SystemRescueCD got my back, Unreal Tournament 3 runs but...

(tags game, Windows, Linux, Unreal Tournament)

I had to download Unreal Tournament 3 twice, and then re-verify it with a torrent before the installer ran. Huh. Then the installer said I didn't have enough space to install. Well I knew that going in so that was my fault.

My back was to the wall so I transferred the contents my boot drive from the ol' original 120 GiB (from 2004) to a newer 300 GiB (2007) hard drive. I have a really dumb partition scheme. It is 1 GB for an empty C:, 20 GB for D: (boot), and 90 GB for the program install partition F:. I want to get rid off F:. I used SystemRescueCD 0.4, which is really useful. The copy command was dd with options "if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sde conv=noerror,sync". I did the partition resizing with GParted, which was to extend the extended partition containing D: and F:, move the F: to the right, and expand the D: partition fully.

I can't believe I haven't yet re-installed Windows XP, even after 3 years of use. Well maybe I'm used to the sluggishness? The Program Files is really crufty. :)

So after 3 hours of dd and 6 hours of gparted and 30 minutes of Windows XP at-boot chkdsk, I finally was able to install UT3. It runs. :) It looks terrible and stutters. :( My rig barely meets minimum requirements. The menu screen seemed to be false colored! Imagine VGA resolution, with 50% effective size (320 by 240 effective rendering?!?) and texture detail 1 and world detail 1. Its torture. Anyway, it feels like 20 fps or 30 fps at spurts but looks so so pixelated and murky. Due to the visual and input stuttering, advanced shock rifling is out of the question. In fact, I haven't even played one complete Deathmatch game. I'm still tweaking, believing that its not finding my hardware acceleration card. I suppose I'm in denial. The game crashes and the ATi software says it had to reset the graphics card so I suppose it is using it. :-(

Well I am disappointed, but I'm not going to fix the problem. I'm so satisfied with FPS/TPS gaming on my Xbox 360 that I don't think I'll upgrade my PC this year. Heck I have at least 3 games I want to finish on the Xbox and countless more on the PS2, et al. And the PC version of UT3 I will buy but install it for the OGG music. Music is kewl.