Question for "high-end" PC gamers.

Dude, Ian isnt lying.

Anyway, yeah the 9600XT has that weird resolution bug. At 1024*768 its performance is poor, but bump it up, its great. Thing is, my monitor only goes up to 1024*768.

GRRR.

I've got windows XP home edition, maybe that's why i get such a sucky FPS :P

but i still don't get that heat haze thingy..

GP4 is a pointless benchmark - ignore any revews using it - this thread proves that perfectly! The amd64 is the best proccessor out there by a big margin at the moment, I can well believe 20% po!



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

Yeah, I think that F1c basically acheives the highest FPS it can, but can cause instability.

Where as GP4 locks the framerate as best it can for stability, although performance isnt an issue. 20Fps is good on GP4 because of the sense of speed. 60FPs you get that horid lack of speed effect. 60Fps on F1c is just average.

Shows how time moves on.

Yeah, anything over about 40fps is bad in gp4 for me :| I feel very detached from the game at those fps.



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

Here's the best I can manage:

30fps
Track geometry: high
Car geometry: medium
Textures: high
Shadows: mid
Reflections: off
Advanced Lighting: on
Main view: All objects
Mirror view: trackside objects
Bump map: on
Heat haze: on
Pit crew: medium
Video walls: off
Environment maps: off
Resolution: 1024x768x32, FSAA x 2
2D, 3D and EAX: on

PO at start of race at Monaco (t-cam view): 105, dropping to mid 80s during race (feels quite loose and smooth, but slows briefly during lap one just before the tunnel entrance)

Specs:

Jetway N2-PAP Ultra NForce 2 mobo
Athlon 2500+ Barton @ 220x10=2200MHz
GeForce Ti-4200 128MB @ 250/600
Creative Audigy soundcard
512MB PC3200 @ 220/440

Direct 3D settings: blend
Performance/quality: performance

OS: Win XP Pro

All LOD_0 cars only!

I've just fitted this soundcard and it blows the 5.1 Live! out of the water and sounds great. The last obstacle for me is to get full reflections going in the wet, but this gets the PO up to 120-130 at race starts, even at tracks like Spa. The best progress I've made is in raising the Front Side Bus. With some PC4000 RAM and a FSB of 250/500 I think I could really see that PO drop further. Well - we can but dream!



Post Edited (02-15-04 15:18)

Haljazz

(feels quite loose and smooth, but slows briefly during lap one just before the tunnel entrance)

I think you'll find the PO goes down a little at - or around were the intermediete's are - with the time check coming up etc. The PC has to do a little more work to calculate these as well as run the game.

Is GP4 the worlds most "PC demanding" game I wonder?, well, to say the game has been out for a while now - and the fact that a "state-of-the=art" PC still won't get the most out of it, well - I wonder. With other games like the forth coming "DOOM", a high-end GFX card will probably do the trick, or the card after

My guess is that GP4 will run maxed out (EVERYTHING on) at 1600 res etc, but will require a 4.5-5GIG processor to run it, and with a GFX card to match (prob a Radeon 11000)


Tony



Post Edited (02-15-04 17:16)

With the ever increase in technology, the word "impossible" should be used with caution - if at all

11000



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Everything is acceptable to me except ... to be a Forgotten ... nothing is worse than that

.....Pro that is



Post Edited (02-15-04 17:32)

With the ever increase in technology, the word "impossible" should be used with caution - if at all

I have P4 3.0 800 fsb, RadeOn 9800 Pro, 1024 DDR 400 RAM, 2x 120 GB Seagate SATA HDD, Audigy 2 ..

And the score on 1024x768 is around 49 fps .. with everything on, except video walls and shadows are on high not on very high ..

The PO is oscilating.. If i start wet race in Monaco i get around 140% .. Magny Cours back on the grid dry weather around 135% .. but after the start it gets down to 80% .. it's completely different feeling driving GP4 on a powerful machine ..




"I will drive flat out all the time. I love racing." - Gilles Villeneuve

@Tony,

Never thought about the calculations for the different sector times. Makes complete sense, that.

I agree that GP4 might be the most demanding game hardware-wise ever written for the PC. It certainly seems that way when you go out and spend £600 building a new PC to run it and you still can't get the reflections on maximum! The thing is, "maxed out" is something I've only started thinking about since it became a tantalizing possibility; this machine was much more than adequate for running GP4 at my old, middle of the road settings. Viper's new 3D rims are a no-no for me still, and I'd need to overclock by another 100MHz to run the full reflections comfortably. That still leaves dynamic environment maps and the slowdowns caused by heavy rain...

How on earth did they test the full settings of this game when they first wrote it some two years ago? Did such a machine exist!?



