Okay, I've recently started having a problem with LFS. My computer is more than capable of playing this game, and for about two years (until now) it was common to get between 60-90fps...no matter how many vehicles were on screen, or how high I had the graphics settings cranked. I usually keep everything as high as possible and I run 1280x800 because I have a widescreen monitor.

But now, all of the sudden, I'm struggling to run the game. FPS will start out around 10-12 at the beginning of a race, and will eventually stabilize aroun 20-25...which is playable, but its not very fun. And if something happens, ie. a wreck...it drops back down to 10 and I end up getting screwed up and wreck myself.

I haven't changed anything on my PC, and all of my other games still run smooth. I don't know whats going on. I play rFactor on DX9 with most settings at "full" with no framerate problems. I hope theres a quick fix, but I've tried messing with all of the settings in the options menu and nothing seems to change my horrid framerate. I've even tried running as low as 800x600 windowed to no avail. This game is unplayable unless I'm hotlapping by myself...then I can get up to 35 fps...wooo

Heres my computer specs if anyone is wondering:

P4 3.00 gHz
1gb RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility 128mb GFX card
WinXP sp2

Quote from mkpelto :

But now, all of the sudden, I'm struggling to run the game.

Has anything changed at all? Drivers? New software running in the background? Have you tried a new install of LFS? Perhaps your current version has become slightly corrupted some how?

Sounds like drivers to me, which ones are you using?.

Dan,

I did update my drivers a while back. I checked and it says they were updated 8/2/2006. Driver Version: 8.282.0.0 if that helps anyone. I downloaded them directly from ATI.

There aren't any more programs running in the background. Guess I could try a new install...

Get the latest drivers, there were revisions of the ATI drivers earlier in the year that caused big problems with FPS and ATI cards.

Dan,

Thanks, I'll try that.

Okay, that helped quite a bit. Thanks. Its now playable.

What exactly is Hardware Vertex Shading? And should it be on or off? And, would running compressed skins help framerate? Thats what I'm assuming anyways. Some of the graphics settings are confusing to me.

HVS should be on, running compressed skins would have little effect on FPS on your system.

Dan,

HVS tranfers some of the graphical stuff to the cpu to process or summink like that...

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

HVS tranfers some of the graphical stuff to the cpu to process or summink like that...

HVS lets the graphics card do the work, if its off the graphics card doesn't do anything, the cpu has to do it all, raping your fps

Thats what I meanT!

What is HVS and where is the option for it?

HVS is "hardware vertex shading" and is found in the bottom section of the Graphics submenu under Options.

If you want to know what it does: http://computing-dictionary.th ... onary.com/vertex%20shader

If you disable HVS, all those things the vertex shading does are done by the CPU which is far from optimal, if you can get your graphics card to do it.