Found The Culprit!

The Out Of Hell mod had been absolutely plagued with a terrible framerate issue, even on modern hardware since release in 2009. It was something that I tried to look into, but lacking any real knowledge, the best I could do was try to change a few settings here and there and release a patch.

Still, the problem persisted…until now. A User named ImmersiveSinner joined the Discord channel recently (who also happened to be a member way back in the old days on the forums. Remember those? :p) and told us about a fix they discovered!

Here is what they posted:

8:53 PM]immersiveSinner: What I found … recently when I played it last (last year sometime) was that it still kinda ran like shit lol unless you did one thing then it was smoooooooth as butter.
[8:53 PM]immersiveSinner: I have a 13th Gen i7 and an RTX 4070 TI… so I was still surprised when I had such horrible frame drops…
[8:54 PM]immersiveSinner: but if you just close the console printout window… Damn it’s like a whole new game.
[8:54 PM]immersiveSinner: No idea why.
[8:54 PM]immersiveSinner: like 500 fps constant no matter what’s going on.
[8:55 PM]Chicken+Ribs Combo: Hmm, I havent heard of that! Maybe we can repost that in the bug forum. Theres some folks that tried to get to the bottom of that frame drop
[8:55 PM]immersiveSinner: Yeah so when you switch to OOH in the mod menu in UT2k4… the console windows opens up right?
[8:55 PM]immersiveSinner: just alt-tab. close it. get back to the game… no issues.

So uhhh…there you have it. A framerate bug that’s been there for 15 years was caused by an open console window.  I can only speculate as to why that would cause such a framedrop or consume so much resources, but that was the problem this entire time!

Now, do understand that the mod itself still has issues with optimization, so it probably won’t run completely smooth in all scenarios, but this is definitely better than the alternative!

Thanks @ImmersiveSinner!!!