rec.autos.simulators

I bought the game a few weeks ago along with a new machine:

AMD K6-2/450Mhz
64MB SDRAM
Voodoo3 2000 AGP
Gravis Ultrasound MAX (old)

GPL seems to run fine (solid 36fps) in practice, in 1024x768 almost
full detail. In the race, however, with 19 other cars on the grid,
the framerate drops to way below 20fps, probably closer to 10fps.
Even in 640x480 with a lot of detail turned off the framerate
remains below 20fps at the start.

When I bought the machine, I thought it would do better than that in
GPL, but obviously I was wrong. How does my experience compare to
other people's results with similar setups? I don't really have any
other (new) games to compare with, but I got some reasonable results
with 3dMark, so there shouldn't be anything essentially wrong with my
BIOS setup or drivers. I've heard that GPL runs better with Intel
CPUs, but I don't know whether it makes a significant difference.
Also, the motherboard only has 512 kilobytes of external cache, if it
matters.

Otherwise, the game is of course brilliant, most likely the best
computer game ever created. With daily practice and Alison's setups,
I've got down to nine minutes at the Ring, and so far it's been a
most rewarding experience.

Antti Salonen, .fi

I'll just have to save up for that Athlon 750 next year..... ;-)

Mike West
3DNow! UK: www.3dnow.freeserve.co.uk

K6-2 400
96MB SDRAM
Voodoo3 2000 AGP
SB 16 ISA

I never go above 800x600 (just not worth it on my humble 15" screen),
but otherwise, your findings resemble mine. However, in a race with 19
opponents, the game goes back to solid 36 fps once I've cleared the
grid. Instead of turning off overall features, try reducing the number
of things shown in the mirrors and, most importantly, push the "detail
bias" slider a bit more to the left. This only influences the distance
at which GPL uses high-res textures for objects and does not lead to
pop-up scenery. While racing, the texture quality of the trackside
objects is so unimportant, but it makes a lot of difference in the
framerate.

Do you use the setk6 utility? I have a pretty old BIOS which does not
properly support the K6-2, so I get a 10% boost in integer benchmarks
with this tool. On your machine, the increase will probably be
smaller, but the tool is free, so it's worth a try. Search for a file
called setk6v3.zip, unzip it onto your HDD and make a shortcut in
autostart with the following command line:

SETK6.EXE /on /M0:LFB /M1:LFB2

Unfortunately for us AMD users, it does. Apparently, GPL is optimized
for the Intel type FPUs. Integer calculations are not a problem, but
GPL's floating point instructions run much better on the Intel chips.

512k should be enough, although more L2 cache is of course always
better. Does the board run at 100MHz FSB? This is more important for
the performance than the size of the L2 cache.

--
Wolfgang Preiss   \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.

Read before posting!

The original poster wrote "...In the race, however, with 19 other cars on
the grid,
the framerate drops to way below 20fps, probably closer to 10fps"

K.S. Br?nnick

My BIOS is only 3-4 months old, and according to the manufacturer it
supports the CPU fully, so there ought not to be a problem.

How about a little patch for AMD CPUs, Papyrus? I bet many would be happy.

-as

3dnow! is not the answer, just like MMX is not the answer, just like
SSE is not the answer.  Even "a little patch" can be a big effort,
because hardly anyone hand-tunes assembly code anymore.  Heck,
hardly anyone even bothers to compile binaries optimized for each
CPU type and have the install program put the right one on your hard
disk.  (Not even most Linux distributions, whose entire mission is
to package things.)

GPL, Quake 2, etc. do not run better on Intel CPUs because they were
hand-optimized for Intel, but because Intel's pipelined FPU is just
better than the K6's non-pipelined FPU when the FP ops flow fast.
The truth hurts.

Luckily for AMD fans, the K7, er, Athlon has a better FPU than any
x86 chip to date.  The time of begging for 3dnow! patches will be
over, and the time of payback (e.g. "You're only getting 30 fps
because the FPU on your P3 is slow and doesn't have enough
pipelines; get a K7.") will begin.

--

spamgard(tm): To email me, put "geek" in your Subject line.

--
Wolfgang Preiss   \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.

The Mocker