rFactor 2 Beta Testing

[Troy Dalton]

Tonight I dedicated some time to testing and tweaking. I have an AMD 9850 X4 2.5 GHz CPU and it's pretty easy to overclock, although this is the first time I've bothered to try. I overclocked as high as 3.01 GHz, but it blue screened onetime after exiting rF2, so I dropped it back down to 2.91 and I'll see if it's more stable. It's very stable at 2.8, so I know that I can fall back to that. In the past, I tried to overclock the ATI HD 3870 X2, but it was very unstable and actually performed worse. I may try again, now that there are more mature drivers out there.

Funny thing happened along the way...

The biggest net gain in FPS, was when I downgraded the resolution from 1440x900 to 1280x800. So, I decided to lower the Anti-Aliasing from 16x to 8x and reduce the Mipmap from High Quality to Quality. This gave me an extra 10 FPS right off the bat, but the game actually performed worse!?! I assumed the extra FPS would allow the game to run smoother, but no. It was like watching a flip photo book. So, I bumped everything back up to it's orginal settings and everything smoothed out again. However, I lost the added 10 FPS...weird.

Back to testing...

[Troy Dalton]

As expected, overclocking the graphics card accomplished nothing. It just became more unstable. I'll post my settings later.

[Kinst Vonsterga]

For rFactor2, I'm running native res. on a 2560 x 1600 monitor, powered by HD6990 (L.cooled, but not overclocked) running the ATI 11.12 driver. Biggest impact is w/anti-aliasing. I dropped from 16x to 8x, and again to 4x while maintaining anisotropic @ 16x. Using vSync, FPS jumped from mid 20s to low 40s with thirty cars viewable @ 100% max in-game visual settings. Not bad as for some other games, their FPS are simply unplayable at the beta level. Orig rFactor w/the above settings would be pegged at 61FPS in vSync and high 100s, low 200s w/vSync off ... and higher when I throttle down the # of AI players.

Ran the 60s mod, full traffic and the visual immersion was great. The feeling of scenery passing by a stationary car was coming from the lack of visual G-motion queues when braking or accelerating, otherwise I'm a wooden-peg that is cemented into the drivers cockpit. I'll see where I can change w/the *.* settings. One thing I absolutely love is being able to see arms/hands onto the steering wheel ... this has so bugged me since day 1 of the orig. rFactor. Driving feel and ambient atmosphere, spot on!

Annoyances:

No water spray in rain mode.
Over the top/default cockpit vibration
Awkward navigation (though not bad, just different)

Still checking it out ... though would love to hear if there is any enhancements to online gaming/stability + driver swap.

[corsa]

One thing for ATI users I've seen (and experienced myself) is if you install the latest "12.1a preview" drivers from ATI, you will get a noticeable FPS boost.

The water spray in rain mode will be coming in the future, it is just one of many things that hasn't made it into the beta yet.

[Troy Dalton]

One thing for ATI users I've seen (and experienced myself) is if you install the latest "12.1a preview" drivers from ATI, you will get a noticeable FPS boost.

The water spray in rain mode will be coming in the future, it is just one of many things that hasn't made it into the beta yet.

I was considering that...just haven't pulled the trigger yet.

btw - Machine is super solid overclocked to 2.91GHz.

[jerrymcc]

For the cockpit motion issue, search the isi forum for "realheadmotion", its a plugin that gives a seemingly more realistic effect without making you dizzy or sick. Easy install, if you don't like it, just delete. I think I like it.

I'm getting about 35-50 fps, pretty stable even with med to high settings on most stuff, even hdr.

[Troy Dalton]

One thing for ATI users I've seen (and experienced myself) is if you install the latest "12.1a preview" drivers from ATI, you will get a noticeable FPS boost.

The water spray in rain mode will be coming in the future, it is just one of many things that hasn't made it into the beta yet.

Updated to 12.1 drivers today...I saw maybe a 5 FPS increase. An improvement, not nearly enough.

[corsa]

Updated to 12.1 drivers today...I saw maybe a 5 FPS increase. An improvement, not nearly enough.

Yeah, that's not very much... mine went up from about 48 to 60.

[Troy Dalton]

I'm really just spit balling here, but after increasing my memory from 4GB to 8GB there was no perceptible difference. None...nada...zilch. So, I broke down and lowered the track details to low and again...nothing.

Is it possible the Beta doesn't include the capability to lower certain aspects of the graphics? Everyone with a top of the line machine, is raving about the graphics, but it doesn't seem like you can detune them.

Thoughts?

[David Kessler]

Is it possible the Beta doesn't include the capability to lower certain aspects of the graphics? Everyone with a top of the line machine, is raving about the graphics, but it doesn't seem like you can detune them.

Thoughts?

The graphics settings in rF2 definitely work, but in many cases, the thing they affect may not be your bottleneck. GPUs process in several stages: vertex processing, geometry processing, and raster (pixel) processing. A lot of the detail settings only really help the first two. I suspect that the last stage is what's killing performance on older GPUs. It may be as simple as the quantity of textures is just too much to fit in VRAM so you lose lots of time "swapping". It would be interesting to correlate performance on older GPUs with 1G of VRAM vs 512K. It's also possible that re-architecting the shader code to handle advanced features has slowed it down even when those features aren't used (for example, preventing loss of precision in calculations to support HDR in later stages).

I suppose there's a chance ISI will add optimization to upcoming releases, but when you look at their competition (pCARS and probably AC), they don't perform any better on old hardware, so the incentive won't come from competition. I suspect they'll be content to stay with what they have and wait for users to catch up.