I didn't notice a difference between the official 12.41 drivers and
unofficial 12.90 drivers. I prefer to use official drivers. I fooled with
the 12.90 drivers once before with N4 only to find that framerates went down
a bit so I stay away from unoffical stuff.
With my rig mentioned above and with both drivers I can't get my rear view
mirrors to work in non windowed mode and the WINDOWEDMODE=1 setting is
ignored if my desktop color depth isn't the same as the game depth (16
bit)!! I find that at the higher resolutions, 32 bit is too choppy even for
my 1.4 gig AMD. Talk about a can of worms!!!!
The following text from the readme.txt file tells only part of the sorry
tale ...
Video Cards
===========
When running F1 2001 we recommend that your video card setting in Windows
Display Properties is set to 16 bit color depth.
We do not recommend running F1 2001 in high resolutions (1024x768 or higher)
and/or with hardware features such 4x anti-aliasing enabled (only really
feasible on fast 64mb+ cards, e.g. Geforce 3) unless you have 256mb of ram
and your AGP aperture size set to 256mb (contact your motherboard
manufacturer or system manufacturer for assistance with this setting). Users
should also be aware that at this resolution the frame-rate is likely to
drop to significantly due to the memory bandwidth limitations of the AGP
bus. Even a 4x AGP bus can only transmit around 1.2GB/s of graphical data to
the system memory, compared to around 7Gb/s internally on a fast video card
such as the GeForce 3.
4x full screen anti-aliasing is only supported on Voodoo 5 cards in
resolutions up to and including 800x600.
And oh ya, did you read this total ***about replays? ...
Replays
=======
Furthermore, viewing the same replay multiple times may lead to visual
inaccuracies particularly with regards to damage.
> I think if you look at many previous posts on this you'll find that there
> are problems with the 21 series drivers. The 21.85s brought the mirrors
> back for me, but essentially most people - myself included - get the best
> results with the 12.90s.
> I have never had any need to set the desktop to 16 bit, or run in a
window,
> or run Fraps, etc. to get this '*** to run'!
> Once I had gone back to the 12.90 drivers, everything was perfect and
> Iain
> > Please negate step 2) as it was a bad rocket scientist decision. Please
> > stick with your official nvidia 12.41 driver. I noticed with the
> "official"
> > 21.83 driver that the graphics were f**king up here and there and that I
> > didn't see any treads on the front tires in***pit view.
> > The experiments continue ...
> > (Please note that my experiments continue because F1 2001 seems to look
> more
> > interesting than GP3 to this scientist) ...
> > > Why is it that every new game that comes out require you to be a
freekin
> > > rocket scientist to figure out how to get the freekin thing running
> > > smoothly??????
> > > EA's F! 2001 is no ***y exception to say the least. First of all,
> S**k
> > my
> > > d**k EA ... and come out with a patch to relieve the rocket science
> > blues!!!
> > > After much F**king around after 3 hours, here's what you have to do to
> get
> > > great 1280*1024 frames per second (plus rear view f**king mirrors) if
> you
> > > have an AMD 1.4 Ghz ish Geforce2 MX 400 ish 400 meg ram ish machine
...
> > > 1) Set your desktop color depth to 16 bit.
> > > 2) I installed the latest 21.83 nvidia drivers from www.nvidia.com but
> I'm
> > > not sure this is necessary.
> > > C) Make sure the config.ini file in your F1 2001 folder has the
> following
> > > setting ... WINDOWEDMODE=1. I've had problems making this setting
stick
> > > even by setting the config.ini file to READ ONLY!!!! Once again, EA
can
> > > blow me :-)
> > > IV) Start the F1Config.exe program and select 1280*1024 16 bit. Click
> > > analyze. Your object detal should say full and you texture detail
> should
> > > say high.
> > > 4) You can now fool around with display settings within F1 2001. I
> > prefer
> > > to keep any settings out of the "RED".
> > > I hope this helps any non aspiring rocket scientists getting this
***
> to
> > > run.
