I have a little question. Can overclocking of PCI-E bus affect peformance if LFS? I think that higher speed of PCI-E = faster PCI-E texturing(same like an AGP texturing, but using AGP sound silly in this case) I heard that LFS doesnt like overclocked anything(I dont think so, maybe only on some systems).
A am talking about it because I have its freq set to 111 percent(or MHz, who knows what that number means - but 100 is default).
And another question, HyperThreading should be Enabled or Disabled for LFS? Ive done tests and I cant see any big difference(1-3 FPS). Does anyone have another experience?

Quote from Moevan1 :

I have the same issues......My temps are fine though. I used to run LFS with my 9700pro at 80-90fps now with my X800XL my fps are 20-30fps. Everything on my PC is fine software wise and drivers. I have a program to gauge if my cpu throttles back or not and I get nothing. It goes strong

my specs:
P4 2.4b O/C @2.97Ghz
MSI 845E 533 mhz
80 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm
1024MB Corsair PC3200 Dual Channel DDR 400Mhz runing @ single channel
ATI X800XL 256DDR3 radeon

Well, I said that LFS isnt sensitive on OCed systems, but try to downclock your CPU. If U will get higher FPS, U are that unlicky man and LFS doesnt like OCes on your sys. If your FPS will be the same or lower, U probably got the same problem as me. I am still working on it to get SMOOOooooooOOOTH framerate.

Keep up on this thread

Quote from jmkz :

uhm, the Intel P4 is actually very good at "taking the heat", it will never do a thermal shutdown if your system is configured properly, you can remove the cooler and your system will keep running (very very slowly) but that's what Thermal Throttling is all about (http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/p4-throttling/)

:-)

However, what people don't tell you is throttling damages your chip over time. So it's not all that good.

My XP-M has a cutoff at 105c, but I force thermal shutdown at 75c, and it throttles (stupid mobo downlocks it >.<) at around 65c. But I rarely leave high 30's low 40's.

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

However, what people don't tell you is throttling damages your chip over time. So it's not all that good.

please find me an article which describes what you are claiming here; I run a hardware website at www.madshrimps.com and haven't picked up any of such information that you referring to.

then again, I have not been following Intel very closely ever since they introduced the Presshot Pentium 4.

edit: Tomshardware mentions something about possible CPU damage in their title here : http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041114/ but in the body of the article they only talk of the CPU not reaching its intended CPU speed (3.6Ghz) due to overheating

Quote :

It may be hard to believe, but yes, Intel's high-end Pentium 4 processor, the 3.6 GHz 560, runs extremely close to its thermal limits, possibly causing the processor to throttle under a high load. That is still the case even today, after this product has been around for several months. Even still, Intel is going to release its faster and probably hotter 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 Processor 570 next Monday.

It took us several weeks to look into this phenomenon. Everything began with Pentium 4 560 benchmark results that kept becoming slower and slower with every repetition. We suspected the engineering sample to be fishy and contacted Intel. The German media manager Christian Anderka and a thermo technician, Benson D. Inkley, spent an entire day at our lab in order to solve the mystery. Last but not least we had a total of three engineering samples of the Pentium 4 Processor 560. Only one out of three processors seemed to maintain the clock speed even under a high load, which is why we chose it for our subsequent tests. However, we were even more surprised to see that the same phenomenon occurred with this processor when we used a different test system. Again, the benchmark scores became worse with every repetition.

Quote from jmkz :

please find me an article which describes what you are claiming here; I run a hardware website at www.madshrimps.com and haven't picked up any of such information that you referring to.

then again, I have not been following Intel very closely ever since they introduced the Presshot Pentium 4.

edit: Tomshardware mentions something about possible CPU damage in their title here : http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041114/ but in the body of the article they only talk of the CPU not reaching its intended CPU speed (3.6Ghz) due to overheating

That's where I first read about it. But also for your proc to throttle, it means it's running damn hot. The hotter a proc runs the faster it dies.

