rec.autos.simulators

I'm running a P166 MMX, 64 Meg RAM (EDO), Voodoo 2 (12 Meg), 4-meg PCI
video card. Am I going to see a significant improvement in framerate by
changing CPU and motherboard to go with an AMD KII-500? I'll be using
all my current hardware except for these two items.

Input appreciated before I part w/my $$$...

J. P. Hovercraft

i'V got the same configuration, only i got a intel 333 celeron...
Gpl works great in this environment.... So when u got an amd k2 500, it
works fine!

Dennis

My K6-3/450 + V3 runs GPL very nicely at 1024x768.  I do take a (tolerable)
framerate hit at the start of a 19 car race, but after that I'm pegged at
36 fps.  A K6-2 500/V2 would be very nearly as fast.  The only problem is
that the K6 series is at a dead end.  Come your next upgrade, you'd be
buying _another_ motherboard along with the CPU.  May I gently reccomend
that you save a few more bucks and buy a MB with more headroom.  For a
about the same price, get a 133 MHz socket 1 +  450ish Cellery setup that
would be upgradeable to a P3 1Gig+ somewhere down the road.  Spend another
$100 (or wait a month for AMD's sub $100 Spitfire) and you'd get a Slot A
board + low end K7.  Overclock the K7 to your heart's content.  (The
rumormonger's consensus is that the Spitfire will easily outrun a celleron
of equal cost and match the current K7 lineup at equal clockspeed.)  In
both cases you'd need new memory, about $55 for 64M.  I _fully_ realise
that $$$ doesn't grow on trees, but, IMHO, buying a Super 7 board is a
waste.

I sold my old K6-2/450 to a friend who is running it at 66x6=400 on an Asus
P55T2P4.  Running GPL on a Voodoo2 with FPM memory, he got surprisingly
poor performance; perhaps 60% of what I saw on my 100 MHz board.  I'm
fairly sure the slower memory and cache access are to blame.  If you do
decide to go with the S7 setup, do two things:  (A) Get a Via MVP3 chipset
based board that will allow you to run the CPU/L2 cache bus at 100MHz while
your older memory runs asynchronously at 66MHz, and (B) plan on getting
some PC100 (PC133 will also work) memory fairly soon.  Another option is to
find a K6-3/400 (The 450 is impossible to find and $$$).  Its big on-chip
cache will enable it to run quite a bit better that a K6-2/500 with your
slower RAM.

-Greg

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the AMD should be fast enough, expect constant 36fps except for the start of
the race (about 15-20fps). It might be that it can't handle a full field
though, because the Floating Point Unit of the K6-2 is very weak and FPU
perfomance is imperative for GPL.

If you have the choice, i'd recommend you to get a decent Mainboard with the
intel 440BX chipset, as these are the most stable at the moment, and a
celeron processor, preferably the 466 because it's the best value for money.

If you have spare money, i'd recommend you to put together a decent athlon
system - but this is gonna be expensive :))

Either way, i wouldn't recommend the K6-2, although it probably will do the
job quite well.

cheers,
Alex

Marc.

15-20 FPS at the back of a full field offline is gonna run fine online
with a 1/4 of the cars drawn that u would see offline

I honestly can't remember the last time i ran against the AI with GPL

Md

Marc.