Re: Removing in-race messages

Hi

Hmm, hardware spec seems ok... weird. How many memory has your 5200, I 
guess at least 256MB, this is ok then... You could try to enable 
"texture compression" in the TORCS OpenGL settings, this helps 
potentially with the thin memory bus (I guess 64 bit) of the card.

When you run torcs -l, is torcs linked to the nvidia OpenGL library (it 
could be that you have OpenGL and Mesa installed, and TORCS is linked 
partially/completely with wrong libraries, I had this problem almost 10 
years ago with two conflicting GLU libraries on my system).

Do you have an OpenGL driven desktop in use or is the "composite 
extension of the x-server enabled, this caused on my systems trouble 
back then (GeForce3 and 5800 IIRC) with some old drivers?

Section "Extensions"
     Option         "Composite" "Enable" <-- Disable this eventually
EndSection

Do you have any otherwise special set up, Xinerama, some other multi 
screen set up, this can be troublesome as well?

Try to set the Display section to "compatible", do you have problems in 
Fullscreen and window mode (occasionly TORCS does not get an accelerated 
OpenGL context on buggy drivers/environments)?

After that I run out of ideas...

Best regards

Bernhard


On 09/01/2012 10:33 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2012, at 02:24 PM, Bernhard Wymann wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> Could you tell us about your system (hardware, graphics, driver,
>> operating system, …)? Do you use the latest TORCS version (1.3.3 or
>> 1.3.4-test1/2)?
>>
>> What happens when you switch off the rear mirror (this is the most
>> "hungry" feature, because the scene is then rendered twice), how does it
>> behave on another track?
>>
>> On a "normal" system it is not possible that the race messages cause any
>> such drop, because it is just texturing (the FPS counter works more or
>> less the same way like the race messages). A possibility is that your
>> OpenGL driver is not hardware accelerated or that the used blending mode
>> is dog slow (e.g. when done in software emulation).
>>
>> I recommend to update the graphics/OpenGL driver if your system supports
>> hardware accelerated OpenGL at all. To check if the sound causes the
>> trouble you can simply switch it off in TORCS. If another OpenGL/3D
>> application is running at the same time, switch it off (e.g. do not use a
>> 3D desktop like Aero), this can hurt performance badly. Some antivirus
>> software or process in the background can slow down things as well, so
>> shut off any background tasks.
>>
>> Btw. if there is no hardware accelerated OpenGL driver for your system
>> around, but it features a Direct3D driver, there is a commercial wrapper
>> around IIRC (but I guess a cheap graphics accelerator does not cost
>> more)., e.g http://www.majorgeeks.com/GLDirect_d381.html, google for
>> more, there might be other ones.
>>
>> Could you try the above recommendations and let us know about the result?
>> Thank you for your detailed report.
>>
>> Best regards
>>
>> Bernhard
>>
>>
>
> Okay, here's some relevant hardware info:
>
> PIV 2,4GHz, 1GB RAM, and
>             *-display
>                  description: VGA compatible controller
>                  product: NV34 [GeForce FX 5200]
>                  vendor: nVidia Corporation
>                  physical id: 0
>                  bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
>                  version: a1
>                  width: 32 bits
>                  clock: 66MHz
>                  capabilities: pm agp agp-3.0 bus_master cap_list rom
>                  configuration: driver=nvidia latency=248 maxlatency=1
>                  mingnt=5
>                  resources: irq:16 memory:e1000000-e1ffffff
>                  memory:f0000000-f7ffffff(prefetchable)
>
> glxinfo shows direct rendering: Yes, and
> OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
> OpenGL renderer string: GeForce FX 5200/AGP/SSE2
> OpenGL version string: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 173.14.22
>
> so no issues there, right? The nvidia driver (probably) can't be updated
> to a newer version, as it's an old card.
>
> Xubuntu 10.04 in use, and I've disabled many unnecessary startup
> scripts, have no virus scanners or other services running in the
> background. At least nothing apart from Xorg seems to show up if I run
> top in terminal (of course I can't try that during a game, though).
>
> TORCS version is 1.3.3. I always run it with the -s option.
>
> I tried some races w/o the rear-view mirror, and sometimes when a robot
> pitted, the FPS did drop (from ~40 to ~20), not under 10 as before.
> Again, this didn't happen on every pit stop. I didn't hear the sound
> interference in those short races, but I'll test it more later to get
> more evidence. Surely, the FPS was higher in general w/o the mirror, but
> driving and battling against the brutes behind the wheel is even harder
> that way. Ditto for running w/o sound.
>
> I've experienced these FPS and sound issues on all kinds of tracks, both
> ovals and road courses. I don't know how to isolate it any further or
> what I could do to identify the culprit. I hope those race screenshots
> at least show I'm not imagining this (or hearing things :).
>
> Thanks,
> st
>


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