FPS in race and evo

[Nils Wijk]

Hey guys,

This thread is not about what a good fps for gaming is as that is always personal but I noticed my fps is lacking.

CASE:

GTR Evo - Mid Ohio - 25 players: my fps drops to 32 at the last chicane max is about 60 during the lap. I tried the folowing:

• lowering drawdistance from very car 2 far fro both normal view and mirrors
• lowering shadows from Very High to High for both the shadows themselves and the shadow quality
• lowering the AA setting from 4 to 2
• lowering the AF settign from 16 to 8

All this combined did not improve my fps at all. so I think that it is not my GFX(Radeon 3870(800/1170) that is holding me back so it must be the cpu which is an A64-X2 5000 BE running at a little over 3.2Ghz. I know this is not the fastest cpu but it surely should be enough to run this game at a decent frame rate as I can also run it on a A64-3500+ (@2420Mhz)

 

[David Lemon]

Hi Nils, this sounds a bit like the problem I had when I turned v-sync on, is yours turned on?

 

[Nils Wijk]

Hmm I think it was turned of as allways but i will check in a bit. Just did a 3dmark 06 run on default settings and I got 10500

 

[Günthar Rowe]

• lowering shadows from Very High to High for both the shadows themselves and the shadow quality

Shadows have more effect than all the others combined IMO. Before upgrading to a 260GTX OC, I had a 7950 GX2 1Gb, and was able to run everything mostly maxed out except the shadows. with the 260GTX I now have the shadows up and can maintain FPS...

 

[Nils Wijk]

Well I did some testing and it also seemed like the track influenced the FPS as I just tested a race at anderstorp and min fps never came below 45 and this was with 23cars on a public server.

Racing was s**t though, that is why I love rd:amen:

But as I seem not be limited by my GFX I think my next upgrade needs to be the CPU. Was planning on ordering a Radeon 4850 or 4870 but now I need to look for a cpu since GTR Evo only uses one core I am clueless on what cpu to buy as there is no big improvement from AMD over current oc'ed cpu...

 

[Damian Henderson]

A good tip if you want higher fps is to go into your Nvidia or ATI control panel and turn stuff on high performance instead of high quality / quality, like texture filture etc, and also turn AA / AF off, all that will help with your FPS allot but will make the Image quality lower.

Nils , your CPU is fine, games are much more GPU dependent, also your 3870 is a very good card for today's sims like Race07 / GTR2 etc, my 8800GTS G80 is a little better and can play all these games maxed out allways above 60fps without a problem @ 1280 x 1024, what resolution are you running?

I get 10,902 in 3dmark 06.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=7707738

 

[Nils Wijk]

Hmm actually it is the CPU that is holding me back as turning of AA and AF and adjusting the other setting described in the first post (all combined ofcourse) has no influence on the FPS.

I am running 1680x1050 but when I first noticed the fps problem at Mid Ohio it was somehow running at 1360x768 and the fps was the same :S

Next test is running my CPU @ 2.6GHz to see if the fps gets worse...

 

[Damian Henderson]

Honestly your CPU is fine, your getting nearly same score as me in 3dmark06 so you should be getting around same performance. I would probably just upgrade your GPU to a 4870 1GB and am sure you will love the performance increase.

 

[Marcel vd Aa]

Hi Nils, i had the same problem on Mid-Ohio.
I'm running evo on a Pentium 4 clocked @ 3ghz with 1 gig of memory and a radeon x1650pro ( AGP) 512mb.
Mid-ohio was running fine with 25 cars on track and all settings at high except for shadows wich are at max.
I do not have AA on though.
It was in qualy where it happened, came towards that final bend and suddenly my fps dropped.
It lasted for half the track when i decided to go back to garage.
After that i did not see it anymore, i finished qualy and the race without further framedrops.

 

[Nils Wijk]

Ok I did some testing:

Windows Vista 2GB / Catalyst 8.8
1280x800 ingame setting @ high CPU@1600Mhz Min FPS = 23
1280x800 ingame setting @ high CPU@3200Mhz Min FPS = 45
1650x1050 ingame setting @ high CPU@3200Mhz Min FPS = 45
1650x1050 + 4xAA 16xAF ingame setting @ high CPU@3200Mhz Min FPS = 45

General Logic dictates that the limiting factor during these tests is the CPU

On and I also posted a new PB 1:25.6xx lol

Will test under XP tomorow...

