I have a laptop and it's not the best specs. I was wondering what kind of tweaks you can do to lfs to get the best frame rate possible. I don't want to lower the resolution as it looks like ass on my WXGA lcd.

Quote from pizza_delivery :

I have a laptop and it's not the best specs. I was wondering what kind of tweaks you can do to lfs to get the best frame rate possible. I don't want to lower the resolution as it looks like ass on my WXGA lcd.

I get stable 50+ fps on my 4 your old lappy. ADM64 3000+ ATI9600Pro 64Mb gfx and 512DDR

I run at 1024*768, 16bit, dither, multi player speed up, half texture size. Not the best visuals but once its all moving its fine.

Depends on your lappy but must be better that what I use

Disable Sky? Disable FPS limiter? (FPS limiter is defaulted to on - for me it always causes a performance hit even when your nowhere near it!).

I just disabled fps limiter and I seem to get like an extra .6-1 fps.

I also tried using widescreen mode, but it doesn't really help much either.

Options

Screen
- Use a 16-bit mode if it doesn't make you go blind

Graphics
- User/Mirror/Dust LoD as low as you can bare
- Sky off
- Not sure about haze, I think it might be better on than off
- Shadow off/low (off makes the cars look like they're floating..)
- Wheels/trees/flags/rubber off (or main if you don't like looking at nothing )
- Mip bias as close to 0 as you can bare (or mip filter off)
- Not sure about dither, but it's an extra process done on the graphics, so I'd say off
- Full size textures off
- Skin compression on
- Z-buffer depth as low as it can go (16-bit works for me)

Misc
- Vertical sync off
- Limit frame rate off (if you get fps spikes that interfere with your driving, might be better to limit to something it usually won't drop below)
- Multiplayer speedup on
- Multiplayer car draw as low as you can without making it so low that it becomes dangerous to drive
- Dynamic LoD reduction zero (so that the minimum settings you've selected are always applied)

Feel free to correct any mistakes

For me, keeping FPS limiter on helps me at the starts of races where it will drop to as low at 12fps.

Also, installing the latest drivers for your video card wouldn't hurt.

Make sure "minimum sleep" on your screen settings is at the lowest ms setting possible.

Get rid of all the textures of the game.

Do a search for a program called 'FSAutoStart.' It helps heaps to get rid of all the BS background processes running on your machine. In addition to the things already suggested, this should help you squeeze out some extra fps.

try "end it all"

Quote from JJ72 :

try "end it all"

*hands over the shaving blade*

I experienced significant and regular (every 1-2 seconds) stutter while racing and even while watching replays. I tried running LFS in highest (not realtime) priority and it is fine now, not stutter at all. I prefer this method rather than the kill-other-background-processes method as I'm too lazy to restart all the background processes after I quit LFS.

Is it possible to set a default/automatic priority for a program, or is it necessary to set the priority, using task manager, each time that it is started? If it IS possible, then how does one do it?

Thanks for any help; I also have experienced frequent, horribly annoying slowdowns with LFS (and, for that matter, rFactor), specifically. Every few minutes (apparently random interval), the framerate will drop from ~50 to ~2, for several seconds (it seems maybe to be related to an "svchost" process taking over CPU time), which problem is alleviated by setting the LFS priority to "high." But it's a pain to have to do this manually, each time.

The slowdown problem was not always there, but I don't know what changed, with my computer, to make it start happening.

Also, BTW, what means "realtime" priority?

Quote from David33 :

Is it possible to set a default/automatic priority for a program, or is it necessary to set the priority, using task manager, each time that it is started? If it IS possible, then how does one do it?

Thanks for any help; I also have experienced frequent, horribly annoying slowdowns with LFS (and, for that matter, rFactor), specifically. Every few minutes (apparently random interval), the framerate will drop from ~50 to ~2, for several seconds (it seems maybe to be related to an "svchost" process taking over CPU time), which problem is alleviated by setting the LFS priority to "high." But it's a pain to have to do this manually, each time.

The slowdown problem was not always there, but I don't know what changed, with my computer, to make it start happening.

Also, BTW, what means "realtime" priority?

I suppose realtime means highest priority...

Open editor, write


and save it as a .bat-file in the directory the lfs.exe is in... When you double-click on that batchfile, LfS will automatically start in highest priority... You may want to edit your links to point to the .bat after that...

Thanks very much for these instructions. However, I would rather stay with high priority, since I don't know what "realtime" means, in this context; if it were merely the highest priority, I would expect it to be called that, or something similar.

So, what would the batch file say, to set high priority? And where did you get such information (so that I don't have to bother people with questions, and I can maybe learn some other stuff, too)?

You can change the priority (if thats what you need?) by cntrl+alt+delete and opening the task manager, then on the tabs goto processes and find lfs, then right click and you will see the option to change the priority

Please read the first sentence of post #14, in this thread (also quoted in post #15).

Quote from David33 :

Thanks very much for these instructions. However, I would rather stay with high priority, since I don't know what "realtime" means, in this context; if it were merely the highest priority, I would expect it to be called that, or something similar.

So, what would the batch file say, to set high priority? And where did you get such information (so that I don't have to bother people with questions, and I can maybe learn some other stuff, too)?

Just exchange the "realtime" with "high"...

And google... When I was searching for exactly that, I just typed "start program priority" (in german though)... First link was what I've been looking for...

Cool. Thanks very much.

best if you tweak to leave as High and not realtime as that could starve the OS of cycles and effect LFS in other ways.

That's kind of what I was thinking; and that it might affect not only LFS, but other computer functions, also, perhaps even causing the computer to lock up.

Here is a definition of realtime, from
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/realtime-computing/faq/

"A real-time system is one in which the correctness of the computations not
only depends upon the logical correctness of the computation but also upon
the time at which the result is produced. If the timing constraints of the
system are not met, system failure is said to have occurred."

This seems to imply that, when a program runs in realtime priority, the computer basically becomes a slave to the program; any timing constraints, written into the program (and LFS, being a physics simulation, likely involves time constraints, to a significant extent), govern the computer's behavior, absolutely, preempting any other considerations. This is merely conjecture, really; the little searching that I have done, on the issue, has returned only the above quote, which merely suggests my interpretive description, and I don't actually know, at all. But "realtime" is qualitatively different, as a characterization, from "high," "low," etc., which gives cause for caution.

Here's a tweak that helped my poor old PC by 10-15 fps.... didn't see it mentioned here but I've seen it in other threads:

In View settings, choose Custom and then set Draw to none (no wheels or body). This will give you a view with no cockpit so you'll also want to use the virtual guages and mirror. Takes some getting used to but not too much. At Blackwood hot lapping, my frames went from 30ish to 40+ and similar affects when racing online.

At the same time, consider using a FOV of ~ 60 degrees. I was using 102 degrees and got a increase of 3-5 fps by going to 60..... plus you actually see the hills and valleys of the track (not nearly so flat looking).