Some here might not know that they can make Unreal/UT look a little better with a couple of advanced preferences options, so perhaps one or two might find this post helpful.

Antialiasing reduces the number of jagged edges shown on screen, with a very apparent example being the Rifle's rounds.
Anisotropic Filtering improves the look of distant objects as well as textures seen from certain angles.

To change: Advanced Options > Rendering > Direct3D8/Direct3D9/OpenGL >

MaxAnisotropy - If set to greater than 1, specifies the maximum degree of anisotropy to use for texture filtering. 16 is usuallty the highest available for most and doesn't have too much of a performance impact for me.
NumAASamples - 2, 4 or 8 are common values, 16 is probably overkill.
UseAA - Should be set to "True" to enable antialiasing.

A quick example: MaxAnisotropy = 0 on the top and 16 on the bottom.

Thank you for your tip. Actually all these values were set to 0 in my ini. Espescially changing MaxAnisotropie makes a significant difference: Unreal looks sharper when setting it.

This has really helped a lot. Now Unreal doesn't hurt my eyes when I set it to OpenGL.

Jesus christ I just realized I've had MaxAnisotropy on 0 for ages. HUGE DIFFERENCE.

I also had AA disabled for a long time since it used to slow down my game in intense firefights on some maps, but now that I have a really maximum overkill video card (overkill for UT at least) I can turn that stuff on too

I believe NumAASamples only works when set to 2 or 4...8 and 16 reset it to 0 for me (not literally but I could see there was no anti-aliasing on pixels when set at 8 and 16), so I just keep AA at 4...since there isn't really any difference that the eye can see when above 4 AA samples

Your card probably does not support AA samplings higher than fource, as is the case with low end graphics cards.

GTX 460...a low end card? I think not

I've done 16xAA in other games and it works fine...I dunno why it doesn't want to work in 227

I've been using 16xAF for Unreal Tournament for years. Even with my 7-year old computer, it doesn't cause the least bit of lag. I keep AA at 0, because it really doesn't change much - unless you sit there and stare at corners and take screenshots to compare. AA also lags the game MUCH more than AF, and tends to mess up the font in the menus. The biggest noticeable difference comes from AF, as seen from the screenshots in the first post. Things really clear up.

My personal recommendation:
AF = 16
AA = 0

Here is something else worth mentioning for people that are experiencing tearing or mouse lag (or mouse latency). In your video card settings, force V-sync to on, and turn the pre-render limit to "3" (this removes mouse lag caused by V-sync). Next, go into the game and turn on direct mouse input. You will now have no mouse acceleration, no mouse lag, no tearing, and movement as smooth as butter.

Edit: For the technique above, I also recommend turning off triple-buffering. This causes lag in Unreal Tournament. The much better solution is to pre-render the frames (pre-render limit).

I don't think UT uses above 8 for anistropic, but I always had that on since forever.
AA can muddle things up, sometimes those jaggies let you see that 3 pixel enemie way off far.

That depends on the graphic card I believe. Triple Buffering is usually a good thing, especially when using Vsync, as it's much smoother then with it on. For most games anyway...though with UT2k4, triple buffering doesn indeed make my FPS all choppy for some reason.

I think triple buffering simply sucks in UT, since I had experienced drops in fps with both my previous Radeon card and my current Geforce card. But yes, I agree that triple buffering is usually a good thing. I use it in Quake and most other games to remove mouse latency and lag. Due to the performance hit in UT however, I found the pre-render limit to be much more effective at removing mouse problems caused by V-sync.

I'm sure there will be a few people that will have different experiences based on their system, however.

i remember the days of negative lodbias before anisotropic filtering

+1

-100 loadbias is mad fun

Actually +100 loadbias is even funnier

Yeeeaaaa, that was some nice stuff there.