The_Doctor wrote:Get the fastest single card you can get your hands on, that would be the gtx285. Yes, it makes a huge differece. The cpu should be ok if you overclock everything you can out of it, but for racing games it will always be at the limit since it needs to calculate a lot of stuff for each car. So the more cars you have the less fps you will get. rfactor unfortunately only runs on a single core. With max cars and details at 1680*1050 i was usually around 60fps (max on the samsung 120lcd in stereo) and drops to under 30 at starts or when lots of cars and buildings on the screen at once. The cpu was t 100% 90% of the time, so the faster the better. Yes, the video card is expensive, but you will keep it for a long time. I would stay away from sli as it doesn't seem to work.
Have you seen the -fullproc trick for running dual-core in rFactor? Edit properties of your shortcut to rfactor.exe. Edit so that at the end of path: ".......rFactor.exe" -fullproc
I overclocked my E4300 today from 1.8 to 2.7 GHz stable. I didn't mess with OC'ing the 9800GTX+ yet. I ran CPU-Z to confirm 2700MHz. I then rebooted and ran rFactor. First my "bloated" rFactor main install. Loaded rfTrainer at Eastern Creek Laser or Fuji, enabled 3D in the Nvidia, KEPT my force vsync setting in the Nvidia rFactor settings*. So I figured with S3D enabled, I'd get the 30-40 I was gettng befoe maybe plus a few. Well, I'm elated to report, I got steady 60-61, as you'd expect from force Vsync on, even with the S3D enabled. Full on 73% depth Nvidia shutter S3D in rFactor at 60 FPS locked with vsync. On a $200 GPU. I think the OC to 2.7 really woke this machine up. Believe it or not I also went from 4GB RAM (swap mode on in BIOS, 32 bit Vista), down to 2GB for this overclock. I was having some issues and thought the original 2GB I had in there stable for so long would be better to baseline with, and see no reason to change now that I'm getting this performance.
I wonder why the difference. Could -fullproc make such a diff? Or maybe the Mitsubishi DLP S3D driver is easier to push than the 22" desktop monitor LCD driver? Hrm, that's an interesting side question- does the 3D Vision FPS hit impact rigs differenty depending on which S3D type of monitor is used? Is LCD or DepthQ harder/easier to driver than DLP? Just wondering.
I also tired a cleaner separate install I have of rFactor Historix and it also ran at 60-61 in 3D with vsync forced on in the GPU settings, triple buffer on, 0 pre-rendered frames, etc...* Running a 70's Porsche 911 with the dirty windshield having grime "floating" out in front where a windshield would be, and seeing depth into the corners, I think I'm hooked. Not sure I can go back to (the otherwise excellent) Gran Turismo 5 Prologue on the PS3, now that I've seen TrackIR and Nvidia 3D Vision. When you look around the 3D cockpit with 6 degrees of freedom on the TrackIR, and can see the racing style toggle dash switches floating out of the dashboard so much you feel you could grab them- wow. I'm hooked!
If running it this way becomes problematic and I need to get a GTX295 to keep up, so be it! But I'll kleep my fingers crossed this way will work. I still also have my old 8600GT I might install in the 4X PCIe secondary slot to be a Physix processor. The new Nvidia 18x drivers enable using an older second mismatched GPU to offload the PhysiX processing from the main GPU so it can only render the graphics. Of course only some games are PhysiX enabled and it's value is debatable (and will cost more in power consumption to run a second card.)
I'm going to install Grid next to see how it does with Nvidia 3D Vision. I'll try to report back on that tomorrow.
*per the setup described on RaceSimCentral in the ZooMin_MIr 's Nvidia Graphix Setting Guide.)