SimRacing.org.uk

Pit Boxes - there are TBC slots available at VIR.

Is it worth postponing for a week?

Regards
Gary

Looks like two of the "big dogs" (Brian and PaulR) are out for this event so it might mean there's an opportunity for us duffers to pick up a few extra points anyway. For that reason alone it should go ahead ;D

Manchester's more like the Arctic Circle at the moment so looks like I have a day free to practice! If anyone else is about and fancies it just drop a post here and I'll host a session.

The track really is quite bumpy around here and seems to throw the car around a fair bit. That last corner as well, if you get the bounce wrong and end up loosing the back end :o

Same story, great for 15mins at 86fps, then a big shudder and everyone goes in shudder mode and fps is at 29-36.
Restart pc and tried daves suggestion again of removing the swap file, great for about 5mins, get to qually session then first fps goes up and down like a yoyo then stupid steering loses 900 degree lock and reverts to 450, then finally fps melt down once more. Grrrrr :(

One thing i did notice when fps drops is the 3 bars at top right of screen, the bottom one shows a length of red bar..what does that symbolise?

Apologies to Dave Gymer for my dodgy rejoin at T1.  My intentions were good, I sat and waited for a gap and decided to cut to the inside so that you could pass me on the left before T2 as I got up to speed.  I thought I'd left you plenty of room, but having watched the replay from your cockpit I can see that I didn't.  Apologies again.

So on the next straight Simon came storming through, and when I tried a move round the outside at T1 Tommy nipped past too!! The next lap I repayed him the compliment, but I must apologise because it wasn't the cleanest of moves, soz Tommy.

ive had it with this poxy sim, it causes me nothing but grief considering the money it costs  >:(

Same story, great for 15mins at 86fps, then a big shudder and everyone goes in shudder mode and fps is at 29-36.
Restart pc and tried daves suggestion again of removing the swap file, great for about 5mins, get to qually session then first fps goes up and down like a yoyo then stupid steering loses 900 degree lock and reverts to 450, then finally fps melt down once more. Grrrrr :(

One thing i did notice when fps drops is the 3 bars at top right of screen, the bottom one shows a length of red bar..what does that symbolise?
Still cannot fathom whether its gfx related problem or an internet connection problem. Again only for this sim, no others.

"The S meter is actually "skew", not "strength". It measures the simulation-time difference between your computer and the server.

The most likely scenario is that the S meter grows and grows. As it gets larger, cars around you likely start to move more erratically. Eventually they all disappear. Not long after this, the screen is likely to flash, the S meter returns to "zero", and the cars shortly reappear. Or, as the S meter continues to grow, you may be disconnected.

The typical cause of this behavior is that your computer has become overloaded - it no longer has enough compute power to advance your simulated world quickly enough to keep up with real-time. This is more likely to happen in Race and Practice sessions when there are many other cars on track with you. Your computer has to receive more information from the network for these cars, it needs to move these cars around in its simulated world, it needs to draw these cars on the screen, it needs more graphics card memory to store their paint schemes, and it might need to mix more sound samples so that you can hear them.

Any settings changes that reduce this extra work load are likely to help:
- On the options/graphics screen, reduce the Video Memory setting. Often times the setting can be high enough that some of the computer's memory is used in addition to the memory on the graphics card itself. When needed, texture maps are transferred from the computer's memory to the graphics card. This is slower than when the graphics card just uses its own memory. Note that the number that is displayed is the amount of memory that the sim will use for texture maps and such, so this number would need to be lower than the actual amount of memory on the card to prevent this system<->video card texture swapping (some graphics card memory is needed for the display itself, along with other things).

- Reduce some of the detail and/or quality settings on the options/graphics screen. Many of these settings not only make your graphics card work harder, but also make the CPU work harder to feed it the extra data.

- If you have edited app.ini and increased the number of sound streams that are mixed, reduce it. "

The utilizable texture memory should be about 80% of your actual gpu memory. In other words if you have a 512 mb graphic card try moving the slider to about 440.

but I was amazed at Simon's pace on his original set of rubber.

You scared me a fair bit there, Kenny. :D But since you were faster I let you go. ;)

I could go for hours in the Skippy and do the same lap times at the end as the beginning, I never wear much out of the tyres in that car, it doesn't have the power to do it. ::) I finished with at worst 94% left on my tyres last night. I never struggle to go fastest near the end when I have a lighter fuel load.

I think the trick is to never lock up and don't turn the wheel as much, but I just drive it however I drive it.

Like MJ I also suffer fps hits during hosted sessions only  >:(, just not quite as bad as him :-\. So thanks for that info Pops, I'll see how it helps next week :)

It's likely though that the hosted sessions are the only races you've done with big grids and with races as long? So I doubt it's to do with it being hosted, just that there are more cars and longer races and therefore you need more replay memory or whatever is it.

