Racing sim hardware

[Doorman]

This may be an answer. I know that every so often my wheel buttons don't want to play ball, this could be the reason. Worth a look though. http://forum.racesimcentral.com/showthread.php?t=326943&page=2

[vobler]

This may be an answer.

Superb find Doors.
I take the liberty to post the important bits originally posted by Mr.Hitman here directly.
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There could be an answer in disabling power management on the USB root hubs.

What you need to do is to turn off the power saving option for your USB Root Hubs. In the Device Manager (rightclick My Computer => Properties => Advanced Tab => Device Manager) you'll find several USB Root Hubs under +Universal Serial Bus Controllers. Uncheck all power saving options for each one on the Power Management Tab (doubleclick each Root Hub). This will prevent XP from turning off the USB Controller, which is what I think causes the problem.

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[Gnomie]

Two provisos: One, NIXIM's service leaves a lot to be desired. You may find otherwise. Two: It is desirable to have your pedals fixed firmly to the floor...or something. With the extra pressure you may find they'll tip up.

Agreed. However it's easy enough to attach them more firmly. All I did was to screw the pedal base onto some pieces of wood which I then cut to shape. Easy! Plus, I can just put something underneath to change the angle of the pedal base. (Although in my case I'm limited by the power socket. )

[Doorman]

I've done more or less the same thing although I've got a carpet floor and have attached carpet grippers underneath the plinth. Works well.

[Gnomie]

As I mentioned online tonight I've been having some problems with framerates dropping when using Ventrilo. It causes the game to stutter for a few seconds every now and then, particularly in the beginning of a race. My PC is kind of outdated anyway, so I normally set LFS to "high priority" in Windows to prevent any interference with other running processes. However when using Ventrilo I can't do this, as it will cause Ventrilo to shut down (that's what happened last week if anyone remembers)

So I figured it was time to crunch some numbers and see where my problems are at, and what I can do to fix them. Therefore I decided to fire up the replay from last Thursday's race, place myself in Obsolum's car, and roll the first 60 seconds of the replay. I did this a number of times with different graphics settings and with/without FreeTrack running in the background. Here's the results:



As expected, the framerates are at their minimum at the very beginning of the race, with 20 cars and lots of action.
Notice how anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering has nearly no effect, except in the last part of the replay. This seems to confirm my suspicion that the CPU is the problem, as AF/AA are computed by the GPU alone. (correct me if I'm wrong..!) Moreover, enabling FreeTrack causes a slight but noticeable drop in framerates, which corroborote this.
 
Adding Ventrilo to the mix will of course increase the CPU usage slightly. I've also read that Ventrilo's CPU usage sometimes spikes (i.e. it's not constant). So since I'm already pushing my system to the limit this could very well be the source of my framerate issues.

Yesterday a new version of FreeTrack was released, which allows one to use a Wiimote instead of a webcamera for tracking. This allegedly reduces CPU usage dramatically. So I'm going to try to get that. (I'm bidding on a Wiimote on Ebay right now.. )

However for the time being I'm afraid I'll just have to do without Ventrilo, at least on the official races, like tomorrow.

And, ultimately, this just makes me one step closer to buying a new PC. :flirty:

[Doorman]

...this just makes me one step closer to buying a new PC. :flirty:

More than one step I reckon. Break out the credit card! :norty:  You have at least proved to yourself what is common knowledge, LFS is CPU dependent if you want it pretty.

[OldBloke]

1920x1200 - you're monitor's too big for your PC :flirty:

[Gnomie]

1920x1200 - you're monitor's too big for your PC :flirty:

I know.. my neighbour had to sell his one year old 24" monitor a few weeks ago, so he offered me to buy it at 1/3 the price. It was too good a deal to let down. And it's purrty. :dribble:

The only thing holding me back from buying a new computer is the fact that I'm most likely going to move abroad next year, and it would be quite a hassle to transport the PC. (I know how parcels are treated in the mail, and it's not nice..)

Anyway, I just read through my post again, and realised it was a load of rambling, and probably not very useful for others.. except that it shows that if you're CPU limited, using FreeTrack will cut your FPS by about 5.

[Toddshooter]

Anyway, I just read through my post again, and realised it was a load of rambling, and probably not very useful for others.. except that it shows that if you're CPU limited, using FreeTrack will cut your FPS by about 5.

 Thats good for me to know because I don't have any extra FPS to play with.

[Gnomie]

Thats good for me to know because I don't have any extra FPS to play with.

I should have added that I'm using 800x600 resolution on my webcam. I suspect that the framerates would improve if I used a lower resolution, although I haven't tried this yet. I'll experiment some more with this and let you know.

Yesterday a new version of FreeTrack was released which supports the use of a Wiimote instead of a webcamera for tracking. Besides providing even better tracking, the Wiimote allegedly also has a far lower CPU usage. Check this thread for details.

From the manual: "The Wiimote has no significant CPU usage because it only sends the point coordinates to the computer and not the bandwidth hungry video stream."

By the way, maybe it would be better to make a new thread about FreeTrack..?

[Doorman]

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly. I just ran LFS and TrackIR. Looking in the Task manager processes I see that TIR uses no CPU but 11,800k memory usage. :g: What does that say?

[Gnomie]

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly. I just ran LFS and TrackIR. Looking in the Task manager processes I see that TIR uses no CPU but 11,800k memory usage. :g: What does that say?

My understanding is that TrackIR comes with a separate unit that does all the calculations, so that's why the CPU usage is 0. FreeTrack, on the other hand, uses some CPU because it's using a webcamera for tracking. Now for people with multi-core processors that won't matter at all. I'm just trying to determine how it affects the framerate for people with crappy-ass PCs, like me.

Anyway, I did some more testing. (All of these graphs show the averaged results from two runs in succession, by the way) Turns out that reducing the resolution of the video tracking gave precisely the same quality of tracking (same responsiveness, no jittering/stuttering) while improving the framerate by about 5 in the start of the race. :yahoo:



I also ran some tests with the other graphics settings, to see what affects the framerate the most in LFS. It turns out that the most important thing is the car detail settings. There's a whopping 8-10FPS difference between the highest and lowest settings! Unfortunately reducing the car detail level also makes it look like crap, so I'm going to set this to ~0.6.



Here are the settings for the graph in the middle:



Conclusion: reducing the webcam's resolution for FreeTrack improved framerates by ~ 5 with no impairment to the quality of tracking. Playing around with the graphics settings in LFS has an even bigger importance on the final framerate.

[Doorman]

Phew! Thank goodness THAT'S sorted!

[OldBloke]

He could've ordered a new PC in half the time it took to do all those tests :flirty:

[Lameduck]

He could've ordered a new PC in half the time it took to do all thoses tests :flirty:

Whist on the subject of new PC's, can you recall if I mentioned to Doorz  that I'd ordered a new computer? :poster_oops::getmecoat: