As some of you may know, the classic Unreal Tournament, and possibly also Unreal itself, but I haven't tested it, suffer from a bizarre form of slowdown on newer computers, largely traced to both Vista and processor management facilities. The game literally runs in slow motion, not stuttering or lagging, but literally as if the 'speed' of the game has been turned down.
My question is this, has anyone who has had the issue found it has been resolved by the GOG team's efforts? Also, if anyone from the team is out there, would they be able to comment if they have encountered and fixed this bug, it effectively prevents people from playing properly on newer machines, and no 'quick fix' I have found online, such as mapping the process to a single core, or making sure speedstep is turned off have worked.

Changing the power settings in Vista did not work. I changed them from 100% CPU to 50% and back again and forth through combination after combination and the game still ran like I was walking through Jello.
I have also tried the other updated UT renderers (which worked great on my XP laptop), which also do not help. Adding the argument "cpuspeed=xxxx" (replacing the x's with numbers, yes) to a shortcut did not help. Running in a compatibility mode with Windows 98 did not help. The posted above "Multi-Core fix" did not help.
I have tried every "solution" on this forum with the same failure. The game is unplayable in this slow state.
Dear lord, I hope Deus Ex doesn't run like this, too. I don't know if I can bear the loss of both. (Speaking of which, GOG.com, where are the Ion Storm games?)
EDIT: Process.exe worked.
http://theunusualsuspect.com/software/process

I hate to double post, but now I have no issues, mainly because I'm using a different computer.
My laptop, with Vista and a Core 2 Duo, has issues. My desktop, with Windows 7 RC and a Pentium E5200, does not.

Yuo would need to edit the UT99MultiCore.bat file, but yes, most likely it would work.

I've had that problem on my TC1100, and traced it to Intel's SpeedStep functionality (AMD probably has a similar feature now on their CPUs), which reduces clock speed and voltage while idle to save power, while bumping it back up to normal when loaded.
The fix there was to set it to maximum performance using Notebook Hardware Control (which I mostly use to keep the CPU undervolted and monitor temps), though that may not be ideal for a desktop. (In that case, you could try disabling C1E and EIST.)

I'm running GOGs version of UT99 straight out of the box on my Windows Vista and I got no problems at all. I got a NVidia graphic card btw..

Hi everyone. I don't have this game on GOG but I bought it on steam and the same speed issue happens with me. I suggest to the GOG support guys that they update their support articles since the power management settings do not always solve the issue and it's not exclusive to windows vista (i'm running windows 7).

I posted what I've researched on the steam forums: [url=]http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=19809748#post19809748[/url]

In short: yes, the issue is because the power management features of modern CPUs and the way that UT, Unreal gold and Deus Ex (every unreal engine 1 game, in fact) set the speed of the game using the nominal (max) speed of the CPU. That speed is used as a reference to set the 100% speed of the game. Since SpeedStep (Intel) and PowerNow! (AMD) lowers the CPU multiplier (and its frequency) the game runs slower and with fluctuating speed each time the computer speed the CPU.

A solution is to download CPU-Z and checking the CPU speed while running the game in a window. Then you use the -CPUSPEED=XXXX command to execute your game, setting your CURRENT (not max) frequency in Mhz, and that number will be used as reference for 100% speed in the game. For example, my core 2 duo runs at 2000mhz max, and that's the reference for UT to measure 100% game speed. If I check my CPU frequency with CPU-Z, it says that i'm running at 1196Mhz. Then I use the -CPUSPEED=1196 command and the game is supposed to run at 100% speed with that frequency.

This solution however, doesn't work that well for me, since the CPU frequency is still fluctuating every time the computer feels the need to speed it up, and of course the game speed reflects this.

The ideal solution would be to have the CPU run at its full speed all the time, battery savings be damned. Then you can try to set your power management options as "high performance" and checking in the "advanced" tab so as to have the CPU running at 100% speed all the time.
Sadly not every motherboard is compatible with windows 7 power management drivers, so this not necessarily reflects a change in CPU speed or power management. Such is my case.

You can try to fiddle inside the motherboard's BIOS and disable EIST, C1E, SpeedStep, PowerNow! or whatever setting enables the motherboard to lower the CPU multiplier. If you can, then you're lucky, but if you're using a laptop you should need to change this setting each time you want to play the game, so as to save battery life when you need it.

If after trying all this, unreal engine 1 games still run slowly/with fluctuating speed, then you're on the same boat as me. Power management settings don't change CPU speed in my case, and my BIOS doesn't have options to disable SpeedStep.

Another workaround is running UT with the software renderer. This strains the CPU enough to enable its highest speed, but of course the game looks bad and if you have a super fast CPU then maybe it won't work.

Funny thing I forgot to tell in the Steam forums: One of the first things i tried was to set vertical sync on on the video card drivers and it worked for a while, UT and Unreal Gold ran perfect. Then I tried to run Deus Ex and the issue happened again in the three games. V-sync settings haven't changed and I tried switching them back and forth to no avail. I don't know if I was running some moderately high requirement application in the background or what happened, but it worked for a while and now it doesn't.

Alternative options that I have yet to try are updating motherboard drivers (to solve the power management compatibility issues) and running some application that enables the highest CPU freq while running the game (but doesn't strain the CPU, as Prime95 does). I'll update accordingly.