Quote from MadCatX :

Well, I said that LFS isnt sensitive on OCed systems, but try to downclock your CPU. If U will get higher FPS, U are that unlicky man and LFS doesnt like OCes on your sys. If your FPS will be the same or lower, U probably got the same problem as me. I am still working on it to get SMOOOooooooOOOTH framerate.

Keep up on this thread

LFS ran fine when I had my 9700pro and once I cleaned the drivers and installed the X800XL with an updated MB bios my FPS dropped. All my other games apart from ISI ones have shown increases.

It looks like that there is some driver issue. I was experimentating with graphic drivers, and once I noticed poor LFS performance(I can rank on aprox. 44th place in Benchmark) What sounds funny is your problem after BIOS upgrade. When I was playing LFS S1, I had BIOS rev. 1001 and it was OK, then I had to upgrade it SEVERAL times due to some problem with my mobo. And now LFS S2 is slow. (of course i cannot be caused by that, but it looks funny). Also I have to mention that S1 was running BEFORE I reformatted my HD. S2 is "running" on new Win installation.
If you can, try to do clan installation of system, or borrow yourself some another HD, install system here and do test. It going to do that as soon as I get WinXP SP2!! install CD, WinXP SP1 installation sucks, SP2 installation everytimes messes my system a little.
BTW: Try to run 3DMark03 on your system, I wanna know how it will score. Your system might be slower than it should be, but due to comparsion with Radeon9700pro you cant notice it. Depending on your CPU you should get something around 7000pts. (I can push my system to 9100!!!)

I found some strange today. In 3DMark05 I have about 2700 CPU marks. OK, I thought it is all right, because I haven't got comparsion, but I ran same test on 3.0 GHz P4 Prescott core(it was 478socketed, but is does not make any difference) and I saw something awful. Mobo had Intel865 chipset. It has 3500 CPU marks!!! HOW is that possible? I am afraid that this is causing my problem (and not only my), mysterious CPU power leak.....

Most likely I've found the problem. I looked on one online replay, where were about 6 cars in race. OK, it is much less against 12 in benchmark replay. But framerate was OK it didn't drop under 40 in cockpit view. I read about AI slowdown in LFS some time ago, but I tought it affects only races, not their replays..... I was probably wrong... THX everyone for tips...

I have a very simillar problem.

My specs are:

Athlon 64 2800+
1024 Mb RAM 400Mhz
Radeon Sapphire 9800 Pro

I used to have Radeon 9700 and everything was fine (70/80 fps). When I changed the graphic card the fps tends to drown to 20 fps when there are >7 cars in field of view. I have simillar FPS on RIVA TNT2 !! When I see no car I have 80 fps. Then, when only one appears on the screen it drops to 40 fps. It is very sensitive to the models of cars in the sight.

There wasn't any change to anything apart from GPU.
CPU cooler is ok and my temps are below 40 Celsius.

I'm going to change drivers to old ones and reinstall DirectX.

Sounds like a CPU performance related issue. Some graphics are not longer done by the graphics card. The game doesn't recognize the card and puts everything he can at the CPU.

But before the change everything was ok. I was using old drivers on 9700 not to have VPU Recovery problems ... maybe when I install the old ones evrything will be ok. I'll go check it.

edit:

Yeah, fool of me, aftre putting Riva TNT 2 into my computer and doing some races (30 / 40 fps on 640x480 not bad as for such an oldie) and putting 9800 PRO inside, the vertex shaders were turned off.

Good point.

I'll join the club. My current system is...

A64 3000+
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (939-socket)
1024 RAM
Seagate 160 Gb 7200 8 Mb
Audigy 2
Gigabyte 6600GT 128 Mb PCI-E

...and I get worse FPS than with my old comp which was quite a bit slower on paper. Every other program showed significant performance increase when I bought the new comp this spring. Kind of strange, but I'm not talking about catastrophical loss of frame rate, so LFS is still very much playable.

Nice,....

