The first update - Build 60

"The ASUS P5QL PRO is only DDR2" - got that from the web, think you may need to change that

cool thanks mate, I get 60FPS with AI and Low-Medium settings, I see no advantage in going to a lower res either which is odd!

 

Modmate is right - I looked it up and the Asus P5QL-PRO doesn't actually support DDR3.

 

OHHHH, it was on my system specs, it was a mistake of course, JUST DON'T KILL ME OK??? I'm sure modmate never made a mistake in life as he/she talks...

 

Hmmm. Update applied with no problems, but now I have dropped from about 70 FPS to 20-30 (all settings full, level 1 AA, no HDR) and get some slight stutter on areas where there are lots of TSOs. I made no changes other than installing the update.

I will attempt to update my nVidia drivers tonight, just as a quick fix, but this is a bit of a surprise.

 

can you try this:

Backup your PLR, to player.bak or something. Start the game (it makes a Fresh/Clean PLR file) and see if that makes any difference, worked for me when I ran into stuttering/slowdowns so would like to know if it helps others too.

 

Thats the way you reply after someone hint you to a fail?? I would feel the same if i realize that i got only DDR2 instead of 3 ...
And now BTT.

 

Since when was the GTS450 ever considered a 'great' graphics card, it wasn't at launch and certainly isn't now lol.

 

Ohh, yours is better...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product-geforce-gts-450-us.html

Wouldn't mind to have one

 

One thing I have heard with mirrored dirs is that the directory being named something other than 'rFactor2' could be an issue.

 

Thanks for posting that much info, will forward that on.

 

Well actually we'd like to do both, eventually. But it'll require some time to get there. Physics are our priority, sure, but they're not everything we're working toward.

 

If you have a low-end system, it won't show you what rF2 really looks like on high settings when you set it on high settings. Your system will only do what it is capable of.

 

Can you give more info there? You shouldn't be putting anything in the core directories, you should be putting it in the updates dir within the data directories. If you installed both to the same place, then yes, you were supposed to put it when you put it when it worked. If there's something else going on please give more info.

 

Was that a driver crash? Do you have anything similar with other graphic intensive dx9 titles?

 

First of all, sorry for my English.

I have the same problem with the fps drops, everything maxed out. My specs:

i5 4.0Ghz
4 GB RAM
580GTX

In the first build always 60 fps (locked by Fraps), no matter what: onboard, replays, offline, online, 0 AI/Online rivals, 30 AI/Online rivals, Malaysia, Spa... Now i'm getting 40/50 sometimes but not always. For example this afternoon in Metro Mills Park (Megane Trophy) against 25 online drivers i got 40 fps in the start, then driving in first position in the start/finish straight with no cars ahead or behind me: 60 fps, but a few laps later, same situation, i got 49/50 fps in the start/finish straight.

 

I'm really starting to wonder how differently different peoples' eyes and brains can work. I spent a few hours today playing Race On (well Race On cars, but I launched it as GTR Evolution. Same thing, different menu music and theme =). I run it with everything maxed at around 200 fps, whereas rFactor 2 currently runs at around 30 fps with 19 AI cars and around 60 fps when I'm driving by myself, mostly High settings, and some of the fancier stuff like environment reflections turned off, but HDR on (I also don't understand people who call the HDR cartoony, the effect is very subtle indeed).

Even so, I can't in good conscience call Race On anything else but "bland" and "grey" in comparison to rF2. I also played rF1 (HistoriX v1.9) for 4 hours non-stop today and it's very much the same, bland. The way the light and shadows interact in rF2 just makes the atmosphere so much better. Driving around Spa in the F1's when the sun is low in the sky and everything just falls together I'm more immersed in rF2 than in any other sim so far. pCARS looks prettier, but at it's best rF2 just looks better to me.

I do agree that when rF2 is really glitching hard (when the shadows flicker and/or disappear and other graphical bugs are at their worst) then yes, it does look pretty dreadful. But those are bugs to be squashed, not inherent properties of the engine. When everything works rF2 looks pretty darn nice, and that's what the end product is going to be like, given time to squash the bugs (and actually even better since there seem to be plenty of graphical effects etc. in the pipeline).

 

Build 60 is SMOOTHER for sure here. Much more pleasurable playing. HDR always on.
I am wondering if there is a glare now or it is just my impression...?

 

+1


Less FPS spikes here as well. The rates or more stable.

 

First of all, sorry for this long post Tim.

