. Built my first rig around 12 and when Unreal Tournament came out it created memories I'm still fond of to this day. It was local LAN parties with some buddies with our desktops and CRT monitors mounted on a dinner table. Don't forget the mounting pizza boxes. Those memories can never be replaced and if you had these memories you are very very lucky.
Oh yes, I miss those days a lot. We used to do LAN parties almost every weekend during the last two years of high school. CRT monitors and pizza boxes definitely included!
Oh man... The feels with this video. I've been playing UT 2004 on my first ever Windows PC. Being 8yrs old at the time, alongside Quake, Doom, Carmagedon, Half Life 1 and CS 1.4... Golden days that bring a tear to my eyes :')
I first played that game on a PowerMac and loved how it ran with the stock FX5200 and its graphics. Since getting into PCs I always loved to see how it runs on systems from different time periods and this video doesn't disappoint. Keep up the great work dude! (Also I have a suspicion that the amount of ram was the cause of stuttering)
Playing this on a PowerMac would be a magical experience for me, since that is a whole different universe of computing I've hardly ever messed with. Hoping to change that up here soon. I appreciate the support!
@@snowfoxcomputing Keep an eye out for a G4 tower if you're interested in exploring the PowerPC world. They're usually unloved, dirt cheap and a reasonably comparable spec to what you've built here
I met so many people on UT2K4. Two of those people I game with to this day. I've known them as long as I've known my son and he remembers sitting on my lap as a toddler playing this game. He is a senior in high school and I credit this game for his love of PC gaming. He still remembers when I got double kill, multi kill, mega kill, etc. Absolutely love this game
Very cool. I hope you have been able to meet these friends in person at least a few times. Sounds like your son had a proper gaming upbringing he can pass onto his children!
@@snowfoxcomputing sadly I have never met them, but our wives and kids all know our voices. We were planning on it a few years ago but covid happened. And my son is now 17. Our living room has 3 pcs (mine, wife and his) and if we don't play together we are still close enough to chit chat. It works👍🏻
This was fun to watch. I've been playing UT3 a lot lately after not having played it for like 12 years, and you can still get lost in it for hours on end. The UT games are some of the best FPS's ever made.
That does tend to happen. UT3 really disappointed me compared to 2004 when it came out but can still be a lot of fun. I also find myself loading it up every now and then for a deathmatch or two.
@@snowfoxcomputing Agree, but have to add that the very same "disappointment when it came out but can still be a lot of fun" applied also to UT 2004, after good ol' UT99! Greatest of all time!
@@snowfoxcomputing 2k3 disappointed original UT fans. 2k4 disappointed 2k3 fans. UT3 disappointed 2k4 fans. Those that came after you were ignorant of your disappointment, and may have one of the later games as THEIR favorite.
This Video gives me a blast to the past, and the music from the game in the background makes me nostalgic. Back then, when i startet the game on my old Pentium 3 866 mhz, with 384 mb an a Radeon 9200 SE (the "Slow Edition" 😂), it was almost the same experience, but i was happy, that it even was somewhat playable. A year later, i bought a pc on a flea market for cheap with a Athlon XP 2200+, 512 mb ddr1 and a FX5200 Ultra and was amazed on how good UT2004 ran on my "new" machine.
That is awesome. Yeah pretty much if it ran on what you already had then things are good! I've had this game and others running on a 500MHz slotted P3 system before and while it technically works, it's not great. The system you upgraded to is also pretty neat still I'd say.
Cool vid, most likely the 128MB RAM was holding it back the most especially with the stutter. Bumping it up to 256, I'd say the default settings would give a decent experience on most maps, except the larger Onslaught and Assault modes etc. For those to run well, a faster processor would do the trick - that PIII really can't keep up!
Well as you'd expect of a min spec build, it falls short in so many regards. The low RAM is likely responsible for stutter while the weak CPU is responsible for low sustained framerate - if it was GPU limited, reducing resolution would have alleviated the pressure there.
Ahhhh, this is the exact kind of video I love. I love playing UT2004 on my out of date Thinkpad T42. Something about how optimized the game is just feels special.
Just announced that UT3 is gonna be free for everyone. Makes me wish they would have just re-released this one instead! Great video, i miss my old computer now lol
2004 I had no idea it had a re release or massive update. I hammered this 1999/2000. Absolutely amazing game. Deck 16 is probably one of the most fluid and flowing death match levels I've ever played across many games in the last 20 odd years 😄
Great memories of this game. It needs a higher end P4 or an Athlon 64 if you want to play 32 player games with no hitches. I remember trying a top end Athlon xp 3200 and the game was still very CPU bound. Moved up to a socket 754 system and the difference was staggering.
Yeah, feels like it isn't the GPU that is the issue. I have a very similar retro setup, but with 256 MB RAM and a Geforce 3 and it still stutters. Putting in a nice Tualatin and upping the RAM would help his setup.
So I noticed something. I know that there are some pixel shaders used in ut2004 but are ignored if you don't have hardware support for those effects. The GPU I used to play ut2k4 on was an Intel 82865g, a 96MB internal GPU on the family PC, a dell dimension 3000. One of the shaders used was on the shock rifle, that little purple glass area generally has a bit of transparency to it which dulls out after firing, returning to purple when it is ready for another shot. It looks like under the hardware acceleration it is opaque, showing that the card doesn't have shaders.. but under software rendering it looks partially transparent from what I can see.
hey man I never played 2004 UT, only '99, but I remember my older bro being crazy about it. Personally I'm not that into it, but it is very enjoyable to soak in your passion for the whole vibe.
Just seeing the 6 pci slots stirs mental juices. Even back then, it was uncalled for, spacing accounted. You had video (agp) sound & ethernet if not integrated. Good stuff 😊 Source a tnt2 or geforce 256 & youre set. That mx is half the bandwidth at 64.
