Released NOW Available Sebring International Raceway!!!

Discussion in 'News & Notifications' started by Christopher Elliott, Jul 27, 2018.

  1. Will Mazeo

    Will Mazeo Registered

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    If tracks are going to get this big wouldn't be better to go ahead with the idea of shiping materials, textures, etc into the game? Wouldn't that save space?
     
  2. Filip

    Filip Registered

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    That could introduce other problems.
    Imagine if devs change some texture and all modded tracks suddenly change
     
  3. Will Mazeo

    Will Mazeo Registered

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    This would actually be better if done right IMO.
    Devs could update the whole thing without people having to modify stuff every time, as long as they follow settings used by default content, if they dont well.. it's their fault.
    If 1gb+ is the goal now things are going to be crazy.
    Min requirements should also be changed. 4 cores and 3gb+ video cars should be a must, also tell people to configure virtual memory file to be a lot bigger, Sebring seems to be using a lot of it and Windows managing that automatically may not be enough.
     
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  4. Adrianstealth

    Adrianstealth Registered

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    Don’t worry to much about grass
    or for that matter anything outside of the tracks/curbs

    I prefer what ever gives best FPS
    Happy to not have 3d individual blades of grass that move with the wind ( or what ever )

    Concentrate on enjoying the layouts , avoiding the worse bumps on the big bend , getting faster
     
  5. Filip

    Filip Registered

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    Well it's a question for devs and modders. I believe most modders wouldn't be too happy about it. Then all current tracks, even S397 ones would be probably broken until updated. Such fundamental change may introduce so many problems unthinkable for you and me because we don't have a full picture of internal structure.
    It would be better to do it only for future tracks but packaging system should be redesigned.
    Also because no other sim has it this way (I believe) tells me it is not preferable.
     
  6. burgesjl

    burgesjl Registered

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    OK, I'm going to report this here but not really sure what conclusions to draw from it...

    As I'd stated in a previous post, with my 'regular' settings I'd been getting 30fps on both the 12hr and Full course (trackday) variants of the track. I'm running an old R9 290 and wasn't expecting anything great. But we also had a new build at the same time. So I decided to go into the graphics options, and lo and behold, the selected graphics adapter was 'auto'; so I changed that to match the actual card I have (the other entry being the MS adapter which basically uses the CPU, and is worthless for what gamers want). So I went back into the game, and tried with a different car selection. For that 30fps test, I'd used a combination of the Oreca LMP2 and the GTE cars, full set. This time, I selected just the BMW GTE as my opponents. I loaded up Virtua-LMs Sebring, and got much the same results I had seen - as low as 60fps on the front straight, but around 90fps in other locations. Now imagine my surprise after I loaded up the S397 full course.... on the main straight I was getting 60fps and on the back straight I was getting over 120fps. What magic is this?

    I did notice when the track loaded it had a very long pause at one stage; we know the load will recompile the shaders at first load after a new build, and it looked like it was doing this again, though it shouldn't have needed to since I reality I hadn't changed the actual graphics adaptor being used (I had changed the settings). Had it maybe built some shaders using the default/CPU based shader incorrectly? What else could have caused this absolutely massive difference in performance?

    If its got to do with how memory is loaded, and swaps of GPU memory with main memory and main memory with virtual (disk), this might warrant some investigation. I'd been pretty much convinced my poor performance was because I had overcommitted memory with my settings in the first instance (all different car models etc.). I have 6Gb main memory and a 3Gb VRAM card. my motherboard also only supports PCIe 2.0, not 3.0, and we've had several postings about poor performance with this. I'll also note my performance also had some massive stutters mid-lap and not necessarily in the same places each time, which I'm sure means data was getting loaded/discarded on the GPU. I've also seen lots of posts about that changing to the 'auto' adaptor in graphics setup, and people having to go back to change it and getting much better performance as a result. Are there some recommendations or changes we should be making here, is performance not that bad if we have the right settings and new builds are responsible?
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
  7. stonec

    stonec Registered

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    The shaders get rebuilt every time you change certain settings like shadows or reflections, this is normal behaviour.

    IMO I find it unlikely that the graphics adapter setting makes any difference, as long as it's auto or dedicated GPU. What makes a difference in rF2 is if you run above VRAM limit, then FPS gets halved as it did in your case. Sebring in particular takes quite a bit VRAM if you run textures on max. So with 3 GB VRAM, if you have a web browser running in background and run lots of different opponent cars with higher settings, you are at risk of running above the limit, which then causes FPS to stall and all this weird behaviour. I upgraded from 2 GB to 4 GB GPU and pretty much got rid of all FPS oddities.
     
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  8. Patrick Schumacher

    Patrick Schumacher Registered

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    :):):)

    I absolutely agree!
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
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  9. burgesjl

    burgesjl Registered

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    That's probably what it was, @stonec over commitment of VRAM. But maybe we need new recommendations that, if you want to run Endurance Pack (1 LMP2, 1 LMP3, 5 GTE) within Sebring, you probably need 4Gb VRAM to get reasonable performance without turning things down or dropping some classes. I'm going to bet that many folks like me have 2Gb or 3Gb cards, and there's a pretty good chance you can't effectively run this combo on that level of hardware. I know the top level cards have 6Gb and 11/12Gb VRAM now, but very people will have those; I'll bet the 'most common' are 2-4Gb.