But no, not at all. That's what's absolutely curious about this situation. I can run any other DirectX 9 application with lots of shaders and whatnot, the system's stability is bullet proof.
The thing is, I even contacted nVidia with that problem in rFactor 1 and even wrote a ticket for their driver devs, but that was probably 2 years ago. It definitely has to do something with rFactor 1's DirectX 9 mode, and it seems like this problem still exists within rFactor 2's rendering engine. I drive for a simteam which mainly takes part in endurance races, say 3h-24h. So our top priority was always to run rFactor 1 as stable as possible, which we can if we pay attention to a couple of things.

On multiple machines (one being the same machine like mine, except it has a GTX470 and not a GTX285, older systems as well with an 8800GT and a 9600GT) we noticed the same things:
DirectX 9 mode can cause driver resets on quite a couple of nVidia cards, no matter the driver version. The screen either freezes and/or turns black afterwards. After a couple of seconds Windows notifies you that the "display driver has stopped working and has recovered".
When running in DirectX 8 mode, rFactor will run for hours. Non-stop. Any mod, ISI base content, track, conditions, even using a replay - the result's always the same. Many of us can't run DX9 on a very capable system. I, for example, will suffer a freeze or crash within the first 30 minutes. DX8 - no problems whatsoever.
So either a driver of our team uses DX8 mode or uses an ATI/AMD card and can run DX9 mode.

In rFactor 1, setting the shadows and special effects to maximum can cause a video ram overflow as well. We tested this for quite a couple of hours and monitored the video ram usage, and when those two settings are set to max, rFactor 1 somehow was unable to flush the ram on certain machines, causing an overflow sooner or later (resulting in an application crash, not a freeze of course). When both are set to medium, the video ram will be flushed in regular time periods or when reaching a certain peak. Note that we only tested this on Windows 7 x64 systems and nVidia cards.

The same issues apply to GTR² and Race07 by the way. With the latter one not providing a DX8 mode, many are not able to use it without having to fear those screen freezes sooner or later. It's sitting on my shelf here.

With the release of driver version 285.62, problems got even worse for a couple of nVidia owners (see this thread). There are multiple reports of said problem, but I think the problem got solved again with version 295.51 (I can't confirm this though because I haven't tested it long-term yet, will do this though and will revert to 266.58 if the problem still exists, but so far all seems fine).

I could post quite a couple of links to (mostly german) threads where there are discussions about all the DX9 troubles with nVidia cards and rFactor 1. Most of the time, people simply suggest to "get a card from ATI/AMD". Many did, and are now able to run rFactor 1 in DX9 mode. Our team drivers experienced this miracle as well. I do not want to switch to an AMD card though since I need to use CUDA accelerated software on a regular basis for example. Any DirectX powered software runs like a charm for me, except for gMotor2 driven titles in DX9 mode...

I was hoping this would not be the case with rFactor 2 because a huge portion of its rendering engine was most probably rewritten entirely, but so far I got the same strange freezes in rFactor 2, even a crash, but the crash could be a result of the beta stage (happened on track in multiplayer after pressing ESC and loading the cars from some other players who joined while I was on track).

Greez Rob

 

I think I might have to revise my earlier statement a bit: Yes, I did infact get lower performance with 19 AI cars using the same settings as in the earlier build. However, with 0 AI cars I'm now able to run the game everything maxed @ 60 avg FPS around Mills (in-game settings, AA is still 4x and HDR turned on, but FXAA is off). In Monaco it peaks around 75 at places and drops to around 45 for an instant on the main straight, but mostly hovers around the 60 FPS mark, Spa is also working great. I don't think that was possible in the previous build. Also I seem to remember getting higher FPS with my older lower settings than I do currently. So maxed settings runs better than before, whereas the med/high settings seem to run a bit worse than before. BTW, I thought of testing how the game ran with everything maxed out because I wanted to see if refreshing the shaders could have an effect.

Adding AI however really takes a toll on the performance though. In my example I'm using F2 cars, starting a formation lap @ Mills, the result is the lowest FPS that lasted for about a second on the starting straight, not necessarily the real min FPS. This is with everything set to Full/Max/On, AA 4x (lvl2), AF 16x, HDR on, FXAA off:

0 AI = 69
1 AI = 59
2 AI = 53
3 AI = 51
4 AI = 45
5 AI = 40 (Also: 10 AI but only 6 visible cars, so 5 AI + player visible = 40)
6 AI = 39
7 AI = 40
8 AI = 36
9 AI = 35
10 AI = 32

EDIT: I'll also post this in the appropriate thread over at Problem reports, no need to remind me Tim. =)