SkaarjWarrior: I started playing Unreal 2 and noticed how sometimes I get big lag spikes out of nowhere, as if my mouse was stuttering like crazy. One moment it was so bad my mouse just stopped working in-game and I had to restart it. I thought it was an in-game mouse problem, but when these lags occur sound gets messed up and laggy too.

I looked on PCgamingwiki but found nothing related to this. Any ideas?

SkaarjWarrior: I started playing Unreal 2 and noticed how sometimes I get big lag spikes out of nowhere, as if my mouse was stuttering like crazy. One moment it was so bad my mouse just stopped working in-game and I had to restart it. I thought it was an in-game mouse problem, but when these lags occur sound gets messed up and laggy too.

I looked on PCgamingwiki but found nothing related to this. Any ideas?

rsc204: Man is there very little information on this game compared to just about everything else I've ever encountered.

I was having the exact same issues you describe with the game seemingly freezing very randomly for a couple of seconds at a time, a real deal-breaker in a fast-paced shooter like this. The problem seems to be the NVidia drivers, personally I'm running a GTX 960 on Windows 7, but that probably won't make much difference. I had been using the 431.60 drivers but downgraded to 398.36 and the problem simply went away. I noticed a similar problem/solution for SimCity 4, which uses DirectX7 so my conclusion would be NVidia have nerfed backwards compatibility. Of course, it could be a later driver then restores this, but so far I've only tested the earlier one, not really looking to spend hours messing around with drivers frankly.

Beware, older drivers may well improve compatibility with older games, but that could come at the expense of performance/compatibility with newer titles. For me not really an issue, I don't really play any newer releases.

SkaarjWarrior: Oh I forgot about this post of mine, sorry.
I found a fix on the Steam Forums, it's about downloading a d3d8.dll file and putting it in the singleplayer/Sytem folder.

rsc204: I've no idea what you are playing, but very few of the games I like to play have OpenGL support, maybe Software Rendering, but that's just really not a good solution to anything. Unreal2 doesn't seem to offer OpenGL, unless it's very hidden?

Just to add, I gave the latest NVidia drivers (451.67) a try over the weekend, but quickly had to roll back to the 398.36 drivers after the problems with older DirectX games came back. So it doesn't seem this was a simple bug, but rather a change in the drivers that affects backwards compatibility.

Whilst the stuttering/pausing is now gone, I'm still left with problems where my character can suddenly "flip" direction if I'm turning too fast with the mouse, especially whilst strafing. Switching off mouse smoothing, reducing mouse sensitivity and the DPI of my mouse all help to some extent, but the problem just doesn't go away. It's really annoying in a fast-paced game like this and my system has no problems playing Unreal Tournament 2003, which uses the same game engine? Understatement that, I'm getting a smooth 200+ FPS there. Anyone able to offer any advice on this? I still managed to complete the game for the first time today despite it, but I'm hoping in future I'll be able to have a smoother experience.