    What I'd really like to see, is some indicators under Ctrl-F that show you (a) if you are using virtual memory within system RAM and (b) how much swapping from system RAM to video RAM you are experiencing, as a sort of graphical display like the CPU graph is, and like how iRacing show this same data. Plus also to see the system RAM load and video RAM load, which again is immediately visible on the graphics page when in a session in iRacing. It helps you to diagnose the settings. Because it is now clearer to me than ever, that going over these limits has absolutely catastrophic results. I mean, the range 30/60fps to 60/120fps is an enormous swing. And worse, even at 60/120fps average, at some points on the lap when it swapped the stutters were terrible.
     
  10. Will Mazeo

    Will Mazeo Registered

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    Of course the more the merrier but I think 3gb as minimum is good enough :) (tho how many cards in the market have this config?) you cant control what people are doing in the background, if you worry about it may as well recommend 6+ghz oveclocking and 4 way SLI in case someone decides to render a video and mine bitcoin while playing lol
    Setting that memory page manually is good, at least here with 8gb RAM it helped to run rF2 better than leaving it at auto
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2018
  11. Ari Antero

    Ari Antero Registered

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    MSI Afterburner can be used in every game including rFactor 2 and it has all you are asking for above and much more.
     
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  12. oppolo

    oppolo Registered

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    in the last turn AI is too slow
     
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  13. AMillward

    AMillward Registered

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    If I've paid for the laser scanned track, I want each blade of grass to be laser scanned too as they were on that day. Otherwise, it ruins muh realism!
     
  14. Adrianstealth

    Adrianstealth Registered

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    Maybe they’ll go back & do a grass scan , but not on a windy day
    We could have 1:1 grass simulation

    Grass that so good we’d not drive at all,
    We’d just look at it
     
    Last edited: Jul 31, 2018
  15. davehenrie

    davehenrie Registered

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    lol I remember back in the days of F1 2k or maybe even earlier, I used to JOKE about the Ferris wheels at Le Mans and Suzuka. I wanted the Ferris wheel movement to match the rotation speed and start/stop intervals for loading. I demanded an end to stationary Ferris Wheels. And now we are onto grass. Ooh boy....
     
  16. woochoo

    woochoo Registered

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    hey, go check out the Jets ride at Le Grand Circuit, inside of turn 2. It has loading time, warm up, low and high movement phases, and then cool down. But it never has any riders :(

    No ferris wheel at Le Mans until '68

    The Matsusaka ferris wheel animation never stops though. Not sure if they're meant to pick people up on the fly, because it's fairly slow
     
  17. 2ndLastJedi

    2ndLastJedi Registered

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    What should this be set to if using 16GB system RAM and 11GB VRAM ?
    I have it to let windows handle it but could i get more/better performance by setting it manually ?

    Sebring grass is good as is , save performance there and use it so we can have leaves falling from the trees :p
     
  18. Paulfield

    Paulfield Registered

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    Could I suggest you go to a race meeting and ask the drivers, eg: Daniel Ricciardo , Craig Lowndes ETC, and ask them what they think OF the grass on all the tracks they have race on over the years. lol
     
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  19. Comante

    Comante Registered

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    Finally a track where FFB is constantly returning feedbacks, even with just my G27 the track feel alive, and the car handling is influenced too. I took the dear old howston on this track, and it was a real blast, even if on default setup it was really hard to even keep it straight. Then I tried the Radical, not the fancy GT3, but the one that nobody likes :D , and I had real fun even on the blamed default setup. I've not tried a race start with a full grid of GT3's. but I've not noticed any performance issue with my usual graphic details.
     
  20. burgesjl

    burgesjl Registered

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    I'm going to report this here because I think there may be bigger issues with track performance.

    There was a new build yesterday, plus an update to the BMW GTE. So I went into all the folders to delete shaders, cbash etc. so that everything recompiled. This time it didn't reset to 'auto' after the build update. Imagine my surprise when performance went back to the 30fps I'd first seen! I then checked VRAM load, and it stated this was 2.8Gb of my 3Gb available. So I decided to change a couple of parameters for things like reflections etc. to reduce the load and lo and behold... performance actually DECREASED to 17fps in the pits and less than 25fps on a lap. So there's definitely something wrong with how this track gets loaded up and what it's performance level ends up being (despite them saying they fixed the dirt map, which probably meant increased performance when it didn't load like it should have).

    To do some further tests, I then did the things I really don't want to: track details down one notch, shadows down one notch, textures down one notch etc. Sure enough, the fps now is back to a consistent 120fps plus around the whole circuit, and whilst there were a couple of stutters this was pretty stable on the Min/Max numbers displayed. So you CAN get reasonable performance on this track, but you have to turn things down quite a bit to do so. The good news is there are not many shadows (e.g. from trees) that get cast on the track or walls/Armco (and a lot of the track doesn't even have Armco up close) and so there are some specific optimizations that'll work on this track which you might not want to apply to others.
     

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