Race 07 irregular performance

[Justin Swan]

Ok, so I can play Rfactor 2, R3e and assetto corsa with good frame rates from my modest system, we are talking easy over 60fps at high detail but it seems to struggle with race 07. Obviously something not right with that. I remember reading somewhere that this has bugged a few people in the past too but I can't remember what the fix was. It was something to do with the fps being unrestricted in Race 07 which was ok back in 2007 but with today's GPUs, can cause a problem with too many fps which appears to manifest itself as bad fps performance.
Anybody here know how to fix this?

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

VSync

 

[Chronus]

Ok, so I can play Rfactor 2, R3e and assetto corsa with good frame rates from my modest system, we are talking easy over 60fps at high detail but it seems to struggle with race 07. Obviously something not right with that. I remember reading somewhere that this has bugged a few people in the past too but I can't remember what the fix was. It was something to do with the fps being unrestricted in Race 07 which was ok back in 2007 but with today's GPUs, can cause a problem with too many fps which appears to manifest itself as bad fps performance.
Anybody here know how to fix this?

Justin,

I'd recommend staying away from the following:
- high level anti-aliasing (performance may suffer with some mods)
- VSYNC (whether you're racing Race07, iRacing or some other racesim, you'll inevitably see controller lag injected by VSYNC)
- FULL shadows (you'll miss the in-cockpit shadowing, but maybe that is a small price to pay)

Depending on your system, you can use a pretty high level of effects and good quality gfx drivers settings if you follow what we advise here:

http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showthread.php?t=279865

http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showthread.php?t=289955

People with 2008 rigs report big improvements by following what moryah suggested and was later confirmed by a nVidia dev in nvidia forums.

I also suggest, if you use nvidia cards, Nvidia Inspector. With it, you can force/set a certain limit for FPS, which will stabilize the performance and help avoid gpu heat problems.
Good luck, mate.

 

[Justin Swan]

Thanks Kennett Ylitalo and Chronus I'll be sure to try all that out

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

Doesn't NVidia Inspector cause the same lag as VSync? I don't know but somehow it amkes me think that any artificial limits would cause lagging.

I admit, using VSync is the final option and Race07 has always performed best with max settings. in 2008 era (that means 2005-2006 PC, i'm poor...) it was either low or max, anything in between didn't improve FPS one bit.. Now with 3 year old equipment it should be maxed. Checking background processes is a good thing to do, Race isn't optimized for multicore CPUs so it's more sensitive to background actions. I've had some antivirus applications interfere with race big time but that was some time ago, did a full round of av softwares recently (all 2013 free antiviral SW, MS Essential was the best, damnit..) and not counting updates or nagging screens, none of them caused any harm.

Oh and i have never had more than 12 cars visible, makes the most difference.

EDIT: Don't know if it counts but as a audio guy, the highest latency that you can "feel" is around 7ms on instictuous actions (playing an instrument is not really conscious, learning a new track is like learning a new song etc there are huge amount of parallels between the two). After that the action seems simultaneous. I would think the same goes for simulator and other games, make it around 3ms and i'll bet that no one can sense the difference.. 3ms is 333FPS, sound travels about 1m in that time..
We all know that playing something over 100FPS doesn't make any dfference, that getting really really close to that magical 7ms latency ( i remember reading somewhere that 120 is the human limit in theory, it was a lengthy piece with lots of fine words and graphs..). Allthou latency is always negative, it always adds to the reaction but the difference is really really minute if we are talking about input latency on a system that's controlled by a human.... My own experience tells that 30FPS is the lower limit, after that lap times begin to suffer. Spiky FPS is much worse so using VSync or some other limit is totally viable method. Input latency is secondary when it comes to consistency.

 

[Justin Swan]

I'm using an Alienware X51 which only has an i3-3230@3.3,Nvidia GeForce GT 545 1GB gfx and 4GB ram running on Win 7 64 bit. I did as the link suggested and maxed out all the settings and hey presto! ran as smooth as silk! I wasn't expecting that.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

It is weird.. Just make sure you check GPU temps every once in a while, Race tends to run hot.