Haljazz

lol, why would I wanna bullshit about my performance, I had the money to get either a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz or a AMD 64 3200+, and went with the AMD. Granted my PO has increased since I've installed the latest cars but only to 50% sometimes with rain and Monaco goes upto 60% never over that :P

GP4's weird, my old PC wasn't too bad on it, got 30FPS with high GFX on 1024x768. Such a crazy game

I found that using Caelen's f1graphics really helped try using that if you have troubles




PSN/Xbox 360 ID - Ianwoollam

Where can I get hold of Caelen's f1graphics.cfg?



Haljazz

You need to sort out you f1graphics.cfg

i have a PIII 667, 384 SDRAM, geforce4200Ti, i play 1024X768 16bit colour, every set to high, accept pit crew and dynamic lighting, just static, can get 30fps with PO 135% at start then goes to around 90% when things settle down, remember the game was made about two years ago, designed around older graphic drivers, i use 30.82, because the new one slow it down to much, try that and turn most stuff off in the mirrors, accept track, particles, kerbs, walls, shadows and set lod down to 30, and cull to 220, saves po, to get better screenshot set environment map strength to 50 i think, cars looks far better.
hope it helps.

@ralv585,

What you're getting there is really good. As far as the graphics drivers go, I've tried the older ones and personally I didn't notice much difference. Some of the tweaks you suggest I'd be happy to try - especially the cull and lod, although with all lod_0 cars the cull is pretty academic now.

With the mirrrors - that's my trouble. I like to have as much detail as possible in the mirrors. I'll try turning them off just to see if the game takes off without them, but as I said above, 30fps is very playable and it's now become an exercise in how close I can get to turning everything on full. Perhaps I should make a cars.wad with all the lods present again (although that will be a chore), and with a few f1graphics tweaks maybe I can get reflections and environment maps happening.



Haljazz

"GeForce Ti-4200 128MB @ 250/600"

Hal, maybe your gfx card is overheating? The default frequency is 250/444, or 250/512 and you have overclocked the ram to much? Just a thought.

@dolinseks,

This was the 'recommended' setting that the MSI drivers suggested (from default 512 as you say), and I haven't touched the GPU core speed. TBH, this is just garnish and makes little difference either way (it helps the FSAA a little). In fact, I'm not having any hardware problems, and I don't really see how performance is lacking that much. The game is great at the moment, but full reflections seem to be tipping it over the edge. Don't forget I insist on full mirrors and 3D EAX sound.

....I tried turning the mirrors off altogether and PO plunged to less than 50 at race starts. It's the mirrors, simple as that, I think.

I mean - do you think I should be expecting to 'max out' on this machine? Is performance lacking? I think if I went back to normal car lods there wouldn't be a whole lot I was missing out on.

I don't know - of course I'm interested in ways of finding more 'slack' without losing quality.



Haljazz

Yeah, I've had to cut mirrors, otherwise I have about 21fps :| Without, get 35+, with a MX440



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

I just spent half an hour creating a cars.wad the same as the one I usually use, but with all the lods back in there, and I went back to an un-hacked GP4.EXE that will use them all. The results were interesting, since so many things have changed on my PC (notably getting an Audigy sound card) since I first went LOD_0 only...

I didn't notice a startling difference in PO at the start of a race at Monaco. However, the slow-down before the tunnel entrance had vanished, and I have to say the game felt quicker. So I cranked the reflections up from none to full, and turned the rain on. Amazingly, PO hovered around 115 at the start of a race at Monaco (p3) in very heavy rain, before the first corner where it briefly peaked at 125 (this is all T-cam, BTW), and then settled down to around 90 for the bulk of the lap, with the odd peak above 100. The game never felt smoother in the rain.

All I'm missing now are dynamic environment maps, full video walls, high quality pit crew, etc...

The reflections are worth having in the wet, though. The rest I can live without.

Conclusion? Having all lod_0 cars was inflicting a bigger performance hit than I thought. It's not immediately apparent from PO readings, but the standard scheme for saving on CPU usage by having simplified car models at distances seems to be very effective. To get around the 'morphing' effect at, say, the final straight before the Parabolica at Monza, I aim to increase the cull distance.



Post Edited (02-17-04 01:09)

Haljazz

Lo2k,

My OS is XP but have to run GP4 in Win98/ME compatability mde otherwise always randomly ctd.



P4 3.2ghz/800mhzFSB; XFX 7800GS; 2Gig PC3200(400mhz) DDR; Seagate SATA 10krpm HD x2 ;SB AudigyLS .

AYRTON SENNA: F1's Undying Legend.