I feel like I traveled back in time!! Amazing content from a small channel. I feel like a kid again and watching this made me smile, thank you! +1subscriber
Cool build! I laugh (and cringed) when I heard the HDD's "7 straight years" run time. Can't believe all of the hardware is still working. Thank you for sharing!
It is sometimes hard to believe this stuff is ~20 years old. As time goes on, it will become more and more of a surprise at what still works, and be even more amazing. Thanks for the support!
This game was so well designed and optimized it was self entitled, unreal. When this came out, I was useing a 1.4 gig AMD prossesor, a Nvidia Riva TNT 2 graph card and 2 gig of ram. aslong as models were turned to medium, everything else could be set to ultra. Gorgeous game, lost days toit and really miss it's CTF league.
Awesome vid! Brings back tons of fond memories of when I just started pc gaming as a teen. Back then Doom 3 and Farcry and in 2005 Quake 4 were the games my friends and I tried to just at least run "decently" on our crappy setups lol. I ran a Athlon 2200+ with 1,5GB ram and a 6600GT 128mb. Would be nice if you could do those 3 games minimum spec builds aswell. Keep up the good work!!
Oh yes, Far Cry was one of the main games my friends and I used to rank our systems too. One of my friends had his ego tied to the performance of his computer, so when he saw that game running and looking better on another friend's new computer he got super envious! Looking up the minimum requirements for Far Cry, they're not far off from UT2004's surprisingly. It would be a matter of doubling this computer's RAM and changing the graphics card to something with 64MB. Could be interesting to try, and already sounds painful!
Same for me as well with UT2003. Actually it was just the demo for it that got me hooked. Never got the full game but UT2004 was not far off, so I jumped at buying the very same copy featured in the video!
UA-cam coming again with great video recommendations, nice build you made there. I played many hours of UT2004 with an Athlon XP 2400+, 256Mb RAM and FX5200, it got somewhat decent performance given how low end the FX5200 were, at least it runs much better than Doom 3, which I somehow finished at 640x480 at ~20 fps lol.
Thanks for the support! That looks like a cool build too despite the FX's reputation. They tend to keep showing up in my collection so they're great to throw into some old budget builds. Nice job on low-spec Doom 3 completion.
Installing Windows 98 always needed a startup floppy disk as it took 11 hours of installation on my pentium pc tower (Micron)133 MHz processor, 32mb Ram, an ATI GPU (2mb) and 2GB HDD (Caviar Hardisk if I recall) The highest games thing ran on it was MDK but it used to crash alot and Stronghold Crusader 2002, but they had like 10~17 fps, Robinhood Legend of Sherwood and Tombraider II (1997)
Awesome video. I still have this game. Great memories. 👍 keep up ur excellent work. Back then I was an amd fan, until I switched to i7 930. Now I am back to AMd ryzen 7. Lol
Thanks! Yep I have changed processor teams many times and am also currently back to AMD with a Ryzen 7 3800X. It has been more than enough for me for the past few years.
UT99 had the option to precache resources at load time to avoid most of the stutters ingame, provided you had enough memory. I wonder if UT2004 has such an option.
Great video! This was fun to watch. The computer you built is similar to the one I put together in high school. Lots of great memories playing UT04 with buddies on whatever used laptops and desktops we could find!
In original Xboxes from 2000 they'll eject spinning discs if the center spindle is dirty, specifically the little black ring that helps keep the disc in place/acts as a brake pad.
I will have to open up that drive and see what's up. The case had a thin layer of dirt all over it and I bet that got inside the ODD and the FDD throughout the years. Certainly not going to throw it away until getting a closer look.
Pretty sure the CPU is the core culprit behind the subpar performance. I've got a system using the same 1GHZ Pentium III but with a much more respectable 64MB Geforce 4 MX 420 and 512mb of RAM, and it still struggles to maintain a smooth framerate a lot of the time even at low settings.
Love how scalable this game is, all the way down to 320x240 software render and yet I can still play it at 1440p on my modern machine with basically no issues.
Amazing! My new favourite channel! Subbed. Hope to see some old school classics. I would love to do something like this! I would build an AMD slot A, the first to get the Ghz with a Maxtor G400 so I could play Nocturne with the "Special" graphics features only the G400 could do if my mind serves me correctly. What a time to game.
I appreciate your support! You should go for it if you have the parts. I have always wanted a Slot A build but still have yet to come across one for the collection.
Now you need some case badges from geekenspiel to complete the early 00s look. That tower is too bare. God. This game was amazing. I played the hell out of it on my Athlon/nForce builds. This era in PC gaming, and building systems, was incredibly fun.
I LOVED thos inwin cases back in the day....I loved them so much I had like 5 of those mid towers and one of the super monster tall full towers. I used those cases for SO LONG, like into 2007/8 i think.
That was quite the collection. My high school had many student computers using their cases and I've liked their looks ever since. In all that time, this case in the video is the only one I've been able to find out in the wild!
Everyone I knew was playing Halo 2 that year. I literally never heard of UT until a few years ago. This game is 100X better imo. I missed out on 20+ years of UT.
way back i tried to play the trial version on intel extreme graphics at 320x240 with the tech tv guys, with my free 10 hours of netzero dialup. I was running an HP a210n stock.
Ah, I remember I had Geforce MX440 64mb and this game was slow AF in 1280*1024. Then I bought GT6600 256mb and set all setings to high. Graphics was mindblowng at the time.
Oh yes that was a major improvement for sure. I was in a similar situation upgrading to a 256MB PNY 6800 GT. It was like stepping into a new world. "Graphics to Drench Your Senses" was part of the advertising on that card and it sure felt like it seeing all the fancy stuff UT2004 could actually do then!
