Minimum Spec to run GP4?

I believe its an 8mb card.....in which case you'd stuggle. Remember, if you do upgrade, unless you really know about it, do not fit a new proccessor yourself...you can really screw it up, as can anyone.



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She says brief things, her love’s a pony
My love’s subliminal

i got a p3 1000 mhz with 640 megabytes RAM.

memory and cpu are very important for this game!

i have po of about 40 with 26 frames/min with good graphics settings.

I have P4 2GHz , 512MB Ram and 128MB Radeon 7500 . That's working quite nice but I think I'm going to buy Radeon 9700 Pro.

Hi everybody!

you're all talking about specs, but nobody is complaining about the long loading times. ok, i have an older PC (PIII 500 Mhz, 128 Mb RAM, Voodoo 3d ) but i rather play GP3 just because of the enormous time to load in GP4. This is annoying when you do a lap and go back in Pit to edit your setup, i can go for another cup of coffee. It really takes 3-5 minutes each time ! Does nobody have this problem, or am i inpatient?



Ibanez guitars played by people like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai make me wanna go fast!!


Come and compete to other GP3 hotlappers [www.gp3Hotlaps.tk]

GP4 got delivered to my house this morning, and as suspected, its doesn't work on my pc. Basically the screen is completely without colour, and I can see all the framework that makes up all the structures, all filled with black. The only thing that colour was the external view of the top of the drivers' helmet.

I'll try and get at least 512 mb ram, and hopefully a 128mb graphics card and try it with my processor. If its unsatisfactory I may get a new processor.

Did you try to mess around with the f1graphics.cfg? I'm sure there's probably something in there that could fix it, just decrease all the graphics to their lowest settings.

Ian




PSN/Xbox 360 ID - Ianwoollam

Yeah I messed with all the graphics options inside the game, but still nothing. My graphics card is probably only an 8 or 16 mb card so I am not surprised.

However I have tried it out on my sisters pc, P4 2.4GHz, 256MB RAM, Radeon 7500 graphics card.
I messed with all the graphics settings and I could get everything on medium or high settings and play it comfortably with a decent frame rate, in the lowest resolution setting though, but this only worked well in practise mode, with just 1 car. When I tried it in a race, it slowed right down.Took a couple of minutes just to get out of the pit lane for qualifying.

Is this due to only having 256 mb of RAM? Would 512 mb RAM (or more) in this machine allow the nice graphics I get on practise mode, in an actual race?

Please help

I have an old ATI card that u have. For one, the graphics drivers are really really poor and are not in development no more. 256mb of ram is good but its still best to have 512mb but will not improve the graphics. It may speed up loading times. At the moment i have a 1.4Ghz athlon, 512mb sdram and a 128mb geforce 4 and my PO in a race is 130 and im buying a athlon xp 3000+ with 512mb ddr ram. So in my opinion it would be best to get a new graphics card for sure and a new processor and motherboard

Rickm550, do you have any ideas as to why I could not get decent graphics with a P4 2.4GHz processor and Radeon 7500 graphics card with 256 mb RAM? Most poeple have suggested a Radeon 9700 in this topic, so should the 7500 in my sisters pc be better than I could get it, or is there a big difference between the 7500 and 9700? It was terribly slow with medium and high graphics settings, and with the lowest resolution option.

I've had ATI cards for a long time (till i got my geforce 4) and have found a lot of issues with them, whilst other people have found them OK. Issues vary on system to system. My first ATI 8meg was appauling becos of crap drivers. My 2nd ATI Rage pro 128 (that u have) was OK but suffered becos of crap drivers and graphics core. My 3rd ATI was a radeon was the 7200 aka the RADEON and that was also terrible even though it had 64mb ddr ram. Enough of my rambling, yes, there is a huge difference between the 7500 and 9700 as in memory clock speed, core speed blah blah and i must say that the drivers have improved for ATI cards but i most cencerly recommend a geforce. As for the 7500 in ur sisters pc, yes, thats sounds a bit odd as i had my 7200 RADEON on my current amd 1.4Ghz and 512mb rig and i got 22fps with medium settings and a PO of 110 in races but some ppl here have these cards and get them working. My geforce 4 runs a lot faster at 1280X1024 at higest graphics with a PO of 130. At the moment, the 9700 and higher line products do have a slight edge of performance over geforces. Its your call m8



Post Edited (06-12-03 22:57)

Thanks Rickm550. I found it very strange that I could only get a decent play on GP4 on my sisters pc when I was by myself in practice, and with a lot of the features turned off, and with the options in the advanced menu on medium and high settings. It looked great during the practise, really smooth and flowing, with good textures, but slowed down so much when I did a race. Do you know what could cause the slowdown on my sisters pc during the races? Is it the processor, graphics card or memory?

