rec.autos.simulators

Performance Gain for Lesser PC's

Peter Hoope

Performance Gain for Lesser PC's

by Peter Hoope » Fri, 30 Oct 1998 04:00:00

HI all,
Just thought I would post a little tweak I found which enables those of us with lesser spec pc's to gain a few extra vital fps. Apologies if this has already been mentioned before but I felt it worth outlining just in case it hadn't or some people like myself hadn't seen it.

In your main GPL directory you should find a very small file called app.ini which contains just 5 options. The one I adjusted was the "soundQuality" one which on my pc had defaulted to 2. I changed this to 0, saved the file then entered the sim.

In Training Mode at Monza in the pit lane I turned on the frame rate counter and could see that the fps was flickering at around the 33/34 mark, a significant difference to the 27/28 experienced with the previous soundQuality setting. The following readings were then taken during several laps:-

POSITION ON TRACK                        soundQuality = 2    soundQuality = 0      
5th post after the pit lane exit                       30                          33
Halfway around Curve Grande                       26-27                     34-35
della Rogia                                                  33                         36
Exit of 2nd Lesmos                                      26-27                     31-32
Under the Bridge                                          33                        MAX
End of right hand barrier around Vialone          28                        MAX
Start of Parabolica Braking Zone                    28                        MAX
Final right hand post around Parabolica          30-32                    34-MAX
Exit of Parabolica                                         26                        31-33
Start \ Finish Line                                         25-26                   31-33

As you can see this equates to roughly 5-6 fps increase over the course of the entire lap, quite a difference and at no extra cost.

Whats more the same increases were realised whilst carrying out the same experiment with 15 ai cars and the change to the sound quality really wasn't that noticeable. Several times during this spell I was able to see for the first time the 37/38 figures that I had seen mentioned in one or two RAS posts.

Again apologies if this is already common knowledge but I would be interested to hear if everyone else had found the framerate increase to be so high.
--
Peter Hooper

PS:- This is on my 233MMX, 64mb RAM, 512k L2 cache, Orchid Righteous 3DFX voodoo 1 card. All forward textures on, cars only in mirrors, all special effects on, detail slider set to one third from left.


rec.autos.simulators is a usenet newsgroup formed in December, 1993. As this group was always unmoderated there may be some spam or off topic articles included. Some links do point back to racesimcentral.net as we could not validate the original address. Please report any pages that you believe warrant deletion from this archive (include the link in your email). RaceSimCentral.net is in no way responsible and does not endorse any of the content herein.