Running GTR2 on socket 939 board, x800 pro graphics

[tt1988driver]

Im trying to run GTR2 on a Foxconn NF4UK8AA motherboard. Athlon 64 3500 processor. 1GB DDR 400 ram. Sapphire X800 Pro 256mb graphics card. 400 watt Jeantech power supply.

My problem is ive never been able to run the game smoothly enough. Important to mention that this is a simulation and is not so graphics heavy (maby heavy enough for my graphics card though), but is processor heavy.

My FPS drops ocassionally to undriveable levels. What i want to be able to do is run this sim at at max res and all graphics settings at max with max amount of cars on track in all weather conditions (rain causes a fps drop). (max res is between 1024*768 and 1600*1200 due to my monitor).

To achieve this i went out and bought a HD4670 1gb gddr (thinking it was a graphics based problem) which i expected to run everything flawlessly and give me 100's more fps than my aging x800 Pro. To my surprise and bewilderment nothing happened, literally no fps increase what so ever. (The card came from PC World so its a branded Sappihre model).

I have since been told that its the processor thats holding me back and throttling the new graphics card. Im going to take the card back, as now i have no use for it, i did look at the cpu use'age during the game and its usually near or at 100%. However i have another game which is always at 100% and it runs smooth, so im confused.

Ive also been told that seeing as my board is a socket 939 I can't get a much faster processor and socket 939 processors are 1: Really expensive and 2: Hard to get hold of. But ive seen dual core socket 939 processors advertised.

GTR2 is'nt optimised for dual core, apparently, but it should still run faster on one, so i am lead to believe.

I dont know what to do. My 1st priority is to run this game, second is to be able to run any new Directx 10 sims that come out (i know DIRT 2 uses DX11 but, thats not so much a sim, more arcade, and the sims i used are only just getting to DX10).

Can i make my existing pc run this or am i totally crewed and need to update everything (basically a new pc altogether)? I only had the £60 to spend on the card, and cant afford a new PC for several months.

Hope this is enough info.

Thanx for any replys.

Paul

P.S. I forgot to say im using an old Soundblaster Live sound card, could this be affecting the fps performance?

 

[tt1988driver]

Have just ran Flatout and used task manager to watch cpu usage. Its using cpu at 100% all the time! Yet it runs at a pretty constant 75 fps with no huge slow downs at all, as does an old game called Chrome.

So now im really confused, seems processor is always at 100% unless im running Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but thats donkeys years old.

So is my processor really the issue, seeing as ive seen folks run GTR2 happyly with same processor. Damn it! All i wanna do is play this game.

 

[isamuelson]

You can try getting a X2 so that you have 2 cores. I'm assuming what you are currently running is the single core Athlon 64.

Single core CPUs are pretty much dead, but so are dual-core. Now it's 3 or quad cores. However, my Athlon64 X2 4200+ has been doing pretty darn well.

BTW, mine is a socket 939. However, you can even get the AM2+ sockets for a good price, but it does mean upgrading your motherboard as well as your memory.

 

[tt1988driver]

You can try getting a X2 so that you have 2 cores. I'm assuming what you are currently running is the single core Athlon 64.

Single core CPUs are pretty much dead, but so are dual-core. Now it's 3 or quad cores. However, my Athlon64 X2 4200+ has been doing pretty darn well.

BTW, mine is a socket 939. However, you can even get the AM2+ sockets for a good price, but it does mean upgrading your motherboard as well as your memory.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes it is a single core, and ive heard of the AM2. But, its just got weirder! I tried the HD4670 with everything ive got to check if the processor is infact the problem, i even tried it with good old Return To Castle Wolfenstien. Now this game use's just over half my cpu so there's plently of room for the graphics card to speed up, guess what? Exactly the same fps as the old X800Pro, its the same with every game, it really is like the pc thinks the old card is still in there, its quite erie!

 

[jgiron]

I had a single core 939 proc and then a friend gave me a dual core 939 proc and I saw an increase in performance. Another friend still uses his 939 dual core proc and is able to play any game out there, including Crysis and L4D2. He also has GeForce 260 GT which takes the brunt of the load.

I switched to a AM2+ motherboard bc my 939 mb shorted out on me. If you can upgrade to an AM2+ or AM3 I would recommend that.

 

[tt1988driver]

Thanks thats good to hear, but now im not even thinking about new processors due to what has come to light in my previous post, i mean X800Pro to HD4670 and no performance increase, same fps exactly! Im just spooked out over this one.

 

[isamuelson]

its definitely CPU bound then. Possibly going to dual-core might help, but the Socket 939's are definitely over $100 on ebay from what I've seen (at least those that are > 3800+). I think 4800 is the max for the 939 chips.

Just to let you know, I'm running an AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ (no overclocking) with an ATI HD3870 w/512 mbs, 4 gigs of PC3200 RAM and I can run the following at the higher if not the highest settings at 1280x1024:

Resident Evil 5
Gears of War
Oblivion
Dragon Age: Origins
Witcher

GTA IV doesn't work very well, but it's definitely CPU-bound due to poor optimization. You need at least quad-core to play this game at reasonable frame rates.

