Spent some time with it in the wee hours of the morning racing at Monza.
First off, as mentioned here by a lot of folks, it's a graphics hog. On my
Celeron running 464 mhz, 3dfx V3000 card, and 128 mb of sdram, I had to turn
graphics detail down considerable to get what appeared to be an acceptable
framerate. I hope to have a 600 mhz plus system with a V5 card here in the
next couple of months, so it will be interesting to see how it performs on
it. I am sure there are other tweaks I can do to get better performance with
more graphics, just haven't gotten into that at this point.
Even with the above, it does look good. The drawing of the graphics ahead
with a medium setting is annoying, other than that I really like how it
looks.
As for Monza, certainly it is almost unrecognizeable after running the 67
version of Monza. It is a lot of fun to run though, and I had a good time
racing the ai there last night. Yes, the ai in the default setting are not
that great, they tend to do really dumb things in the turns, but not all
that bad either. As for track realism, I have never personally driven any of
these F1 tracks in the real world, so I can't really comment nor do I really
care that they are modeled to the T. I doubt though Monza has the elevation
changes that are modeled in F12000, at least based on what I have read in
the GPL documentation.
The sound leaves something to be desired, but realize I am coming from
racing stock cars with a 4 speaker/sub setup with a LIve card. I know F1
cars are much higher pitched, and the sound is probably fairly realistic.
Haven't got to tweak any setups yet, but looks like the setup menu definetly
had the setup gurus in mind.
Certainly F12000 is not perfect, and unless you have a PIII 450 or higher,
you may want to wait for a demo to see how it runs on your system. But I am
not dissappointed I purchased it, and plan on spending several hours with
it. For me, I think it is worth it to have a modern F1 sim on my hard drive,
at least until GP3 is out.
Btw, for those complaining about the graphics hog this is, I gotta believe
GP3 will be even worse, at least based on GP2's requirements.
--
Don Burnette
Dburn in N3 and Legends