rec.autos.simulators

2 weeks ago I upgraded my 'classic' P233MMX/48MB RAM/256K L2/Win95a

System with a Hercules Thriller 3D /8MB /PCI board.

Main reason (I have to admitt it :-) ) was Papyrus' amazing new racing

sim 'Grand Prix Legends'. This GPL sim uses the CPU, L1 and L2 cache

heavily and addresses the V2200 chip therefore AFAIK not via DirectX.

Instead of that, it uses the native RRedline drivers to get maximum

performance out of the grafic hardware

First impression was magnificent. The improvement over my old V1000

board was unbelievable. This worked very good with Hercules' own drivers

(0.85xxx) and well with Renditions reference drivers, too.

Some days ago I did several 'changes' on my sytem:

As far as I remember e.g.:

- I tried the 'oldfashioned' NASCAR2 sim in rendition mode the first

time and was very satisfied again with the improved fps performance

over the old V1000.

- The other day I upgraded my system with a ISDN ISA card, which works

properly and fast.

The next day I tried 'Grand Prix Legends' again and realized a sharp

decrease in fps performance!? I could not believe it.

Especially when the car starts moving, the fps drop heavily and are

mainly in the regions of 18 fps, which was a typical framerate on my old

V1000 board. Normally with the new board I got 24 to 34 fps depending on

driving and environment situation.

I checked 'everything', even the clock rate of the chip (125/63), but
could not find the reason. All BIOS settings sem to be fine, an IRQ is
asigned to the card as well as busmastering is enabled. Even a new
installation of Win95a(!), DirectX6, SB16-driver, GPL, Thiller 3D itself
... didnot help!!

Is there a certain kind of initialization string for the V2200 chip?

Did the NASCAR2 test possibly harm or change this?

Is the ISA bus performance seriously decreased by adding a third device?

Important notice: the performance under DirectX games has not decreased

at all and the 8 MB seem to be still active, because there is a

dashboard in NeedForSpeed3 for example and I still get high resolutions

and color depths in Windows.

I'm really desperate...

Any help therefore is kindly appreciated.

Yours,

J. Pilsl

Altdorf

Germany

   Hi!

   I'm not an expert, but I'd bet that this card is the problem.  Try
removing the card to confirm.  It may be from more items on the ISA
bus.  It also may be that Win95 is frequently accessing the
card/network.  Can you shut down any background network software using
the card?  (In general, it's a good idea to shut down *any* background
software while running GPL.)

   Good luck!

NAR Northeast Regional Contest Board site - points and more...

        On occasion I have to reboot and this I think flushes the
memory in card and improves performance for me at least.

I don't know why, but the framerate on all my sims dropped significantly
with the ISDN card in the system. Oddly enough, it only effects the
2200. My Riva doesn't have a problem with the ISDN card, and neither do
my Voodoo2's.

If you're also using the USR Sportster 128K, shutting its drivers down
(use its icon in the systray)... that restored my framerate. Of course,
if I want to play any games online, I need the ISDN card running... my
solution was to remove the 2200 and go back the the Riva/Voodoo2 combo
instead.

Trips

Hi Juergen,

Maybe silly, but a week ago I also noticed a drop in framerates. I also
started to wonder what on earth could have happened and yesterday I was
showing GPL to a friend and added driving aids for him when I saw I was
driving GPL with ALL 19 sounds! And I alsways played it with 4 sounds. I
know 100% sure I didn't touch the slider, but my system had some lockups a
week ago (caused by some desktop themes) and I think this might have
affected some settings (?). Anyway, the # of sounds makes a BIG difference.
Are ya sure you checked the # of sounds?

Harald