What upgrades do you think I should go for? Something along the lines of a Radeon 9700, 512 mb RAM, (or possibly 1024?) and a whole new motherboard with P4 2.4 Ghz or AMD Athlon 2.4 or higher. I want it to be as beautiful as some of the screenshots we get on these forums, during races, and not only when I'm alone practising.

What is the best combination of processor, memory and graphics card I should be aiming for?

The thing that gave me the most fps was the hardware sound acceleration thing in the readme..... says this since i cant be bothered linking to the countless threads of it....

4.2 Reducing CPU hit for audio
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Some sound cards and drivers can have a detremental effect on the performance of the game. When you have no hardware acceleration available or selected in the audio menu, windows will be mixing all the sounds for the game in software. This can reduce the speed of the game considerably. You can adjust windows audio system settings in the windows control panel.

*In windows 98/Me look at Control Panel->Multimedia->Advenced Properties->Performance

*In windows 2000/XP look at Control Panel->Sounds and Audio Devices->Speaker Settings) Advanced->Performance.

Here you will find two sliders. The top slider is the amount of hardware acceleration windows will try to use for the sound. The bottom slider is the output quality of the sound.

If you put the top slider to "Full" windows will try to use all the features of your sound card. i.e. hardware acceleration and EAX (if supported). If you put the slider all the way to the left windows will use a very basic way of creating the sound. (On some machines this will not replay the sound correctly in the game). If you are having problems with the sound try adjusting this slider until you find a satisfactory result.

The bottom slider is useful to adjust the sound reproduction quality. If you do not have any hardware acceleration available in the game you can adjust this to use less CPU time at the expense of sound quality. In windows XP the default value for this slider is "Best". This will render the highest interpolated quality sound (at a high CPU hit). Reducing this down to a lower level will help to ease the CPU hit significantly and therefore speed up the game.



Kev

I have a P4 2GIG
512meg Rambus Ram
64mb Gforce 2mmx/400 GC

with everything turned on full in the game i can only manage:-

17/19FPS
PO=100/130




RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE

On ur sisters PC it could be anything from either the graphics cards drivers to motherboard or even sound drivers. Not to forget that the sound card can eat many CPU cycles and slow the game down (this is with 3d EAX enabled or something like that). Ur sisters CPU is very good and the ram is ok. U might wanna try fiddle around with the sound, say turning off all options and just have 2d sound running and see what happens.

As for your upgrade - really depends on what u want to buy. I would get an AMD XP processor as they are cheaper and genrally faster than a P4, defiantly 512mb ram (ddr ram would be best) a new motherboard (obviously) and i dnt know which graphics card......hmmm......maybe a 9700 but i have never had one of these and my previous experiances with ATI cards makes me not want to buy one ever again, even if they are a tad faster than a geforce. But i guess many ppl would say a 9700....or maybe a geforce fx but these both are expensive cards but good quality and fast i guess. If u quote how much u wanna spend i can draw u up a upgrade. Hell, its cost me £450 for AMD Athlon XP 3000+, Gigabyte 7NNXP motherboard and 512MB DDR Ram but this is becos i wanted something that is very fast.

Maybe for u a AMD Athlon XP 2600, 512mb ddr ram and a 100 quid m/board and ur sorted (unless u wanna beast)

check out www.dabs.com



Post Edited (06-12-03 23:21)

fongu's post is something u consider. I had that problem with winxp and a sound blaster live card. I killed my PO hitting 220 at time :O

What's up everyone, I just got GP 4 a couple of hours ago, and it looks amazing! It went very slowly in my PC with low specs, but I'm about to get a laptop for college, and it will be a P4 2,66 GHz 512 mB RAM, 32 mB ATi Radeon Graphics Card. Do you guys think it will be enough to give me some GP 4 pleasure? Or maybe give me a perfect GP 3 simulation? Thanks a lot, and the game seems sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.........
:P ;p

I'm just excited.....

Hello again. I will mess around with the sound settings on my sisters pc to see if it can be imporved.

Today I went to maplin Electronics and they gave me some suggestions. They have a deal on at the moment: ASRock K7S8X Motherboard with 3 DDR slots, plus Athlon XP 2400+ processor, and the cooler, all for £180, saving £125 if bought separately.

They have 256mb Ram for about £60, so I would get 2 of these making 512. Also they can get me a Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card for £160.

So this package upgrade would be about £460 approx. I could buy more memory if I needed it, but what do you reckon about the motherboard/processor basic deal? Would I get beautiful graphics with this setup?

Hello. I changed the audio settings as sugested and it really improved the game on my sisters pc. I set both slider bars to their minimum position, and then went straight to a race, and it worked fine. The sound was awful though, as expected because of the new settings. Would the solution to this new problem be a better sound card?

What do you think of the motherboard/processor deal at Maplin?