<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JoeB:
There was a post on the board last year that suggested to disable vertical sync. in the video card settings. WHOA, huge difference. Frame rates up around 140 in many of the views and no more Frame skips when there are many trucks on the screen. One thing though, since I have done this, the AI seems to have gotten, well, stupid.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I just had a thought. Previously we've had people asking how to up their framerate from the 70-80 or so that the game normally tops out at on a fast (ie more than capable of running it) computer system. Normally it's something I see as pointless (explained below) unless there is a problem with the framerates to the begin with... Anyway, this is where the disable vertical sync business comes in.
Normally, the game syncs to the refrsh rate of your monitor. It will do all it's processing, render the frame, and then wait until the monitor is ready to display it before going through the sequence again. This is standard practice in most games or applications that require smooth animation with no flicker. If your monitor has a refresh rate of 75 Hz, it can only draw 75 pictures per second, so therefore the game will produce a maximum of 75 frames - any higher than this doesn't really benefit you, as even if the game is rendering more frames, the monitor isn't able to draw more than 75, so the extras are just being discarded.
What the disable vertical sync setting does, obviously, is disable this restriction. (PS it's not a Windows system setting - it affects how your hardware, namely the video card, handles output to your monitor.) So now your apps will hammer away as fast as they can, without regard to waiting for the monitor's refresh cycles. However, it occurs to me that this will change the timing in the game, and possibly this is what's upsetting the CPU trucks. Having the game sync to the refresh rate can be a handly timing mechanism, but your game, going at 140 fps, is around twice as twice as fast as it would normally be expected to go. If the trucks are using some method of timing to do their navigation, and TRI when they wrote the game assumed the timing (ie framerate) would never logically go beyond certain thresholds (or perhaps it's being rounded to a lower accuracy or soemthing), then that may be why the bot racers are suddenly failing their driving standards tests en masse.
Unfortunately, since it seems you need the vertical sync disabled to solve your lag problem, I guess you'll have to make concessions one way or the other to properly enjoy the game
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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines
