Reducing the texture resolution doesn't help increase my framerate either. Here are some FPS stats from a 1 lap capture of a 29 car grid at WE2, looking from the car around 5th place, cockpit view.

High res textures: Avg: 51.383 - Min: 35 - Max: 79
Low res textures: Avg: 51.930 - Min: 38 - Max: 78

53 FPS at the start, down to 32 FPS in the first corner.

In SHIFT + U mode, I've got 30 FPS when the whole the track is visible, switching to low res textures makes no difference.

In single player, one car on track, I get 90 FPS at the start and 56 in the first corner, then again about 90 going into T2, 130 in T3.

The FPS loss is likely due to more objects being drawn at different places. But my CPU/GPU are quite old (AMD Athlon II X3 455, ATI Radeon HD 5770), so I partially blame my system for that


And a note, I personally like higher res textures, because of the ability to get that bit closer to the objects without losing the quality. It just gives it a more realistic feel for me, a good sign of quality too. I agree that when you're racing, you hardly notice them. But it's nice to have them there for other purposes like screenshots/videos or other cases when your car might end up close to something and the texture still looks good.

But that is just me – it's individual. Some people love them, some people find them useless – that's why the low res texture per-track option is a good idea to implement.

It doesn't matter what GPU you have, you're always going to get basically the same results, it's the CPU that matters.

With a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7850 I'm getting ~40fps when I view the whole track in SHIFT+U and LFS is maxing out one of my cores.

One of my team mates recently bought a GPU that's roughly 40% faster than my card and his FPS in various tests was only slightly better. That's because his CPU is more or less the same as mine.

I have an AMD A10 5700 APU @ 3.4GHz and LFS maxes out 1 of the cores most of the time on Westhill. That's the problem with most games, like LFS, they're single-threaded and unless your CPU is great at single-threaded stuff LFS will not run any better regardless of how much graphical processing power you throw at it.

Your CPU is letting you down Martin, not your GPU.

Eehh .. If I reduce GPU memory speed from 1 Ghz to 800 Mhz I already experience 120->100 fps on avarage. So how can you say that GPU doesn't matter?

Oddly enough, I get only around 25% GPU usage when playing LFS, if that's relevant.

Interesting find cargame, as far as I remember GPU memory speed never affected FPS much. Default of 800 MHz gives me around 142 FPS, increasing it to 1000 MHz FPS goes to 160 FPS. Change in GPU frequency does give a couple more FPS, but very minor to percentage of overclock. Probably due to reason that my GPU isn't that heavily stressed, around 60% at the moment.

Neither the CPU is fully utilised, while doing same tests I've got around 30-35% usage (dual core), but its an Intel, relatively newer (2014). I'm not a fanboy, but Intel seem to get far better results in single-threaded benchmarks.

Quote from Flame CZE :

Oddly enough, I get only around 25% GPU usage when playing LFS, if that's relevant.

LFS has always been far more CPU intensive than GPU.

It depends which is the bottleneck, GPU or CPU.
I got a bigger (minimum) FPS increase by overclocking my CPU by 300MHz than getting a 3x faster GPU.

As for the GPU, it's running at ~75% core clock with barely any load.

My guess is that the CPU isn't able to send the graphics calls fast enough for the GPU to do much.

The fact that I have zero FPS difference with no AF+AA and low textures vs. max AA+AF and high res textures reinforces that. (AA especially is a very expensive operation, graphically)

Interestingly, disabling car shadows alone gives a significant FPS increase.

Edit:
FWIW, most "FPS drops" that I experience that aren't obviously down to what's being drawn on screen or driving outside the the open config path system seem to be caused by people leaving pits and skin/texture loading. Another CPU load issue?

Thanks for the info. It goes in somewhere.

Scawen, I think the problem might be draw calls at some places. You should try to create bigger object instead of a ton of small ones. It will reduce a lot the number of draw calls sended to the GPU.

That is how it is done. The tens of thousands of small objects are indeed grouped together in static vertex buffers and called to be drawn, material by material. If they were drawn individually the frame rate would be much, much slower.

However, that is quite impossible with sorted alpha objects which must be drawn in sorted order, far to near, as individual objects. The sorted alpha objects are a big part of the problem, causing many more draw calls for relatively few triangles, and this is one reason why we use a hidden object removal system.

