DX 8.1 Prob with new patch!

Hi again all, hope youre all well, sorry its been so long since my last visit but its time for a bit more GP4 action seeing as theyve released this new patch. After installing the patch it tells me I need to have DX 8.1 installed but I have it already, but its the 8.2 Direct X, so why doesnt it recognize this version. Anyone else overcome this prob?

Thanks in advance.




May The DownForce Be With You!

Oops If I had read back a page I would have found the problem. All I do is use the folder .EXE not the shortcut. Hope DX9 officially comes out and fixes everything.




May The DownForce Be With You!

Welcome back, lad!

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REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS

Ah Wedge, you return! But for how long?




Racing Is Life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting
Jesus may be able to heal the sick and bring the dead back to life, but he can't do shît for low fps

Until Anki Vraught returns.

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It's only after we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything.

Hahaaa, alas no, Ive definitely seen the last of that nerd whoever it was! Norton Systemworks 2003 sits patiently on my PC awaiting his return so it can ditch his virae straight in the quarantine section!

Anyway, heres my report on GP4 AFTER I installed the patch. I was expecting to be enabled to play with more graphical settings on full but it still only gave me about 12 FPS with everything on, then I went back to having most of the important stuff on high and the rest on mde-low and q few items that werent reeaally necessary to low or off and it still gave me about 18 fps, not exactly flying eh? SO I went for the auto-detect feature and the most I got was 22 fps, Im really disappointed as a lot of other 3D hungry games I have can give me 90+ fps, 40-50 min at a push, stuff like Medal Of Honor, UT23K, where rendering is happening a lot with lots of characters, whats to render in GP4, a bunch of cars where only the wheels and a few other things actually move. Totally baffled and I hope GP5 can improve on visualperformance. But at the end of the day, it looks better than GP3 and Im still enjoying it as much as I did the first time I played GP1.

Happy Racing and if I dont see ya'll in here before Christmas then all the best and hope Santa brings you all the hardware you wished for!




May The DownForce Be With You!

... where rendering is happening a lot with lots of characters, whats to render in GP4, a bunch of cars where only the wheels and a few other things actually move.

Well, thats not quite the whole story. GP4 has to have an open space ready for rendering, thats about 3 x 1,5 kilometers. Thats 4,5 square kilometers of rendering (if it really isn't more) without loading at all during play! Most GFX engine cannot do this at all, nor even come close. 3dshooters solve this problem by narrowly defining where you can go, in a linear gameplay and movement restrictions, and by dividing the levels up into small sections that are loaded as needed. If you look at one of the closest attempts at what GP4 is trying to do, made in 3dshooter, that would be the forest map in UT2003. And with medium detail, I get about the same framerate on this map, as I do in GP4.

And really, there are more than 22 moving 3d objects. Every car can (and sometime does) split into little pieces. And then you have the marshalls running from their posts to the track, and 11 pit crews consisting of several engineers. None of this can be loaded during the game. Everything has to be stored in memory before the race starts. And most objects are, contrary to GP3, now in 3d, even though they are static.

The Q3 GFX engine couldn't do what GP4 does. UT2003 is on track, but it certainly isn't lavish in its fps either. Serious Sam (and its sequel) or Hitman 2, is probably the most generous shooter in recent months, when it comes to wide open spaces and many 3d objects. And none of them portray movement in the range of 100+ kph, nor do they need complex CPU demanding physics.

Thats not to say, that I think that the GFX engine for GP4 is generous in the fps department, far from that, but most people don't realize how hard it is to have such a vast area ready for rendering, and how many objects there actually is in the game, and how sheer speed of movement affects a games performance. The best thing to invoke is certainly not 3dshooters. Far better would be flight sims, since their specialty is the same as GP4's: Good GFX with lots of damagable objects that move in high speeds, while they obey complex CPU demanding physics, in wide open spaces.

Anyway, a lot of people have studied tinkering with the F1graphics.cfg file, and vastly increased their performance. If you need more ommph, I am sure that if you ask in a new topic and remember to post your specs, people will be more than happy to hand out a few pointers.

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It's only after we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything.

... and dont forget that brilliant physics that have to be calculated all the time, gfx isnt everything in gp4.

two suggestions for a better performance:

no objects in mirrors, just other cars. mirrors eat lots of fps.

start with 800x600x16 and turn everything off. then see what fps you get and drive a few laps (and be amazed how good the car reacts to your input), than start to set some of the gfx-settings higher. this gives you a good impression of what you can expect from your system before changing the f1grphics-file.,

greetings, jp