Also, this is all under Windows 7 64-bit.

 

[tt1988driver]

Thanks isamuelson, thats really helpfull, im gradually getting to the point of giving up and waiting till i can get the money together for a new PC. All this is so dissheartening, and i only wanted to use this bloody dx9 game to the full. These sims that i play are very cpu heavy, but then my other games which use 100% cpu run just fine, oh well. Im still amazed there can be no fps improvement at all with such higher graphics card.

 

[isamuelson]

Thanks isamuelson, thats really helpfull, im gradually getting to the point of giving up and waiting till i can get the money together for a new PC. All this is so dissheartening, and i only wanted to use this bloody dx9 game to the full. These sims that i play are very cpu heavy, but then my other games which use 100% cpu run just fine, oh well. Im still amazed there can be no fps improvement at all with such higher graphics card.

Again, being this is a simulation, I'm wondering how many operations (especially floating point operations) it's doing? That, or it's not optimized well and it's off-loading s a lot of the graphical computation off onto your CPU.

I'm not familiar with that particular game at all although it states that the min. requirements are a 1.8 ghz cpu, 1 gig of RAM, DirectX 8.1 , Windows 2000.

That definitely doesn't jive with what you have. In fact, it seems you should be able to run the game without any problems.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong game?

 

[tt1988driver]

No, you're right, thats about the long and short of it. Its notoriously bad for not being optimised well, and the min specs, ive never trusted, but videos like this just make me wonder:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzIKLYPm2rM)

His specs are worse than mine, he's running more cars at the same track and daylight settings than i could, much better!

I dunno, maby my rams the wrong type or wrong frequency, maby ive not set my bios right, but i usually leave it at default settings, as im not clever which that side of things.

I think you're right about the game offloading to cpu.

 

[tt1988driver]

Just had a thought, maby the new gpu is so fast the processor just cant keep up with it so it ends up being really slow and just happens to match the performace of my old card, maby putting an old X1900 Card would do the trick, its old, but still alot more powerful than the X800,(not to mention alot cheaper than a new pc just to run GTR2) just hopefully not powerfull enough to cause my current situation.

 

[tt1988driver]

One more thing i should mention. To follow up my quest to find out if this is a processor based problem, i tried taking out half the ram to see if effected the games performance (for some reason i thought this would make things harder cpu and therefore show it to be processor bound problem). The games ran just the same and the pc didnt really seem to slow down at all.

 

[kislen]

Having just upgraded from a socket 939 single core athlon to a new i7, using a GTX260 in both systems, I can tell you, it's the CPU/RAM. Mostly that CPU.

Don't bother getting a dual core for it. People charge outrageous rip-off prices for opterons, or really, any dual core socket 939, and the actual gains in performance will be negligible at best because of the technology those chips are built on. . . Their cache is TINY, for example!

Just be patient and get your new rig, bud.

 

[isamuelson]

I just downloaded the GTR 2 demo and so far, it runs fine on my rig on max graphics settings at 1280x1024. Therefore, I agree with kislen (and my initial assessment) that this is a CPU issue.

I did see there is a patch out there for the game. Not sure if you've applied it or not, but that might help.

Because of your CPU, running at max settings is not possibly.

Definitely upgrading your CPU will help, but like kislen said, people are charging outrageous prices for dual-core 939 CPUs. You can get newer tri/quad-core CPUs cheaper. It might be more expensive initially (motherboard, memory, CPU), but it will last you longer.

 

[tt1988driver]

kislen, isamuelson Thnkyou both very much for your help and advice on this, I am very greatfull and am in agreement with you. I have seen the game running well on my chip, but that is probably just a motherboard graphics combination thats working just a bit better, as looking at the processor graph, the games spiking every time the processor does.

isamuelson, looking at your pc sspecs is interesting as the chip you have would work on my board. Im interested to know what settings you tried GTR2 on, because there is a graphics default setting of max, but there are settings that can go much higher than that, did you go under the advanced tab as well? Most importantly, try max number of cars (which varys from track to track) on a rainy day.
Thats how im trying to run it.

If i somehow stumble apon a dual core 2.6 or 2.8 processor for my board and its 20 quid second hand ill try, but like kislen said, its prob not likely and ill just save for a new pc.

Thanks again guys!

 

[isamuelson]

TT1988,

As soon as I max it out, I do get stuttering issues. But, I can definitely play on high settings and the game is smooth.

I guess my question is, is there ANY setting you can play this game on that gives you a smooth framerate? It appears you want to play this game on the highest possible settings which is definitely not something a minimum spec machine would be able to handle. Remember min. spec means what it could possibly play on with the minimal settings.