There isn't going to be a 'magic bullet' here, something I've totally overlooked, after all these years. Westhill is highly detailed and that's why it's slower in some places. 25% drop in some places isn't some strange and weird thing, a mystery that is waiting to be solved. Obviously if you see more objects, if your frame rate is unlimited, then it will take longer to draw each frame. If you don't want frame rate drops, set vertical sync on and go full screen. I am quite shocked that anyone can think it's a bug that unlimited frame rates may vary depending on where you are looking.

There are some small optimisations that can be done, with minor frame rate benefits. I can't say exactly how much but I expect very small benefits like 1 or 2 per cent from the ideas I already have. The car shadows do cause a significant slowdown and it will be interesting what will happen with a new shadow system I would like to try at some point. Though I expect that to have a negative effect on frame rate.

Thanks in advance but I do not wish to discuss a new shadow system, I just want to try it at some time. I also have some partly developed live generated car reflections that also will reduce the frame rate further for your viewing pleasure! They look nice though!

NOTE:

There are three totally different "frame rate drop issues" here.

1) People with a laptop randomly going into CPU energy saving mode, causing a dramatic loss of frame rate. These people have to set up their computer properly to run LFS. Unless someone tells me how LFS could instruct the CPU not to go into power saving mode. I really have no idea about this.

2) People who notice a drop from (e.g.) 350 to 280 frames per second. Well that is like saying, the sky (in the real world) is fluctuating, sometimes it is blue and sometimes grey, and sometimes it is black with small dots of light on it. Yes, obviously, as expected.

3) People who have noticed that Westhill has a lower frame rate than other tracks. Well, true, of course. It is far more detailed. There may be some slight things I can do to improve this, with a lot of detailed analysis and experimentation. But this is why I am following the thread, letting it pass through the mind every now and then, even while I am on holiday.

Like I said, there is no 'bug' and no 'magic bullet' to be hoped for here. Maybe some slight improvements, but that's about it.

I run a triple core and 2 gig of ram , 512 geforce graphics card and I don't have any problems with new west hill, seems to me people are more interested in watching there frame rates than actually racing around the track. Oh I did notice the grass was green whilst doing 160 mph.

I was a demo player since early 2010, and I bought the game just for this track.

Simply stunning

Quote from mbutcher :

It doesn't matter what GPU you have, you're always going to get basically the same results, it's the CPU that matters.

With a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7850 I'm getting ~40fps when I view the whole track in SHIFT+U and LFS is maxing out one of my cores.

One of my team mates recently bought a GPU that's roughly 40% faster than my card and his FPS in various tests was only slightly better. That's because his CPU is more or less the same as mine.

I have an AMD A10 5700 APU @ 3.4GHz and LFS maxes out 1 of the cores most of the time on Westhill. That's the problem with most games, like LFS, they're single-threaded and unless your CPU is great at single-threaded stuff LFS will not run any better regardless of how much graphical processing power you throw at it.

Your CPU is letting you down Martin, not your GPU.

no, its only because LFS limits frame rate to 40 on shift U mode. better gpu more frame rate, cpu has very little to do with it, has more to do with physics. and if your cores are maxing when you are viewing an empty track with shift U then I think you have something wrong going on with your pc. maybe a background process.

Quote from Scawen :

...

Well about new shading system... I think it could improve frame rates if this new shading system won't be too much complicated . I mean most integrated gpu's nowadays have pixel shader. For example my laptop from 2009 with intel integrated gma x4500mhd and this gpu has 8 or 10 pixel shader units, its not much (low end dedicated gpus have like 100+ pixel shader units) but in games which will use it i see some gain from that. I was afraid some newer games will run very poorly but a lot of them (race 07 or need for speed world) which uses pixel shader i got stable 30-40fps on very low details.
Without pixel shader i guess it will be like 5-15fps less.

Quote from Scawen :

Hmm, so what did you do, when this shadow patch was released, fps went mad up ??
Possible to do same with westhill ??
never touched my pc settings, only the power save mode!!

Ohh well, never mind, ill enjoy lfs, as i have done this for past fev years

I maxed everything out, took battery off from the laptop, running on cable instead.

I did update drivers, everything, cleaned computer physically and hardwarely*, softwarely*, completely. Running LFS now everything max, except took shadows off...

