Stuttering Replays

[tpw]

Hi guys. Does anyone have any good tips* as to how to reduce jerky/stuttering playback?

I'm running an i5/GTX660/SSD which is perfectly capable of silky smooth 60fps in cockpit view with everything on max except shadows. However playback is jerky, with frames dipping into the low 20s, particularly if the camera pans across trees. As someone who enjoys replays of the occasional times when I manage to drive OK, this is pretty annoying.

I've set "Record To Memory":true, and replay fidelity to minimum in-game, neither have had the slightest affect. Nor do altering vsync settings or antialiasing/anisotropic filtering. Setting all details to minimum/off only helps to a point, and I'm not that keen on the severely impacted visuals as a result.

I suspect that less than optimal texture handling or LOD switching might be the culprit.

So if any of you have experienced this and stumbled across some settings which helped, I'd be all ears.

* "Buy a better gfx card", and "man up and accept poorly optimised gfx performance because the driving is so good" do not count as good tips.

 

[Gijs van Elderen]

Record to memory: i don't think this is necessary. Your RAM memory will increase during a session. But if you have enough RAM and a 64 bit system it can handle the extra. Unless you are doing long sessions.

Setting replay fidelity to lower is lowering the "sample-rate" the replay makes. So your replay file is smaller.
It has nothing to do with the graphic quality.

Road reflections is a fps killer for replay's. Set it to low or off might help. Lowering texture details might help if you run out of VRAM.
So it depends on what's the culprit: rendering power or VRAM?

Fps of a replay depends a lot on the car/track combo too. Some are better then others. ISI content should be a benchmark.

When in replay full screen mode. Try to switch. With buttons: Pg-up, Pg-down, home, insert, etc..

When in replay mode hit "enter" to hide the replay UI.

If you want to record your replay's, use Vsync. When you upload it to youtube, it will be in 60fps.

Note: track side cams will display/render more track side objects then cockpit view.

 

[tpw]

Thanks Gijs, hugely appreciated mate. After my post I decided to get completely methodical and worked my way through the game and nvidia inspector settings. What I hadn't realised is that most of the nvidia settings applied via inspector do not have any effect until the game is restarted. So I'd been changing things, alt-tabbing back to the game and not noticing any improvements. So in my case lowering antialiasing solved most of the stuttering, and lowering reflections solved the rest. Silky smooth no matter what car or track now!

Thanks again.

 

[Gijs van Elderen]

nvidia inspector settings

2 builds ago ISI did improvements on the ingame AA levels. You might want to try them out.
Some nvidea settings might srewed up your config.ini and cache files.

This is what ISI recommended to do:
http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/rf2-graphic-bugs-things-to-check-first.106607/

But it's up to you what you want ofcourse.