SCE new user graphics advice

[bsmooth]

I have about a 6 year old PC Asrock P67 Extreme4 with an I5 2500K running an Asus 560 TI graphics card with Win 7 64.
If I just want to run the sim using the graphics controls in the game, what would be the best settings using 1680x1050 screen resolution ?

 

[Gringo]

http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/new-gtx980-now-gsce-graphics-looks-terrible.98462/

These guys have a good discussion on older graphics cards a few pages in.

http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/stock-car-extreme-all-the-tips-you-need-to-know.91704/

This thread might come in handy as you get going.

But your likely to have a pretty good experience out of the box... then tweak it as you go. Have a look in the forums as this topic is popular.

 

[bsmooth]

I did read those, but I noticed the sky in SCE has what looks like rounded graduations, instead of being smooth, almost like jaggies. is there something I'm missing in the config screen I should be setting different?. BTW I think I have mine set to 32 bit instead of 16, does that make a difference ?

 

[Gringo]

Hummm... The graphic config tool has an option for "Shader Level"... have you tried to set that to Auto?

Or maybe experiment with the DX levels... if you can you want DX9. But maybe your hardware needs a different level. No that cant be it you do have a good video card.

Is this issue with all the stock content tracks? And do you have track details set to max.

 

[bsmooth]

I've been reading over the graphics threads, you had mentioned and I came acroos something called the lod patch clamp, and the formula Vee's running with slow FPS, which I what I noticed as well. Do you have to do the lod patch clamp and what does it do?
strangely enough all my fine, although I could never get Rise of Flight to run as well as I wanted to.
RF1 runs terrific as well and from what I understand that uses the same engine.
Is there a frame counter in SCE ?
I'll have to check what my settings are in the Configure screen, which I can assume I can still get to ?

 

[yusupov]

#1 thing to do if youre getting poor framerates in races/with other cars is turn opponent detail down as needed.

check out the NVidia control panel, I can't do it rn but theres an option in the manage 3d settings part to set lods to clamp or w/e the other is, it explains it pretty clearly. pretty sure clamp would be harder on performance, I think it might be something like preventing switching lods, but I'm not really sure why anyone would want that so I'm questioning myself.

 

[MoodyB]

I've been reading over the graphics threads, you had mentioned and I came acroos something called the lod patch clamp, and the formula Vee's running with slow FPS, which I what I noticed as well. Do you have to do the lod patch clamp and what does it do?

'Clamp LOD' in the NVidia Control Panel affects the mipmaps of textures.

Positive ( greater than 0 ) value = progressively blurrier textures.

Negative ( lower than 0 ) value = sharper ( and potentially too sharp) textures.

People use the lod clamp patch for rF1 based games because it improves the pixellation / shimmering of the white lines at the side of tracks, amongst other things.

It only affects how textures appear in-game, and has nothing to do with when a 3d model changes detail level ( that's a different version of LOD that's only controlled by the game, or editing files. )

RF1 runs terrific as well and from what I understand that uses the same engine.
Is there a frame counter in SCE ?

Yep, Both games are based on the GMotor engine.

For a frame counter, press ctrl+f when in-game.
Press it again to show how much video ram you're using, and press it a 3rd time to show both the fps & vram.

I'll have to check what my settings are in the Configure screen, which I can assume I can still get to ?

Run GSC.cfg from the root of the game's installation directory.

Biggest fps hit will likely be from AA being too high in GSC.cfg, and max shadows set in-game.

 

[bsmooth]

Well I figured out why the sky looked so strange. In the configure box I had 1680x1050x16, so I switched to 1680x1050x32 and the sky now looks much better. Still getting those annoying little micro stutters, which really takes away from the game, but i don't know whats causing them.
Weird part is one night I played for 2 hoyrs and everything was good, no stutters at all.

 

[t1mo]

Does SCE support ultrawide 21:9 resolution?

 

[William Wester]

I'm running 3440 x 1440 (21:9)

 

[t1mo]

I'm running 3440 x 1440 (21:9)

Thanks!

 

[Gringo]

Does SCE support ultrawide 21:9 resolution?

Yes it works great on 21:9... I prefer not to use the "widescreen UI" selected from the config tool.

 

[P*Funk]

I used to get graphics slowdowns due to the real time progression. Turning that off solved my FPS issues.

For the record I have an 8 year old PC with a 5 year old GTX 470 and I can run full AA and mostly everything on high at over 100 FPS with it basically locked at 120 FPS without any opponents and the only thing that slows it down significantly would be that time progression. Also I run at 1680 resolution. All settings edited from the game and the config tool.

 

[David Cordell]

Still getting those annoying little micro stutters, which really takes away from the game, but i don't know whats causing them.
Weird part is one night I played for 2 hours and everything was good, no stutters at all.

I have found the most common causes of stutter on my system with GSCE has been race time scale, special effects and opponent detail. I turned race time scale and special effects off and opponent detail to medium or low and what was a stuttering mess is now silky smooth.

 

[P*Funk]

Time scale, thats the thing I was referring to above.

 

[bsmooth]

Whats the Race time scale thing and how do you adjust it? Is it in the settings somewhere ?

 

[s2173]

I have similar pc, even weaker: 550 ti 1gb, core 2 quad Q8200, 4 gig ddr2 ram, windows 10 64-bit. I run the game with 1280x960 resolution, max shadows, race time scale on, maybe few things on high or medium. Most important settings are in my nVidia profile, I will list the things I have changed from default:

Antialiasing mode - override any application setting
Antialiasing - 8x cssa
Maximum prerendered frames - 1
Power management mode - max performance
Texture filtering anisotrophic sample optimization - on
Texture filtering - High performance
Vertical sync - Adaptive (half refresh rate)

That last line, on my 75 hrz monitor, gives me constant 38 fps. Now, the game runs at 100-130 fps without AI, but in G-Motor games I found that there is very noticeable and unpleasant stuttering when frames drop or rise, form 100 to 80, from 70 to 90. On certain tracks that happens on important corners and feels awful. Why half refresh rate, and not full? Well, I can't hold solid 75 behind full field of cars with max shadows, and 38 is very close to the GPL's 36 fps I was so used to, and will not drop lower no matter how much smoke or cars are on screen.

So this is my solution... if you want, you can drop shadows to medium and try just normal adaptive vsync. Don't use the game's vsync tho. You should get it to run pretty smooth without turning off race time scale (I kinda like running laps while the sun rises )

 

[xnorb]

Whats the Race time scale thing and how do you adjust it? Is it in the settings somewhere ?

In the right column of settings in the bottom, there's "Time Scale".
You can increase it up to a factor of x60, which means an hour passes in a minute and a full day/night cycle takes 24 minutes.