BTW, I couldn't find this game in stores anywhere (and Amazon wants over $50 for it!), but I did find a digital distribution game site (gamersgate.com) that had it for $20. I like it so far. Thanks for asking this question as I wouldn't have found out about this game at all!

 

[tt1988driver]

TT1988,

As soon as I max it out, I do get stuttering issues. But, I can definitely play on high settings and the game is smooth.

I guess my question is, is there ANY setting you can play this game on that gives you a smooth framerate? It appears you want to play this game on the highest possible settings which is definitely not something a minimum spec machine would be able to handle. Remember min. spec means what it could possibly play on with the minimal settings.

BTW, I couldn't find this game in stores anywhere (and Amazon wants over $50 for it!), but I did find a digital distribution game site (gamersgate.com) that had it for $20. I like it so far. Thanks for asking this question as I wouldn't have found out about this game at all!

Thats fantastic! Im glad you like it, its one of the best racing simulators availible. I take it from the $ sign you used that you're in America, so im afraid i can't tell you where to get it as im in UK, but you should be able to pick it up cheap online, but i dont think theres a fully downloadable version. As you can tell from the GTR2 website there are a few patch'es for it (you'll need the last one for online multiplayer. The program simulates everything! Tire wear, damage, weather, day to night transitions and even has live track technology (as you race the rubber that gets laid down on the track gradually bilds up and creates more grip on the racing line, similarly if your racing in the wet gradually a dryer line will build up on the racing line) and even motec software that records you're lap times, grip and all sorts.

There are plenty of mods availible for it as well, you can get all you need here (patches first mind):

@http://www.nogripracing.com/files.php?maincat=6@

You'll need to register, but it only takes a moment. Try out the unified weather patch, what it does is allow the weather conditions to change as you're racing (but if you have a race and it does'nt don't worry, it does'nt always, its always different). The WSGT mod is also a great mod, this has world super gts and is availible here:

@http://www.virtualr.net/world-super-gt-mod-10-released/@


Hope you enjoy!

As far as PC problems go, you're right once again, I do wanna run this game at max settings with full car grids day or night, rain or shine (rain and night racing are a big fps hit). If not though id be happy with 20 car grids and full DX9 graphics with shadows on high, draw dist medium, and no high res liverys or cockpits, and i always have 'simple debris collisions' off as they cause one hell of a stuuter when theres a crash.

I have made some progress with FPS, i found out i could change the programs priority in task manager, it was at 'high', ive now set it to realtime and the frames jumped up by nearly 10 FPS! Great! This definately confirms that it is processor bound, and im very happy about that as it means a cheap processor upgrade that will cost less than a graphics card. I dont need a new card now as i have a feeling the X800 is actually underperforming by alot due to the processor. More good news is that ive found someone with a Athlon 64x2 4600+ selling cheap!

At present i can run 6 cars at spa on reasonable settings and get just over 20 fps constant, thats inj DX8 at 1024*768 res with most things turned to medium or low (Spa is also the most graphically demanding track), so its just about smooth enuff. Im not dropping down to DX7 it would mean more fps but its damn ugly.

Guy with the processor is getting back to me Monday as he's guuna see if hes got any other processors lying around. Im so looking forward to Monday!

 

[tt1988driver]

Greetings! You are now speaking to Happy Bunny! A Happy Bunny who has been racing GTR2 all night!

Yup! It was processor bound alright, and maybe memory too. The guy who had the Athlon 4600 x2 came round to fit it for £80, only to find my board would fit Athlon 64's but not x2's.
So seeing as he had some 939 processors he offered me an ASRock P43DE board, an Intel Pentium Dual Core E5300 2.6mhz processor and a gig of DDR2 667 ram for the same money if I gave him my old board, processor and memory. Deal or what!

Now i can run 20 cars at Spa on pretty much all high and full settings at 10248768 at a stable 25 fps with no stutters and thats with 3x anti alialising and a bit of Antroscopic filtering thrown in. And thats with 100% Rain!
Can't believe how good everything looks! Ive never seen it with this kind of detail on the cars and tracks, I can see so far into the distance and the sun glare, rain and reflections are just incredible! (This is all on my old X800pro btw, i took the other card back for a refund)

I even tried a full grid of 64 cars at Spa in the wet, and if i turn my graphics down to medium settings it runs just fine. This sim is just so awsome now i can finally drive a whole race, physics day to night transitions weather and everything is just superb!

If i get a spare £50 i'll buy that X4670 again and run 64 car grids with everything on max!

Thanx for all your help guys, you've been grand!

Now how do i change the title of this thread to read SOLVED!

 

[isamuelson]

Now how do i change the title of this thread to read SOLVED!

Glad you were able to get it working.

As for making this solved, you didn't post it as a Question. You can modify it to be one.

Go to the post you opened this discussion up and click on the edit button. At the top of the screen, you'll see two tabs. Right now it should be on the discussion tab. Click on the Question tab and then save.

Then, you'll be able to pick the post with the best answer to close it out.