Not that card specifically no, but I did get a 7900 GTX when finally moving onto a PCI-E build. That was also a great card. I dug it out and tried it in my Dimension XPS Gen 4 video and it's only good for generating tons of artifacts now. A real shame.
Thank you for watching! Yes this game was always a mainstay at our local LAN parties back then. Lots of cold cathodes, flashy cooling fans, ethernet cables everywhere, Balls energy drinks, and UT2004 is how we usually did it.
Watching videos like this really makes me realise just how privileged gamers are today. You really had to work for it if you wanted to game on a PC back in these days. It’s so much easier today.
I used to play this on the computers at ITT Tech lol. They had ati C300 igps that were just enough to run the game. First system I really ran it on though was a P4 S423 1.7ghz, 256mb rambus and an ATI 8500le (I want to say 64mb but probably 32). I have a little project pc I'm trying to figure out what to to for a gpu. Maybe an fx 5200 pci or something if I want a pci sound card too, otherwise might go voodoo2 sli (only 2 slots) but then I'd have to figure out storage as the hdd caddy is in the way. Maybe a 32GB CF Card tucked away somewhere lol
I can relate completely. When my schools upgraded to new Optiplex GX270s and GX280s back then I brought the demo burned onto a CD. It ran right off the disc with no installation required and made the school day that much more bearable! Fun times.
UT2004 has slightly lower recommended system specs than UT2003, but the busier and bigger gamemodes tax things more overall. That card would probably play most of the game just fine I imagine.
Hello! I appreciate the kind words, and I agree. Been trying to get more things sorted for a long while now but I still have plenty of ideas. By the way, interesting stuff on your channel. I hope you have better luck with power supplies and brittle processor sockets!
That sounds like a fun build. I've not had many SLi setups, infact only one with dual GTX 280s on a Core 2 Quad! The last S939 build I did back then was running an Opteron 165 with a 7900GTX, and it was amazing. Two of those cards would have been cool but a power surge took out that system. Was not a good day.
@@snowfoxcomputing yeah it’s a fantastic time. Built it back in 2018 for nostalgia. I have two 7950 GX2’s I want to put in it but I just haven’t had the time to tinker with it.
I had a Celeon 700mhz With Nvidia Riva TNT 2 (the 64mb !) for UT99. Then for 2004 a P4 2Ghz + GF 4MX (64 mb) but with artifacts / bugs , It didn't ran Well at max settings So I asked my shop for a change with a GF 4Ti 4200 128mb (best was 4800 ?) And it was a beast ! Even on Onslaught big map with many bots, it ran like a charm. Many many years later I tried again the 4Ti on an old AGP motherboard , it Still worked perfectly even if the Heatsink was moving out coz of the dead glue :p I'm Still playing it a bit (mainly speedrunnin) on a 8700K / 3080 x) and I'm not sure the game profit of SSD , anyways after a Core2Duo / GF 8800GTX 768mb upgrade to a PhenomII X4 955 / HD5770 (my best budget investement), I Started to Wonder Why I bother uprading , specially GPU every 2-3 years, to stick to UT2K4 ^^ (main online game till around 2015) I've never seen the game loading as fast as on an AMD Venice plateform since, (or P4-E Prescott 3Ghz ?) , thanks to some special server memory sticks (ECC ?) , But it was buggy and crashed a lot too so, not reliable at all.
Interesting on the lowest settings in 480p, kind of looks like a first generation PS2 game. Wasn't shocked that dropping to 240p didn't do anything for the frame rate, it's something that would help a lot in software renderers but with 3D hardware it stopped making a difference in the graphics pipeline Ie. no optimization to be had in that setup. By the time this game arrived software rendering stopped making much sense since there was simply too much and too detailed a graphics standard by default to make it a worthwhile option anymore. Still it's interesting to see how the "squeeze" is handled by minimum specs. ;)
Would be cool to see a follow up video with a 64mb card even though it looks like it was CPU bound. I'm subbing, I like material on old stuff I'm fond of.
I also think, that the CPU is responsible for the mediocre performance. That's why your framerate tanks across all tested resolutions. A CPU limit is always more difficult to handle than a GPU limit.
Nice video! I still have my copies of all the Unreal Tournament games. Definitely great to go back to now and then as they are still WAY better than many "modern" games they create today. I am onboard and subscribed! 👍👍 PS: I was just trying out an old Tyan motherboard with that same Pentium 3 1000 CPU and 640MB RAM. I am thinking of maybe making a retro out of it. Just need to decide on the case. I will also go with an nVidia 6200 that I changed all the caps on. Funny thing about that card is that I bought it brand new many years back and only tried it briefly just once and put it back in the box. I decided to take it out and look at in when I saw nearly ALL of the caps leaking! I never used it and the caps just went bad anyway while it was in the box in storage! It shows that some capacitors CAN actually go bad just from age, I guess, especially if you NEVER use them for a very long time. Something I learned in electronics lessons many years ago. Crappy brand capacitors like back in the "capacitor plague" days of the early 2000s' don't help either I would imagine. Be well! 👍👍
Age is the main factor that makes electrolytic capacitors go bad. I used to work on vacuum tube radios and surprisingly most non-electrolytic capacitors are still good even 70 years later.
That Tyan board sounds great for a build. A shame about the 6200's caps, but they shouldn't be too bad to replace. Dang capacitor plague will haunt us all forever. Thank you for the support!
@@EmergencyChannel I still have my mom's old tube radio and my sister's old Sony reel to reel tape recorder that also runs on vacuum tubes! That old Sony still sounds fantastic even till this day!
