Hey guys, I'm wondering if you can help me out since i'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to graphics settings and what they do - Perhaps somebody has a similar rig to mine and a bit of knowhow on the matter?

I've a Dell (Dimension 5150) with a P4HT 3.2Ghz CPU, and a Nvidea 8800GT Graphics card, and 4Gb (3.25 gb usable) machine running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

The thing is, on single player, LFS Achieves around 70-80 FPS, which is just fine and to be honest as long as it's over 30 it doesn't bother me how much further above it goes. However online I achieve 40 FPS max and then when >4 cars are around me it can drop to 20, heaven forbid a physics object gets involved .

I know Pentium 4 is fairly old but i'm pretty sure LFS is just as old so why does my machine struggle? LFS has these settings (half of which i don't know what they do);

User lod 0.55
Mirror lod 0.25
Dust lod 0.41
Haze effect yes
Draw sky off
Shadow type low res
Draw trees off
Draw flags off
Draw rubber main
Full screen aa 8x
Texture filtering 16x
Mip bias -1 interface
-2 objects
-3 grass/gravel
-4 road surfaces
textures high res
car/helmet skins full
z buffer depth 24

I've never touched the graphics settings on the actual nvidea program - does this need tweaking too perhaps? I really don't know how to get performance out of this machine

I appreciate your help!

Edit: Another thing, LFS Has higher fps in windowed mode than full screen too

Try turning down Full screen anti aliasing and texture filtering.

Edit: I see high res skins is also on, but I don't know how intensive this is.
Also, did you change screen resolution frequently? Like bought a new monitor?

Quote :

Another thing, LFS Has higher fps in windowed mode than full screen too

Drop your resolution some and the framerate should jump up a lot. P4 is getting seriously old at this stage though and if your limited to less than 4GB of ram then I'd guess your really on 32bit and that your using an AGP slot for the graphics card (didn't thing 8800's came in AGP though). If so then that's your main problem, AGP just doesn't have the bandwidth for a good card and an 8800 can handle way more than your motherboard can give it. Ask around and you can probably find a dual core beige box for free, so long as it has a PCI-E slot it will be a big step up from what your using ATM, you can get a card for it very cheap.

I've changed monitors quite a few times on this machine, atm I'm running two screens, both are Dell VGA's, at 1280*1024

@ Stan

Nope, it's 64 bit windows (x64)

And the graphics card is sat in a PCI Express slot

It was one of the higher end machines at the time :P

If your FPS drops with the number of cars on track increasing, it's your CPU. Make sure it's not overheating. IIRC a perfectly fine P4 3.2 GHz can handle a grid of about 15 at 20+ FPS easily.
BTW, how can you be running a 64bit Windows and have only 3.5 GB of RAM usable? Apart from P4 6xxx series, those CPUs weren't 64bit anyway.

How should I know. Some kind of technicality.. I'm not lieing it's right there in system properties haha

Maybe it's at the motherboards ram limit :/ A 1st gen PCI-E bus is still low for what that card can handle but as madcatx says, it's more likely your cpu causing the bottleneck, how does it handle a full grid of ai opponents? I'd be curious how it runs with a 32bit install, don't think there are any issues with early 64bit systems but it could be a neglected area of windows and 32bit may give better performance, you wouldnt be loosing much if you cant use all the ram you have with your current setup.

I have "kinda" similar pc, P4. 3.2ghz, HD 2600 XT oc 30% ,1.5gb ram

If you have low fps i know the solution go to Option, misc, and search multiplayer speed up option, turn it on, and set the View distance to 210 and the LoD to 0.70, You are gona have better frame rate with no quality loss ( Well maybe some "Box" cars in the mirros when they are really behind and far of you )

in my case in Full grid with 31 cars ahead i have 30 fps on normal tracks and 24 fps on open tracks

After t1 ( normaly ) I have constant 50-60 solid fps.

Also here you have a "good" config

http://puu.sh/ATl0

Also a tip, you can use 2x of AA and 16X of AF, having more AA is pointless unless you use it for screenshot oterwise i strongly recommend you use 2x of AA the rest of the options you can max it al you want

I had 8800GT too when I begun racing online. Reduce AA to 4x or even 2x, and reduce AF to 8x with MIP bias adjustments to compensate if textures gets too blurry. Also there is a dynamic LOD reduction setting under the Misc tab, aswell as multiplayer car draw distance you can adjust. You can also try using compressed textures. Don't force any settings in the nVidia panel.

If you want to experiemnt with the settings you can start a new race in single player and fill the grid with AIs. Put yourself at the very back of the grid so you see all the cars ahead of you. Before the green flag comes on, pause the game and go into options. Enable the FPS counter and start playing around with settings and see how the picture quality and FPS is affected.

Quote from Skagen :

I had 8800GT too when I begun racing online. Reduce AA to 4x or even 2x, and reduce AF to 8x with MIP bias adjustments to compensate if textures gets too blurry. Also there is a dynamic LOD reduction setting under the Misc tab, aswell as multiplayer car draw distance you can adjust. You can also try using compressed textures. Don't force any settings in the nVidia panel.

If you want to experiemnt with the settings you can start a new race in single player and fill the grid with AIs. Put yourself at the very back of the grid so you see all the cars ahead of you. Before the green flag comes on, pause the game and go into options. Enable the FPS counter and start playing around with settings and see how the picture quality and FPS is affected.

use Ai to test fps is not the same as racing on a server with others 32 cars

The amount of geometry is the same. The difference I see is that LFS suspends audio rendering, networking tasks and physic simulations. Computation for AI is also suspended when the game is paused.

The biggest difference between online racing and a paused single player game is the physic calculcations beeing suspended. But for a purely graphical rendering test, it should be pretty much the same.
But if you record a SPR with yourself at the back and play it back, all the simulations should be done, and the computational load should be similar to online racing (no computation for AI).