I solved my problem few days ago. Its not a universal help, but when I have installed different drivers to my CMI9880 integr. sound without EAX support etc.(supplied with SP2 for WinXP)my FPS grew. When I reverted to the first drivers(supporting EAX n A3D), I notices FPS dorp again.

Quote from spankmeyer :

I'll join the club. My current system is...

A64 3000+
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (939-socket)
1024 RAM
Seagate 160 Gb 7200 8 Mb
Audigy 2
Gigabyte 6600GT 128 Mb PCI-E

GFX Card? And attach your LFS cfg file, may help troubleshooting.

Quote from huxorator :

GFX Card? And attach your LFS cfg file, may help troubleshooting.

Quote from spankmeyer :

Gigabyte 6600GT 128 Mb PCI-E

While I an NOT a computer expect can I sugggest the following (it worked for me when I had frame rate problems).
Have a look ot your "task list" and if you see and of these stop them and it should help your rate
"nvsvc32.exe" "alg.exe" "fxssvc.exe" "ctsvccda"

Mine went from about 18 or so to about an average of 45 and if you are already as 30 or so .....
Like I said I'm not an expert or anything like it but is was the only thing that worked for me and I was at the stage of giving up on the sim.

Let's know if it helped

If other out there know any reason why he should not stop these - please advise

Quote from spankmeyer :

I'll join the club. My current system is...

A64 3000+
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (939-socket)
1024 RAM
Seagate 160 Gb 7200 8 Mb
Audigy 2
Gigabyte 6600GT 128 Mb PCI-E

...and I get worse FPS than with my old comp which was quite a bit slower on paper. Every other program showed significant performance increase when I bought the new comp this spring. Kind of strange, but I'm not talking about catastrophical loss of frame rate, so LFS is still very much playable.

Has your MoBo integrated sound? If it has, be sure it is DISABLED. Also try to update drivers of your SB Audigy. And it last, try to remove your SB Aud and run LFS on integr. sound and do the benchmark (The unofficial LFS System Benchmark site)

I'm talking about this because my problem is(or more likely was:schwitz caused by soundcard. I will try to get some else sound and look what it'll do with performance.

Quote from MadCatX :

Has your MoBo integrated sound? If it has, be sure it is DISABLED. Also try to update drivers of your SB Audigy. And it last, try to remove your SB Aud and run LFS on integr. sound and do the benchmark (The unofficial LFS System Benchmark site)

I'm talking about this because my problem is(or more likely was:schwitz caused by soundcard. I will try to get some else sound and look what it'll do with performance.

Yes the mobo onboard audio is disabled in the BIOS. Actually I've been thinking the problem might be linked to my Audigy2 somehow, I have to do some tests later on. My situation isn't life threatening as LFS runs mostly over 30 FPS, so I'll be fine for the moment.

Quote from spankmeyer :

Yes the mobo onboard audio is disabled in the BIOS. Actually I've been thinking the problem might be linked to my Audigy2 somehow, I have to do some tests later on. My situation isn't life threatening as LFS runs mostly over 30 FPS, so I'll be fine for the moment.

SND cards can couse a prob in LFS, especially when they supprots EAX. SND card applies the EAX effects, and that is what is should not do in LFS. Calculating EAX uses CPU power (if you dont have X-Fi 64MB RAM soundcard) and this steals some power from CPU. I have tested it on my SoundBlaster Live! and CIM9880(when I' installed proper drivers) and results are almost similar. Framedrop when there are more sound sources close to me. SBLive! doesn't slows LFS as much as CIM9880 does, but THIS is the problem!!!! GUYS, I THINK WE GOT IT.....

Quote from MadCatX :

...Framedrop when there are more sound sources close to me....

That describes my problem very accurately. Is it possible to disable sound in LFS? That would be a easy way to test the theory instead of pulling out the card.

If you have EAX enabled, try disabling that too. See here http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=3567

Shift-N turns sound off (don't know if it just mutes it or turns off the sound engine though).