This reminds me of the first computer I ever bought when I was in highschool that I still have fond memories of my old emachines athlon xp 3000 and playing doom 3 at the minimum requirements 😆
As someone who has a Pentium 3 / Geforce 3 Ti 200 build I can only say, a bit faster hardware is surely useful. A faster CPU, like a 1.4 GHz Tualatin or Athlon would already do quite a bit. But I love the crunchy text in 320x240 I even got the same motherboard, but a Pentium 3 933EB on it. And some 256 MB PC133 Infineon RAM. For power I got a nice FSP 350W unit. JumperFree mode is super practical. Not only can it automatically set the correct speed, but also precise overclocking. My P3 is stable up to 148 FSB and when I set the RAM down to 100, even 153 is stable.
A Tualatin would certainly be beneficial for this system. Have you tried one in this motherboard? I don't recall seeing official support for them. OCing the 1 GHz Coppermine may have to be something I should try.
When this game came out I was still playing Unreal 99 and Wheel of Time on a Pentium MMX + 64MB. It's not a bad setup but switching up from an 8MB Rage XL to a 32MB Rage Magnum made all the difference in the world in 1600x1200 and even 1920x1440. I had one of those MASSIVE Gateway monitors that could do 2048x1536 but it just didn't look right and the cute passive cooled video card couldn't push the pixels fast enough and even then, just painful to look at. The experience here is quite good. Guys like me would endorse overclocking just to push the frames a little higher but what's really needed is frame stability. When the 1% lows dip LOW, you gotta do something about it. On an interesting note, I'm sure this would run perfecty fine on an eMachines. So building a retro computer might not even be necessary for that authentic experience. Athlon 64, 1GB, nForce4...It's probably fine.
Good stuff. Sounds like that monitor was a lot of fun, and weight. Something like that eMachines would do well if the graphics are in order of course. Is that one of those Nvidia 6150LE integrated types? That can certainly game on a budget.
A retro build with a purpose. Actually, a retro build with THE purpose. Still have it installed in my system and play from time to time, when I need the quick adrenaline rush, although net play is harder and harder to find, especially due to lag. Oh well, I take it out on the bots!
I used to play the absolute hell out of this game on my monster Toshiba laptop back in 2004. 17" screen, 3.4GHz P4, GeForce FX 5700. Performance was good but the fans just screamed whenever I played this or any other game.
That does sound like it would have been rather toasty, good for gaming on a cold winter night! Do you still have the laptop? Curious about the model number.
A correction: Probably obvious to everyone watching, but the hard drive capacity is 120GB, not 128. Guess I was thinking in SSD and not HDD!
Nintendo needs to buy the rights to this IP.. Seriously..
@@kenrickkahnwhat??
@@kenrickkahn if it's up for sale then no, if it's not then definitely not because they (Nintendo) suck
Well SSD like GoodRam CL100 is like 120GB but CX400 is 128GB
Anyone tried running the original UT2004 (not steam or GOG version) on Linux?
The nostalgia is unreal with this one. Built my first rig around 12 and when Unreal Tournament came out it created memories I'm still fond of to this day. It was local LAN parties with some buddies with our desktops and CRT monitors mounted on a dinner table. Don't forget the mounting pizza boxes. Those memories can never be replaced and if you had these memories you are very very lucky.
Oh yes, I miss those days a lot. We used to do LAN parties almost every weekend during the last two years of high school. CRT monitors and pizza boxes definitely included!
Oh man... The feels with this video. I've been playing UT 2004 on my first ever Windows PC. Being 8yrs old at the time, alongside Quake, Doom, Carmagedon, Half Life 1 and CS 1.4... Golden days that bring a tear to my eyes :')
I first played that game on a PowerMac and loved how it ran with the stock FX5200 and its graphics. Since getting into PCs I always loved to see how it runs on systems from different time periods and this video doesn't disappoint. Keep up the great work dude! (Also I have a suspicion that the amount of ram was the cause of stuttering)
Playing this on a PowerMac would be a magical experience for me, since that is a whole different universe of computing I've hardly ever messed with. Hoping to change that up here soon. I appreciate the support!
@@snowfoxcomputing Keep an eye out for a G4 tower if you're interested in exploring the PowerPC world. They're usually unloved, dirt cheap and a reasonably comparable spec to what you've built here
I met so many people on UT2K4. Two of those people I game with to this day. I've known them as long as I've known my son and he remembers sitting on my lap as a toddler playing this game. He is a senior in high school and I credit this game for his love of PC gaming. He still remembers when I got double kill, multi kill, mega kill, etc. Absolutely love this game
Very cool. I hope you have been able to meet these friends in person at least a few times. Sounds like your son had a proper gaming upbringing he can pass onto his children!
@@snowfoxcomputing sadly I have never met them, but our wives and kids all know our voices. We were planning on it a few years ago but covid happened. And my son is now 17. Our living room has 3 pcs (mine, wife and his) and if we don't play together we are still close enough to chit chat. It works👍🏻
This was fun to watch. I've been playing UT3 a lot lately after not having played it for like 12 years, and you can still get lost in it for hours on end. The UT games are some of the best FPS's ever made.
That does tend to happen. UT3 really disappointed me compared to 2004 when it came out but can still be a lot of fun. I also find myself loading it up every now and then for a deathmatch or two.
@@snowfoxcomputing Agree, but have to add that the very same "disappointment when it came out but can still be a lot of fun" applied also to UT 2004, after good ol' UT99! Greatest of all time!
@@snowfoxcomputing 2k3 disappointed original UT fans. 2k4 disappointed 2k3 fans. UT3 disappointed 2k4 fans. Those that came after you were ignorant of your disappointment, and may have one of the later games as THEIR favorite.