EDIT: Totally off topic but did you know in one clock pulse, the electricity that starts from the center of you CPU can not reach the edges of your motherboard (imagining a wire that's comes straight from the cpu running at 3GHz, that's 10cm...) That's mighty fast and still those things break relatively seldom (in computer "timeline" that's like multiple earth histories between each crash..) When photon starts it's travel from screen and reaches your retina, the CPU has started at least 4 instructions.

 

[Chronus]

I'm using an Alienware X51 which only has an i3-3230@3.3,Nvidia GeForce GT 545 1GB gfx and 4GB ram running on Win 7 64 bit. I did as the link suggested and maxed out all the settings and hey presto! ran as smooth as silk! I wasn't expecting that.

Great! Glad it helped you, it's helped a lot of others.

The nvidia developer/engineer explained in detail why the improvement of performance happens - related to pipelines and shader units used.

So, while from a pure programming perspective this sort of surprises people, from the point of view of gpu architecture makes sense.

One final advice: use Nvida inspector and set gpu fans to manual (instead of the usual auto-throttled setting of 35% or so). We usually set it at above 90%, it helps a lot in keeping gpu temps down.

---

RE: lag and nvidia inspector

Nvidia inspector never caused lag - visual or controller lag, never heard of that and it doesn't make much sense. If people force VSYNC through Nvidia Inspector (or through Rivatuner, nHancer, d3doverrider or other app) then under known circumstances controller lag is inevitable, but that has nothing to do with the apps forcing it.

Forcing a cap on FPS stabilizes performance for a number of reasons. Plus, it ends up easing the load on the gpu cores if you set it around 60 to 70 FPS - though I have seen users force 100 FPS and keep the cores at relatively low temps.

 

[Justin Swan]

Chronus On paper the Gt 545 looks a cheap and cheerfully graphics card but I'm very impressed with its performance. I haven't come across anything yet that I've had serious (unplayable) issues with. Planetside 2, battlefield 3, far cry 3, borderlands 2 and even the latest batch of sim racing titles run at decent frame rates at anything from med/high-high/max settings and the gpu doesn't seem to struggle at all. I don't think I've seen temps above about 60deg or auto fan speeds going above 40%. I was looking at upgrading to a 650ti boost or 660 but I really don't think it warrants the expense.

 

[Chronus]

I still have my old 9800GT (an upgraded 8800GT, basically) and with a very mild overclock (dispenses with non-air cooling) and all the tweaks (in-sim, gfx drivers, shaders, lighting) Race07 (steam or offline) runs superbly and usually stays at around 58 fps(my fps limit).

GTR2/GTL perfect, rFactor runs well (even better), NKP runs superbly, LFS stable at around 5x (depending on the number of AI cars), XMR is pretty much ok too. Only S2U and pCARS (terrible performance in my rig) hit the lower 40s or less.

Right now, and with 2.5 year old gfx drivers, it's quite good.

Temperature wise, as temps keep rising towards the mid-spring temps outside, so too are rising inside the room but until now both the cpu and gpu cores are comfortably well within limits.

Upgrading now? Nope. I fully understand what you mean.

Glad everything is super for you.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

Chronus : Can you give me links to that info, it's really interesting. My notions are not based on any facts, just my own train of thought. Now that i think about it, VSync could cause wait cycles, would like to read more about the subject. I really thought we would be running against some FPS limiter by now but then again, programmers tend to take all the processing time available and then some.. Kind a analoquous to loudness war and it's countermeasures..

 

[Chronus]

The reasons why VSYNC introduces lag are known and several sites present the information in a very detailed manner.

The explanation regarding why the max settings (plus gfx driver settings recommended in the threads I referred above) work was given early 2012, at Nvidia forums. I can't recall the name of the thread(s) but one of them focused on the shaders used when CUDA was enabled. Both threads (in which this was discussed) were many pages long.