Help with your gfx performance

From a post at Simbin, for those of you suffering high PO:

I have a 1Ghz Athlon, 256mb RAM, GeForce2 Ti 64mb, and Sb Live.

I`m not sure how the split axis works for me but I`ll explain what I did - you can`t just choose `wheel` from the options menu, you have to choose `advanced` and make a custom user setting which you then save as a filename. Once you have setup a custom controller the game seems to recognise all the axis and buttons. By doing this I managed to get split axis working perfectly. Just choosing the `wheel` option from the four default control options wasn`t enough - it didn`t recognise my braking pedal at all.

My framerate is good because I use 16 bit colour. The resolutions in the graphics options menu (in game) are mainly for 32 bit colour - you`ll notice that it only has 640 res and 800 res at the bottom of the list as selectable 16 bit options. So instead of using 800 res (too low for me) I decided to edit the `F1Graphics.cfg` file and force 1024x768 in 16 bit colour. Here is a bit of the file;


1 ; f1graphics.cfg controls all settings (default 0)
1024 ; [RELEASE] Game 3D Horizontal Resolution
768 ; [RELEASE] Game 3D Vertical Resolution
0 ; [RELEASE] Enable 32bit mode if available NB. If Windowed then is forced to desktop format


You have to change the first line to `1` otherwise it won`t use this file for the games graphics settings. Then type in the resolution you want and put a `0` next to the Enable 32 bit mode line so it won`t try to run it in 32 bit.

For me this made a massive difference to the way the game runs - I can even use 2x Antialiasing without any problems at all and I`m only running a GeForce 2. However once you have edited this file you shouldn`t go into the graphics options in the actual game or it will reset the graphics options at that particular time (it won`t change the F1Graphics.cfg file back to normal but you would have to exit and reload in order for the 1024x768 16bit res to be working again).
It doesn`t matter that much as you can edit all of the in-game graphic options from this file so you don`t need to bother with the ingame stuff. You can also change a load of other stuff from this file which aren`t options from the in-game menus. You can get rid of the `track map` while keeping damage and speed displayed in T-Cam mode, you can turn on track reflections for wet races, choose lens flare (didn`t seem to work for me though) and a lot of other things such as level of detail distances.

Just to get to the point.. My exact graphic setup (to get a super smooth game) went like this - I loaded the game, went to graphic options, chose 800x600 with 16bit colour (it`s at the bottom of the list), selected the graphics options I wanted from the `manual` menu (everything highest except reflections and bump and enviroment mapping) ran the `test` option twice (the first time didn`t give an accurate read-out), and then once it had recommended 51 average fps I changed this down to 35 fps so that it would run smoothly all the time. Once this was done I exited the game, made my changes to the F1Graphics.cfg file (so I could have 1024 res and still keep 16 bit colour) and then loaded the game with 2x Antialiasing and it runs perfectly in a full race and it even looks quite nice.

Also turning off 3D sound really helps (depending on your sound card) but selecting 16 bit colour was the thing that made a massive difference for me.