@@Bubu567 How can 2k4 disappoint 2k3 fans? The entire 2k3 is essentially in there, it's basically the same game just bigger and better.
@@SianaGearz Mostly I remember complaints about worse performance and a clunkier feel. UT3 felt a little like a tech demo and not polished.
This Video gives me a blast to the past, and the music from the game in the background makes me nostalgic. Back then, when i startet the game on my old Pentium 3 866 mhz, with 384 mb an a Radeon 9200 SE (the "Slow Edition" 😂), it was almost the same experience, but i was happy, that it even was somewhat playable. A year later, i bought a pc on a flea market for cheap with a Athlon XP 2200+, 512 mb ddr1 and a FX5200 Ultra and was amazed on how good UT2004 ran on my "new" machine.
That is awesome. Yeah pretty much if it ran on what you already had then things are good! I've had this game and others running on a 500MHz slotted P3 system before and while it technically works, it's not great. The system you upgraded to is also pretty neat still I'd say.
Cool vid, most likely the 128MB RAM was holding it back the most especially with the stutter. Bumping it up to 256, I'd say the default settings would give a decent experience on most maps, except the larger Onslaught and Assault modes etc. For those to run well, a faster processor would do the trick - that PIII really can't keep up!
Well as you'd expect of a min spec build, it falls short in so many regards. The low RAM is likely responsible for stutter while the weak CPU is responsible for low sustained framerate - if it was GPU limited, reducing resolution would have alleviated the pressure there.
Ahhhh, this is the exact kind of video I love. I love playing UT2004 on my out of date Thinkpad T42. Something about how optimized the game is just feels special.
I played the demo on my dads T42 back in the day. I was hooked after that
holy shit when you showed components i got such a nostalgia trip.... damn
Still visually stunning... I'm with you in the fact that this game solidified my passion for PC gaming. 🤘🔥🔥
Just announced that UT3 is gonna be free for everyone. Makes me wish they would have just re-released this one instead! Great video, i miss my old computer now lol
Thank you for making this video man thoroughly enjoyed it! Subscribed
Such convenient timing with regards to your upload as I was contemplating reinstalling this just yesterday. Cheers.
My favorite game ever made. Ton of mods.
i live for these types of builds - subbed!
Same!
I appreciate the support!
Just found your channel m8! already subscribed! looking forward to see how you grow! this video already blew off!!!
2004 I had no idea it had a re release or massive update. I hammered this 1999/2000. Absolutely amazing game. Deck 16 is probably one of the most fluid and flowing death match levels I've ever played across many games in the last 20 odd years 😄
there this game type called tam. it will blow your mind
the mad onslaught stutter at the start of the round really brings back memories
Yeah, this is more true to my experience back then, than those videos with everything overpowered today. Thx!
Great memories of this game. It needs a higher end P4 or an Athlon 64 if you want to play 32 player games with no hitches. I remember trying a top end Athlon xp 3200 and the game was still very CPU bound. Moved up to a socket 754 system and the difference was staggering.
Yeah, feels like it isn't the GPU that is the issue. I have a very similar retro setup, but with 256 MB RAM and a Geforce 3 and it still stutters.
Putting in a nice Tualatin and upping the RAM would help his setup.
my fav game, cool stuff, cool lore, awesome music, a lot of mods, great community and so fun!
HW mounting AND a trip to the ancient times of hassling Bios and installing Win98? Subbed.
Hearing "Blue power node under attack" unlocked the deepest nostalgia for me. I never even had the full version, I played UT2004 demo for YEARS
Amazing vid! I love when small creators like you pop up on my recommended!
Thank you for the support!
This was awesome. I'd love to see more custom classic builds to try out classic PC games.
this is a great video man, brings me wave after wave of nostalgia. keep up the good work!
Thanks for the support!
Still better than fortnite.
Absolutely.
Better than any multiplayer shooter
@@ME262MKI It's up there.
That's true.
Unreal Tournament Still Cancelled Soz
So I noticed something. I know that there are some pixel shaders used in ut2004 but are ignored if you don't have hardware support for those effects. The GPU I used to play ut2k4 on was an Intel 82865g, a 96MB internal GPU on the family PC, a dell dimension 3000.
One of the shaders used was on the shock rifle, that little purple glass area generally has a bit of transparency to it which dulls out after firing, returning to purple when it is ready for another shot. It looks like under the hardware acceleration it is opaque, showing that the card doesn't have shaders.. but under software rendering it looks partially transparent from what I can see.
I still remember playing the ut2004 demo from a software cd. I also had the pentium 3 1000mhz back then with a GeForce FX 5200.
hey man I never played 2004 UT, only '99, but I remember my older bro being crazy about it. Personally I'm not that into it, but it is very enjoyable to soak in your passion for the whole vibe.
Really cool video idea- congrats on blowing up :P
Thank you for the support!
Just seeing the 6 pci slots stirs mental juices. Even back then, it was uncalled for, spacing accounted. You had video (agp) sound & ethernet if not integrated. Good stuff 😊 Source a tnt2 or geforce 256 & youre set. That mx is half the bandwidth at 64.
Awesome vintage unit. I love vintage gaming with the proper vintage equipment.
Emulation and backwards comparability are great, but there's nothing quite like experiencing the genuine article that's for sure.
awesome vid! I wish you had more comparisons on screen near the end when you REALLY dropped the quality to show the difference. I'm subbbing!
Thanks for the support!
Thank you 👍
I would watch more content like this from you.
I feel like I traveled back in time!! Amazing content from a small channel. I feel like a kid again and watching this made me smile, thank you!
+1subscriber
I appreciate your support!
Cool build! I laugh (and cringed) when I heard the HDD's "7 straight years" run time. Can't believe all of the hardware is still working. Thank you for sharing!
