Released NOW Available Sebring International Raceway!!!

lol wtf, my fps went from 130 down to 52 by switching the rain drops from off to ultra, in the dry...
That's just ridiculous, good find @stonec

 

WOW, thanks for that info...as I was wondering whether to upgrade my tired old GTX690 and by looking at your screenshot of the rF2 'Display' settings this has confirmed that...great information.

 

If I am not completely wrong the rain drops settings includes shaders that are loaded even if it isn't raining. Shaders can have big impact on performance even if they aren't directly visible.

 

That is my explanation as well but seeing the huge impact this has on performance there must be a better way than throwing away half your fps for something that you are not using, it's a problem.
I reckon there's no easy way around that, when you join a server there may be rain or a chance of rain, in that session or the next so you have to have those shaders loaded.
But maybe rf2 simmers should be made very aware of this so they make educated choices with their settings.

 

Must be some kind of bug though
Although they are loaded they are not being displayed

 

must be a bug
i have 85 fps in sunny day with rain drops OFF
and i have 26 fps in sunny day with rain drops ULTRA
i m sure its a bug

 

If this is true it could be revolutionary finding. Imagine all those poor users having rain drops on but racing in dry and fiddling with options, .json files, gfx control panels, pci buses, cpu core parkings... to get few FPS more. If they only knew performance is a click away.
This should be sticky and announced on all rf2 forums, steam etc.

 

Just imaging if PP Ultra gained 20% performance . lol
I ain't doing it but someone needs to go through every setting and find where performance lose and gains can be found

 

I don't understand your post. Can you explain please?

 

lol , well if it wasn't for @stonec testing between rain drops Off through to Ultra we wouldn't have found that they are causing massive lose in performance , so without testing every other setting how are we supposed to know what else is really heavy or maybe we could even gain performance by having something on Ultra , lol that not many people actually do , like Ultra PP ! I don't imaging many people run PP at Ultra , well maybe for screenshots but then they aren't really benchmarking then are they ??

 

Difference between rain drops and other options is that it makes sense to change all those other options so people already did it and performance gain is known.
I tried every single other option but it never occurred to me to turn off rain drops while in a scripted sunny session.

 

So, before more people start claiming how totally ridiculous it is for your FPS to drop if you turn up your settings (for the record, they are settings for a reason, in general turning graphics settings up will impact your framerate) let me explain why.

Since the introduction of the updated rain, we have added several new rain effects, that are affected by the setting that is being discussed. Turning the raindrops "off" is equal to the old rain effect we had: you see the drops coming from the sky but they don't actually hit your windshield. Anything above "off" will enable those drops to be visible on your windshield, with higher settings providing an even nicer rendered effect. So that gets us to the point of why that shader will cause a drop in performance even when it's not raining. The short answer is because it always has to anticipate drops hitting the windshield, even if is not raining. Because:

1. The track might still be wet from a previous session or earlier in the current session. That causes spray to be thrown up, which gives drops on the windshield.
2. We cannot predict when it will rain. Partially because you set the chance of rain in a session, but also because a plugin might decide that it should start raining at any point too.

For those reasons, making a special case for this shader makes little sense and you would experience a sudden drop anyway if it would activate half-way through a session. Therefore we chose to implement it like this. So if you want the best looking sim, turn up that setting to the point you can still comfortably drive. If you can't spare the FPS turn it off. I hope that explains everything and we can all go back to racing!

 

It's always nice to get actual clarification on things like this !
It is obvious that higher settings make FPS go down but sometimes it aint that clear for us not as clued in on the ins and outs of certain thing .
Thanks for sharing

 

Thanks Marcel we really need that so we know what to do
very cool info
thanks

 

A visual guide for each graphic setting would be a great addition be it a video explaining the differences or game manual with screenshots.

Graphic settings can be daunting for experienced users and I wonder what newbies must think as it's human nature to turn every setting to 11 and wonder why the frame rate isn't so good!

 

Lol

 

To quote Paul Newman or Axle Rose "what we've got here is a failure to communicate" lol

 

Shouldn't the rain shader run for everyone to make it more fair tho? It's like particles in rear view, I turn it off for performance reasons (this turn off rain spray too) but I dont think this sould be possible, it's pretty unfair under rain for those that keep it on

 

That is a fair point @Will Mazeo as it is arguably a bit easier to see out the windshield if there are no drops rendered on it. We have not made a final decision on that. We could render a static "raindrop" texture outside the wiper area in case you have the setting set to "off" but we'd probably need to blend it in and out a bit so it does not just "pop in" when it starts and stops raining. That way we would all see something that is about the same.

But really equalizing this is hard as you correctly mention there are more settings that you could change to gain a visual advantage (even up to the point of changing contrast in the video driver or on your monitor). So at some point we have to accept that unless we all agree to play fair, things are not going to be exactly equal. And that's probably why a lot of esports finals are done in stadiums with sealed and certified hardware that nobody can mess with.

 

Thanks Marcel

Permanently off it is then