Quite a straightforward race for me in the end. As others have said, qual was not the best in terms of drivers joining or rejoining the track, so it took quite a while to get a decent lap in. With F3 it should be easy enough to check if there is anything coming along behind, and if your lap is ruined (or is an outlap) why hold someone else up?

On my G15 keyboard it shows the CPU usage for each core and always with iRacing it tends to be running both quite heavily, i think its around 80-90% usage for the cpu as a whole but normally one core is flat out. I'd imagine it fluctuates a bit for most people but maybe there systems are able to cope with it a bit better before dropping that low.

On my system the fps fluctuated alot normally droppping 30fps onto the main straight and the start was with 60fps for me. And I didnt think my PC was that quick now. C2D 2.4Ghz, 4gig ram, ATI4890

To be fair, LRP is a very short track and it was very difficult to find enough space to get safely out of the pits without getting in anyone's way or getting run into by other cars trying to leave the pits. During practice I resorted to squeezing myself out in front of cars I knew would be slower; in qualifying I was lucky enough to make a dash for the exit and get out 3rd behind you and Stuart, both of whom were faster.

things got mixed up when we lapped Mr Oily

I've said it before and I'll say it again - you're describing all the symptoms of another process running, stealing CPU and causing the Logitech Profiler to lose track of what's running and revert to the default steering lock.

Can't remember which bar is which but one is latency, one is quality (packets getting through) and one is skew (how far out of sync the server and client clocks appear to be). If you're PC is too busy to talk properly one or more will almost certainly go red.

Yeah sorry if I held you up there Paul - I just don't have the same confidence/ peripheral vision with the Skippy I might do in some Simbin cars and didn't want to risk moving off line/ slowing up only to be collected by your extra pace. I know when I'm lapping (the distant memory that it is!) I always prefer some predictability so decided to drive as normal and let you make the move when you were ready. Any other track and it would have taken a corner or two but it's a little tight at LR isn't it!

i checked this last time it happened Dave, there were no other processes running that could hog the memory/resources other than the usual xp things like svchost.exe (what is that and why are there several of them?).

Ross, it was only reformatted and reinstalled about a year ago...something i would like to avoid doing yet again as ive got 122gb of data on my pc !

Just ran the intensive 'Intel Burntest' application and that passed successfully, so all okay in the cpu/RAM department.
Anyone recommend an app to give the gfx card a good kicking/test ?

DG, you could be right as not until hosted events have there been as many cars on track. All the standard IR events usually had about 15 runners at most. Have certainly ran much longer normal sessions than i am managing in these hosted sessions.
I assume 22 IR cars is a lot more resource hogging than 28 GTR2 cars at a gfx heavy track like LM then?

Ross, it was only reformatted and reinstalled about a year ago...something i would like to avoid doing yet again as ive got 122gb of data on my pc !

Just ran the intensive 'Intel Burntest' application and that passed successfully, so all okay in the cpu/RAM department.
Anyone recommend an app to give the gfx card a good kicking/test ?

If you want to rule out your graphics card you could try running the game in a window at a much lower resolution. Not a great long term solution but it might help you work out where the problem lies.

Have you tried turning everything on the graphics and replay to minimum btw?

Also, you say the fps drop happens after random time periods - can you say how random?

Any of you kind Fellas have a replay of Lap1 from last night, please?

No, not tried it at minimum Paul and to be honest i wouldnt want to race the sim at minimum especially as i can run full danglies in P&G. I can try it as a test but never find out results of my testing until next time there is a hosted race session and by then its another race night ruined  Sad

here you go...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.harrington/LR%20lap%201.zip

Yeah sorry if I held you up there Paul - I just don't have the same confidence/ peripheral vision with the Skippy I might do in some Simbin cars and didn't want to risk moving off line/ slowing up only to be collected by your extra pace. I know when I'm lapping (the distant memory that it is!) I always prefer some predictability so decided to drive as normal and let you make the move when you were ready. Any other track and it would have taken a corner or two but it's a little tight at LR isn't it!

The best way to do this is accelerate out of corners slightly less than normal.

I pulled right across to the right hand side after the last corner

On that note - does anyone know if it's possible to configure the relative times/ gaps so it shows maybe just the one person ahead but uses more slots for those runners behind you? I think now it's about even.

1680x1050x32 Paul.

Don, are you capping it at 60fps using the cap option or setting v-sync on ? I have v-sync off in IR so far.

1680x1050x32 Paul.

Don, are you capping it at 60fps using the cap option or setting v-sync on ? I have v-sync off in IR so far.