It is sometimes hard to believe this stuff is ~20 years old. As time goes on, it will become more and more of a surprise at what still works, and be even more amazing. Thanks for the support!
This game was so well designed and optimized it was self entitled, unreal. When this came out, I was useing a 1.4 gig AMD prossesor, a Nvidia Riva TNT 2 graph card and 2 gig of ram. aslong as models were turned to medium, everything else could be set to ultra. Gorgeous game, lost days toit and really miss it's CTF league.
Nice build! I need to dig out the Riva cards I have stored somewhere and see exactly what they are, perhaps for other systems to play with.
Awesome vid! Brings back tons of fond memories of when I just started pc gaming as a teen. Back then Doom 3 and Farcry and in 2005 Quake 4 were the games my friends and I tried to just at least run "decently" on our crappy setups lol. I ran a Athlon 2200+ with 1,5GB ram and a 6600GT 128mb. Would be nice if you could do those 3 games minimum spec builds aswell. Keep up the good work!!
Oh yes, Far Cry was one of the main games my friends and I used to rank our systems too. One of my friends had his ego tied to the performance of his computer, so when he saw that game running and looking better on another friend's new computer he got super envious! Looking up the minimum requirements for Far Cry, they're not far off from UT2004's surprisingly. It would be a matter of doubling this computer's RAM and changing the graphics card to something with 64MB. Could be interesting to try, and already sounds painful!
I've never seen a 32mb gpu with a fan cooled heatsink until now
More of those game-specific build videos!
This is one beast of a game. Amazing video!
It's was 2003 edition that got me playing UT.
Quake 2 was my first love in multiplayer games on pc
Same for me as well with UT2003. Actually it was just the demo for it that got me hooked. Never got the full game but UT2004 was not far off, so I jumped at buying the very same copy featured in the video!
Remember that I was blown away by its graphics back in the day haha
UA-cam coming again with great video recommendations, nice build you made there. I played many hours of UT2004 with an Athlon XP 2400+, 256Mb RAM and FX5200, it got somewhat decent performance given how low end the FX5200 were, at least it runs much better than Doom 3, which I somehow finished at 640x480 at ~20 fps lol.
Thanks for the support! That looks like a cool build too despite the FX's reputation. They tend to keep showing up in my collection so they're great to throw into some old budget builds. Nice job on low-spec Doom 3 completion.
Damn. Seeing windows 98 gave me more nostalgia than i expected.
this game brings back so many fun memories! Long live LXG guild
Installing Windows 98 always needed a startup floppy disk as it took 11 hours of installation on my pentium pc tower (Micron)133 MHz processor, 32mb Ram, an ATI GPU (2mb) and 2GB HDD (Caviar Hardisk if I recall)
The highest games thing ran on it was MDK but it used to crash alot and Stronghold Crusader 2002, but they had like 10~17 fps, Robinhood Legend of Sherwood and Tombraider II (1997)
Hey SnowFoxComputing, I enjoyed your video contents! Good thing UA-cam algorithm recommends me here 🤭
Thank you for the support! Cool to see the video being recommended.
Awesome video. I still have this game. Great memories. 👍 keep up ur excellent work. Back then I was an amd fan, until I switched to i7 930. Now I am back to AMd ryzen 7. Lol
Thanks! Yep I have changed processor teams many times and am also currently back to AMD with a Ryzen 7 3800X. It has been more than enough for me for the past few years.
7:39 omg that sound - pure nostalgia 😀
UT99 had the option to precache resources at load time to avoid most of the stutters ingame, provided you had enough memory. I wonder if UT2004 has such an option.
it can precache player models. There are also some fan-made stuff like the DX8 rewrite that increases performance and graphic fidelity in this game.
Great video! This was fun to watch. The computer you built is similar to the one I put together in high school. Lots of great memories playing UT04 with buddies on whatever used laptops and desktops we could find!
That's great. I do miss the LAN party days with all of us showing off our best, or crappiest builds.
In original Xboxes from 2000 they'll eject spinning discs if the center spindle is dirty, specifically the little black ring that helps keep the disc in place/acts as a brake pad.
I will have to open up that drive and see what's up. The case had a thin layer of dirt all over it and I bet that got inside the ODD and the FDD throughout the years. Certainly not going to throw it away until getting a closer look.
Pretty sure the CPU is the core culprit behind the subpar performance. I've got a system using the same 1GHZ Pentium III but with a much more respectable 64MB Geforce 4 MX 420 and 512mb of RAM, and it still struggles to maintain a smooth framerate a lot of the time even at low settings.
Love how scalable this game is, all the way down to 320x240 software render and yet I can still play it at 1440p on my modern machine with basically no issues.
Love the care and attention to detail. Subscribed.
Thank you for the support!
Amazing! My new favourite channel! Subbed. Hope to see some old school classics. I would love to do something like this! I would build an AMD slot A, the first to get the Ghz with a Maxtor G400 so I could play Nocturne with the "Special" graphics features only the G400 could do if my mind serves me correctly. What a time to game.
I appreciate your support! You should go for it if you have the parts. I have always wanted a Slot A build but still have yet to come across one for the collection.
love vids like this, trip down memory lane trying to make my awful compaq presario run anything its minimum could handle.
Such a throw back
I still play the Steam version on my modern 5600g based system, running Linux. This and Quake 3 are still my favorite games.
I love this game..way ahead of it's time back then
Now you need some case badges from geekenspiel to complete the early 00s look. That tower is too bare.
God. This game was amazing. I played the hell out of it on my Athlon/nForce builds. This era in PC gaming, and building systems, was incredibly fun.
Good idea, I should visit that store more often. Lots of things to pick up there. Seems they even use an InWin case in many of their product images.