Almost did a miracle.

As I have told, my laptop is pathetic to run any high detailed thing, but funny thing was, as the fps before was 5-15/42 on tracks, After the things, it now runs very nicely non-open configs on old tracks (Y)

Westhill however, did do nothing, but fps in some points is over 50! it changes from 2 - 18/50

Only track what I can drive properly without signifcant fps drops is karting national, in there fps was steady 9-15 ( if you call that steady, for me, yeah ). Now it is 12-40.

Everything else, same, except sometimes over 50 fps ( even more on older tracks )

So uumm.. I know this sounds pretty stupid, but anywhere possible to dl quater-textures? ( half-half lol ) I have heard there is remarkable difference, I want to see even more difference before I get new PC in this summer ( hopely.. people help me a bit if I am going to fail /partial begging )

EDIT: Interestingly, changing resolution did affect nothing to fps, nor changing bitframe, or Z-buffer ( though pretty useless in this laptop anyway )

Quote from Scawen :

1) People with a laptop randomly going into CPU energy saving mode, causing a dramatic loss of frame rate. These people have to set up their computer properly to run LFS. Unless someone tells me how LFS could instruct the CPU not to go into power saving mode. I really have no idea about this.

This seems to work.


There are, however, a few things that come to mind. It should be the job of the CPU governor to scale the CPU power accordingly to the load. Newer Intel CPUs in particular seem to suffer from the governor not getting it right every time. Tracking the problem down and filing a bug would be the right thing to do rather than hacking around it. Another problem with the code above is that it overwrites the current power scheme and restores it back to the original settings right before the application exits. Obviously, if the application happened to crash, you'd be stuck in "full steam" and have to change it back manually. Last thing is the MSDN documentation. Apparently there is "XP way" and "Vista+" way of adjusting power settings. Although it is not documented anywhere it looks like some of the legacy functions could behave differently on Vista and above. To make matters even more obnoxious, admin rights are required to change the power settings.

(VS 2013 redist package is required to run the attached executable.)

Quote from S.E.T.H :

Quote from mbutcher :

...

no, its only because LFS limits frame rate to 40 on shift U mode. better gpu more frame rate, cpu has very little to do with it, has more to do with physics. and if your cores are maxing when you are viewing an empty track with shift U then I think you have something wrong going on with your pc. maybe a background process.

You misunderstood me. I was on a track with 40 cars in SHIFT+U when I took that frame rate reading. The frame rate is limited to 40 only if the track is empty.

Also, I am certain you're wrong when you say the CPU has nothing to do with it, maybe you should check your CPU load when playing (note that LFS is single-threaded and will only run on one core, values of 20%-25% are common on quad-core systems) and then check your GPU load. It is well documented that LFS is a CPU intensive game and that you shouldn't focus too much on a good GPU (yet at least).

I don't want to sound annoying but I have an I7 2nd generation mobile CPU doing not even 10% cpu load according to Lazy.

Thats why I don't get why people including dev talking about that its CPU intensive. Am I in a different universum or something?

Quote from cargame.nl :

I don't want to sound annoying but I have an I7 2nd generation mobile CPU doing not even 10% cpu load according to Lazy.

Is it a quad core with hyperthreading enabled?

I disabled "Draw trees", and it helped a lot in my case. There isn't lag anymore as it was on certain track positions. I didn't get much in FPS raise, FPS is still between 40 and 60 fps, but driving is now smoothly, like on old tracks. I can drive without any problems now.

Quote from WyngPax :

I disabled "Draw trees", and it helped a lot in my case. There isn't lag anymore as it was on certain track positions. I didn't get much in FPS raise, FPS is still between 40 and 60 fps, but driving is now smoothly, like on old tracks. I can drive without any problems now.

When I turn off trees in options, it doesn't hide any trees on Westhill. So I'm not sure where the performance improvement comes from.

Could it be considered as a bug maybe?

Quote from Flame CZE :

When I turn off trees in options, it doesn't hide any trees on Westhill. So I'm not sure where the performance improvement comes from.

Could it be considered as a bug maybe?

That graphic option affect only trees that move with wind (attachment), not trees which are in fact fixed objects.

Camouflage tents? What the heck,Daniel??? :P

I've got a parade, military parade running around Blackwood