I'll end and review it later today or tomorrow. So maybe you will be interested to wait until I do it, so that it can work flawlessly.

Because I had a bad experience with bashing and making fun when I was trying to do something decent for the community, I have to post this part:
- nr1: If you don't like it, don't care, it's not important for you and you are happy with what you currently have, cool. But if you want your money back, move on, the post is not for you.
- nr2: if you still don't like it, it can be tweaked somewhat. Some dudes like the blue atmosphere of HeatRay, others consider blue unpleasant and cold. That's fine! What's not fine is saying that it sucks, because they can't figure out that it can be fine tuned
- nr3: This requires registry changes. If you are not confortable with it that's fine. But don't whine and just go away.



Sorry, I only know to do this for NVidia cards. If you have an ATI, check out the great Atitray utility.

I'm going to try to fix a few things here for you guys by creating some color profiles and .ini settings. The color profile is only loaded by the drivers when you start the game and then the default one is loaded when you exit


The point of this post is to achieve the best balance of performance, image quality, decent color intensity and have similar tonality to what the game looks like with DOF,and HDR. true HDR is lost obviously, but even then, the settings could be fine tuned to get a bit more poor man's HDR.

First, you have to enable the old NVidia Control Panel. See here how: http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion...hp?t34844.html. I'll Google for some thread which brings the old back, or maybe just doing the reverse will work. Please do it yourself maybe, I don't care, I prefer the older panel.

Then you create a profile for UT3. Let's assume there isn't one, the explanation is a tad more elaborated.

Right click on the desktop and select NVidia display, then the monitor where you play. You should see this:
[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/panel.jpg[/shot]

Then create a color profile. I use this one on MY monitor which I calibrated to hopefully be similar to what you guys have, but YMMV
I use different settings for each color channel. Red and Green are the same, but blue is tweaked to give the game the blueish tone. It disappears when you disable DepthOfField ingame. If you don't like it, you can increase all settings at the same time.

[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/red.jpg[/shot][shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/green.jpg[/shot][shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/blue.jpg[/shot]
Don't worry if the result looks saturated due to higher contrast. In game it looks better.

Save it:
[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/ut3NoDOF.jpg[/shot]


Now 3 options here:
- Use ut3.exe profile, if you have it on the drivers.
- Use bioshock.exe or r6vegas_launcher.exe if you want to force the AA trick.
- Create a new one.
- Or just use some lame profile. I had to screw around here and assigned the profile to Alice.exe You can select other if you feel embarrassed, it's just an example OK? Surely you can figure out that your yourself don't you? Just don't take the thread way OT because of this.

Select 3D performance. Sorry for the poor quality of this and some other shots.
[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/3DSettings.jpg[/shot]
Then you have to make a copy of UT3.exe to alice.exe and create a shortcut pointing to it on your desktop


Since we are tweaking, use these to improve performance w/o perceived image quality loss

Image Settings: Quality
Force mipmaps: Bilinear
Hardware acceleration: Single-display mode. Very important.
Trilinear Optimization: On
Anisotropic mip filter: off
Anisotropic sample optimization: off
Triple Buffering: off
Threaded Optimization: On


Now in utengine.ini, put these settings. This is my balanced quality/performance settings on a 8600, playing at 1024x768 100Hz:
[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/path.jpg[/shot]
Code:
[SystemSettings]
StaticDecals=True
DynamicDecals=false
DynamicLights=True
CompositeDynamicLights=True
DirectionalLightmaps=True
MotionBlur=false
DepthOfField=False
Bloom=true
QualityBloom=true
Distortion=True
DropParticleDistortion=False
SpeedTreeLeaves=True
SpeedTreeFronds=True
OnlyStreamInTextures=True
LensFlares=True
FogVolumes=True
FloatingPointRenderTargets=true
Trilinear=false
OneFrameThreadLag=True
UseVsync=False
UpscaleScreenPercentage=False
Fullscreen=True
AllowD3D10=false
EnableHighPolyChars=False
SkeletalMeshLODBias=0
ParticleLODBias=0
DetailMode=2
ShadowFilterQualityBias=0 
MaxAnisotropy=16

NOTE: setting everything to low can be worse and lame for competitive gameplay. Example: shadows. Get rid of them if you want more FPS. Otherwise they will be important for DM'ers to help predicting that someone is around the corner or how many player are screwing around there. Some others above are debatable here too. If this is _really_ important for DM I'm not sure and I really don't care.
Code:
DynamicShadows=True
LightEnvironmentShadows=true
Now, RivaTuner. Go to www.guru3d.com. The purpose is sharper textures, and monitoring FPS(kicks Fraps ***) and core temperature.

First the LOD: Disclaimer I don't care about it, don't blame me, I use negative LOD. But it appears that positive values are considered cheating. Some people don't have much clue here, because the characters will also blend more with the background instead of standing out, which kinda defeats the purpose. They become way less visible at the distance, even more if you play with high brigthness and gamma. It's similar to shadows, there's always a tradeoff, degrading image quality without thinking will give you a disadvantage instead.


To set up you go here, click the green X. Set LOD to -0.6 or so. -0.9 or -1 are nice too. Lower values will give you even sharper textures but some sort of grain grain when you move. Disable the clamp option
[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/Lod.JPG[/shot]

Anyway, take a look at these screenshots. They are color corrected so that hopefully you see similar results on your monitor when you play with the profile. It has texture sharpness that comes from the negative LOD. This is LOD -3 which is great to show how important the setting is, but you will not be able to play like this, too much grain. -0.6 to -1 is well balanced IMHO and is way better than the default 0


[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/shangri1.jpg[/shot][shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/shangri2.jpg[/shot]
They look nice even after disabling DoF and bloom

Increase brightness ingame if it's too dark, change the Color correction settings at your personal taste and so on.

Finally the monitoring:
[shot]http://turtlegt.planetaclix.pt/iq/monitor.jpg[/shot]

I will detail this part later