Ut2k4 Veteran here
I may have to look into that, thanks for the suggestion.
I LOVED thos inwin cases back in the day....I loved them so much I had like 5 of those mid towers and one of the super monster tall full towers. I used those cases for SO LONG, like into 2007/8 i think.
That was quite the collection. My high school had many student computers using their cases and I've liked their looks ever since. In all that time, this case in the video is the only one I've been able to find out in the wild!
Everyone I knew was playing Halo 2 that year. I literally never heard of UT until a few years ago. This game is 100X better imo. I missed out on 20+ years of UT.
way back i tried to play the trial version on intel extreme graphics at 320x240 with the tech tv guys, with my free 10 hours of netzero dialup. I was running an HP a210n stock.
nice vid. theres also unreal championship 1 and 2 on the original xbox which are great.
JEEEEEDEN Tag wie ein besessener gespielt ❤❤❤
A similar video for the first Unreal would be awesome!
Ah, I remember I had Geforce MX440 64mb and this game was slow AF in 1280*1024. Then I bought GT6600 256mb and set all setings to high. Graphics was mindblowng at the time.
Oh yes that was a major improvement for sure. I was in a similar situation upgrading to a 256MB PNY 6800 GT. It was like stepping into a new world. "Graphics to Drench Your Senses" was part of the advertising on that card and it sure felt like it seeing all the fancy stuff UT2004 could actually do then!
@@snowfoxcomputing
Have you used 7800gts or skipped a generation to buy 8800? 😅
Not that card specifically no, but I did get a 7900 GTX when finally moving onto a PCI-E build. That was also a great card. I dug it out and tried it in my Dimension XPS Gen 4 video and it's only good for generating tons of artifacts now. A real shame.
I'm amazed they even bothered with software mode for this game. It was already 2003 or so after all. Quake 3 was hardware only for a while.
never got to play this game series before but it looked like it would of been a lot of fun back in the day
thanks for the video
Thank you for watching! Yes this game was always a mainstay at our local LAN parties back then. Lots of cold cathodes, flashy cooling fans, ethernet cables everywhere, Balls energy drinks, and UT2004 is how we usually did it.
@@snowfoxcomputing or in internet cafes
UT2004 is still one of the best twitch shooters out there, and the AI is fantastic making single player very fun.
Watching videos like this really makes me realise just how privileged gamers are today. You really had to work for it if you wanted to game on a PC back in these days. It’s so much easier today.
I used to play this on the computers at ITT Tech lol. They had ati C300 igps that were just enough to run the game.
First system I really ran it on though was a P4 S423 1.7ghz, 256mb rambus and an ATI 8500le (I want to say 64mb but probably 32).
I have a little project pc I'm trying to figure out what to to for a gpu. Maybe an fx 5200 pci or something if I want a pci sound card too, otherwise might go voodoo2 sli (only 2 slots) but then I'd have to figure out storage as the hdd caddy is in the way. Maybe a 32GB CF Card tucked away somewhere lol
playin this on dell p4’s in 2004 at schoop computer room…this game owned
I can relate completely. When my schools upgraded to new Optiplex GX270s and GX280s back then I brought the demo burned onto a CD. It ran right off the disc with no installation required and made the school day that much more bearable! Fun times.
I never tried UT 2004 with a 3dfx Voodoo 3 but UT 2003 runs very well even in 1024x768 with an Athlon Xp 1500+.
I’ve tried it with a Voodoo5 and it turned out to be... less than ideal combination 🙄
UT2004 has slightly lower recommended system specs than UT2003, but the busier and bigger gamemodes tax things more overall. That card would probably play most of the game just fine I imagine.
We need a UT 2004 Remake.
This channel needs to make a comeback
Hello! I appreciate the kind words, and I agree. Been trying to get more things sorted for a long while now but I still have plenty of ideas. By the way, interesting stuff on your channel. I hope you have better luck with power supplies and brittle processor sockets!
this game is a real Olympus among shooters!
Now there's some real nostalgia
Excellent video 😊
I always loved Intel. So giving a thumbs up for this system
Awesome video!
On my 4800+ 939 build with two 7800GTX's it slaughters this game. It is fun to see this game run on low end hardware
That sounds like a fun build. I've not had many SLi setups, infact only one with dual GTX 280s on a Core 2 Quad! The last S939 build I did back then was running an Opteron 165 with a 7900GTX, and it was amazing. Two of those cards would have been cool but a power surge took out that system. Was not a good day.
@@snowfoxcomputing yeah it’s a fantastic time. Built it back in 2018 for nostalgia. I have two 7950 GX2’s I want to put in it but I just haven’t had the time to tinker with it.
Nebri ♥
I have to admit, this is game that i just love to replay and replay, same with UT99, for some reason it just has that something for me
Nebri FTW! Yeah it always pulls me back in no matter how many years pass by. These games just hold up so well.
@@snowfoxcomputing Ye i have to agree, i did not had such a thing with any other game to be honest. Should probably play it again soon-ish too.
I had a Celeon 700mhz With Nvidia Riva TNT 2 (the 64mb !) for UT99.
Then for 2004 a P4 2Ghz + GF 4MX (64 mb) but with artifacts / bugs , It didn't ran Well at max settings So I asked my shop for a change with a GF 4Ti 4200 128mb (best was 4800 ?) And it was a beast ! Even on Onslaught big map with many bots, it ran like a charm.
