maybe the game is indeed cpu bound, but that is because the rendering to be done is very very simple. Simpler than other titles out there, at least. That's why even a worthless card like mine (5700LE overclocked to more than double the original frequencies for both core and memory) can cope.
dropping my athlon's (mobile, barton core) core frequency from 2.2GHz to 1.1GHz, LFS dropped my fps from 100 to 85.
a 25% decrease for HALF the processing speed?
85fps at 1.1GHz and you say it is cpu bound?
Well, ok, if you use a 600MHz p3, the game is indeed cpu bound and the fps will drop to... say... 40? still perfectly playable.
At that point (1.1GHz) i turned on 4xAA and 8xAF. the fps from 85 dropped to 40. And at THAT point, turning my athlon back to 2.2GHz restored the fps to 41fps. gee.
So we have:
half the CPU, 100fps->85fps
More graphics, 85fps->40fps
Original CPU, 40fps->41fps
cpu bound... gpu bound...
depends on the setup i guess. By definition anyway, the game runs as fast as the slowest of the two allows (fast gpu slow cpu-> generaly games go fast, but since LFS is simple graphicaly speaking, most gfx cards can go really well.)
and i
do take offence, so please go shove a hardware vertex shader pipeline into your preferred body orifice: Hardware Vertex Shaders is most probably not what you wanted to talk about, at this point, considering the rendering engine in LFS gives you the option to
not use the programmable vertex pipeline that your graphics card might have. So
that is not reason for slowdowns. You are referring to hardware Transform and Lighting, which is indeed the deciding factor for many modern games' performance. If a card doesn't have it, (pre-geforce or lappy vid) then D3D8.1 (don't remember the exact version) uses software for it, which drops the fps a LOT. Some games do not run without it (Homeworld2 comes to mind).
but what do i know. Me haves no clue.