 

[Damian Henderson]

I just realised your running Vista, am running it on my other rig and was using Vista for gaming for a while but even after tweaking the OS to the max to get it running as fast as it can I was losing anything from 5-20fps in Race07, GTR2 + various other games over using XP, while rfactor actually ran a little better, everything else apart from gaming and audio stuff I much prefer Vista though, (just my personal experience) The OS does need quite a beefy CPU to run correctly, what you planning on getting?

 

[Nils Wijk]

Strange thing is, that race07 always felt a lot smoother when running on vista compared to xp. I will do some fps testing tomorrow on xp as numbers do not lie Anyways I am not sure on what cpu to buy as I do not want to upgrade my mobo also. This leaves me with amd and since amd has not released anything that will be noticably faster (in race07/GTR Evo) then what I am running now I am stuck :S

 

[Damian Henderson]

The tests you shown don't lie about you being CPU bottlenecked, but it is also a bit strange because your CPU is not that much slower then mine really and where running pretty even GPU's.

My Vista / XP numbers are just from personal experience so I don't know if you will get the same sort of results or not.

I dunno about you but if I check my CPU usage history after playing race for a bit it only uses 1 core, the same with GTR2 & rFactor and there isn't really much chose for you to pick from cpu wise for a AMD based system as a phenom quad won't make much difference if games are only using one of it's cores.

 

[Nils Wijk]

Ok I did some testing on XP and I think my average FPS allmost doubled :thumb: I did not bother to test the lower resolutions. Please note that this has been done with an older driver version

Windows XP 2GB / Catalyst 8.6
1650x1050 ingame setting @ high CPU@3200Mhz Min FPS = 71
1650x1050 + 4xAA 16xAF ingame setting @ Max CPU@3200Mhz Min FPS = 66

 

[Damian Henderson]

Nice, so you allot happier now?

Vista does seem to suck in games unless you have a Quad Core, like a Q9450 @ 3.0Ghz and a GTX260 or 4870, love Vista for everything else though.

Am also using some older drivers still ( if it works don't change it I say )

 

[Nils Wijk]

Actually I never had any problems with vista, maybe it happened after i upgraded to CAT8.8 but that needs to be tested. If you read some reviews on the web you see that in a lot of cases Vista performs better then XP. But also in GTR Evo system requirements it says limited support for Vista or something else of that nature. Anyways no need to buy a new CPU so I will order a G25 tonight

 

[Damian Henderson]

Actually I never had any problems with vista, maybe it happened after i upgraded to CAT8.8 but that needs to be tested. If you read some reviews on the web you see that in a lot of cases Vista performs better then XP. But also in GTR Evo system requirements it says limited support for Vista or something else of that nature. Anyways no need to buy a new CPU so I will order a G25 tonight

It's the other way round in most reviews I've read and from user experience (usually average around 12fps more with a pretty good GPU and in most games in XP's favour, other games only 1 fps difference, sometimes Vista runs other games little better though, ), but am glad your happy and have things sorted now and G25 on the way too! , lucky guy

 

[Christopher Aponte]

well in one of these hours Marcel may say something about Vista & Xp

the only question i have for you right now is......do you have Vista SP1 installed?

 

[Nils Wijk]

well in one of these hours Marcel may say something about Vista & Xp

the only question i have for you right now is......do you have Vista SP1 installed?

Yup Sp1 installed... ...I will do some more testing as I know I was getting virtually the same FPS a couple of weeks ago but Vista felt smoother. But due to some s**t at work I will be very busy the coming weeks...

 

[Nick Carnell]

Hey guys,

This thread is not about what a good fps for gaming is as that is always personal but I noticed my fps is lacking.

CASE:

GTR Evo - Mid Ohio - 25 players: my fps drops to 32 at the last chicane max is about 60 during the lap. I tried the folowing:

I can only dream of fps between 32-60, at monaco on the last RD race I was down to 12 fps.Desperate for a new pc, soon hopefully.