Many many years later I tried again the 4Ti on an old AGP motherboard , it Still worked perfectly even if the Heatsink was moving out coz of the dead glue :p
I'm Still playing it a bit (mainly speedrunnin) on a 8700K / 3080 x) and I'm not sure the game profit of SSD , anyways after a Core2Duo / GF 8800GTX 768mb upgrade to a PhenomII X4 955 / HD5770 (my best budget investement), I Started to Wonder Why I bother uprading , specially GPU every 2-3 years, to stick to UT2K4 ^^ (main online game till around 2015)
I've never seen the game loading as fast as on an AMD Venice plateform since, (or P4-E Prescott 3Ghz ?) , thanks to some special server memory sticks (ECC ?) , But it was buggy and crashed a lot too so, not reliable at all.
Interesting on the lowest settings in 480p, kind of looks like a first generation PS2 game. Wasn't shocked that dropping to 240p didn't do anything for the frame rate, it's something that would help a lot in software renderers but with 3D hardware it stopped making a difference in the graphics pipeline Ie. no optimization to be had in that setup.
By the time this game arrived software rendering stopped making much sense since there was simply too much and too detailed a graphics standard by default to make it a worthwhile option anymore. Still it's interesting to see how the "squeeze" is handled by minimum specs. ;)
Would be cool to see a follow up video with a 64mb card even though it looks like it was CPU bound. I'm subbing, I like material on old stuff I'm fond of.
I've been loosely planning a followup video with upgrades to this system so it certainly may come around again! Thanks for your support.
@@snowfoxcomputing can't wait to see it!
I also think, that the CPU is responsible for the mediocre performance. That's why your framerate tanks across all tested resolutions. A CPU limit is always more difficult to handle than a GPU limit.
Looks amazing in 320x240, it's like a PS1 demake. If only you could disable texture filtering to get sharp, nearest-neighbour textures.
Nice video! I still have my copies of all the Unreal Tournament games. Definitely great to go back to now and then as they are still WAY better than many "modern" games they create today. I am onboard and subscribed! 👍👍
PS: I was just trying out an old Tyan motherboard with that same Pentium 3 1000 CPU and 640MB RAM. I am thinking of maybe making a retro out of it. Just need to decide on the case. I will also go with an nVidia 6200 that I changed all the caps on. Funny thing about that card is that I bought it brand new many years back and only tried it briefly just once and put it back in the box. I decided to take it out and look at in when I saw nearly ALL of the caps leaking! I never used it and the caps just went bad anyway while it was in the box in storage! It shows that some capacitors CAN actually go bad just from age, I guess, especially if you NEVER use them for a very long time. Something I learned in electronics lessons many years ago. Crappy brand capacitors like back in the "capacitor plague" days of the early 2000s' don't help either I would imagine. Be well! 👍👍
Age is the main factor that makes electrolytic capacitors go bad. I used to work on vacuum tube radios and surprisingly most non-electrolytic capacitors are still good even 70 years later.
That Tyan board sounds great for a build. A shame about the 6200's caps, but they shouldn't be too bad to replace. Dang capacitor plague will haunt us all forever. Thank you for the support!
@@EmergencyChannel I still have my mom's old tube radio and my sister's old Sony reel to reel tape recorder that also runs on vacuum tubes! That old Sony still sounds fantastic even till this day!
This reminds me of the first computer I ever bought when I was in highschool that I still have fond memories of my old emachines athlon xp 3000 and playing doom 3 at the minimum requirements 😆
Sounds great. eMachines FTW!
As someone who has a Pentium 3 / Geforce 3 Ti 200 build I can only say, a bit faster hardware is surely useful. A faster CPU, like a 1.4 GHz Tualatin or Athlon would already do quite a bit.
But I love the crunchy text in 320x240
I even got the same motherboard, but a Pentium 3 933EB on it. And some 256 MB PC133 Infineon RAM. For power I got a nice FSP 350W unit.
JumperFree mode is super practical. Not only can it automatically set the correct speed, but also precise overclocking. My P3 is stable up to 148 FSB and when I set the RAM down to 100, even 153 is stable.
A Tualatin would certainly be beneficial for this system. Have you tried one in this motherboard? I don't recall seeing official support for them. OCing the 1 GHz Coppermine may have to be something I should try.
When this game came out I was still playing Unreal 99 and Wheel of Time on a Pentium MMX + 64MB. It's not a bad setup but switching up from an 8MB Rage XL to a 32MB Rage Magnum made all the difference in the world in 1600x1200 and even 1920x1440. I had one of those MASSIVE Gateway monitors that could do 2048x1536 but it just didn't look right and the cute passive cooled video card couldn't push the pixels fast enough and even then, just painful to look at.
The experience here is quite good. Guys like me would endorse overclocking just to push the frames a little higher but what's really needed is frame stability. When the 1% lows dip LOW, you gotta do something about it. On an interesting note, I'm sure this would run perfecty fine on an eMachines. So building a retro computer might not even be necessary for that authentic experience. Athlon 64, 1GB, nForce4...It's probably fine.
Good stuff. Sounds like that monitor was a lot of fun, and weight. Something like that eMachines would do well if the graphics are in order of course. Is that one of those Nvidia 6150LE integrated types? That can certainly game on a budget.
this was my go to game back in the days played the hell out of the demo version 💪 💪
A retro build with a purpose. Actually, a retro build with THE purpose. Still have it installed in my system and play from time to time, when I need the quick adrenaline rush, although net play is harder and harder to find, especially due to lag. Oh well, I take it out on the bots!
Just found your channel , good video and please keep up the same content
I used to play the absolute hell out of this game on my monster Toshiba laptop back in 2004. 17" screen, 3.4GHz P4, GeForce FX 5700.
Performance was good but the fans just screamed whenever I played this or any other game.
That does sound like it would have been rather toasty, good for gaming on a cold winter night! Do you still have the laptop? Curious about the model number.
@@snowfoxcomputing Sure do, it's a Satellite P25-S676. Minor miracle that it hasn't cooked itself to death yet. lol