Test Drive Unlimited Released Tomoz

zytok · 14 Mar 2007 at 12:11

is it just me or does the framerate drop through the floor when you go into a car showroom? Seems ok apart from the juddering that seems to blight the 8800 but fps in showrooms is virtually single figures.......

ajgoodfellow · 14 Mar 2007 at 12:34

zytok said:
is it just me or does the framerate drop through the floor when you go into a car showroom? Seems ok apart from the juddering that seems to blight the 8800 but fps in showrooms is virtually single figures.......

On entry, yes I find this. It's reading the hard drive though which would explain the lower frame rate. I also find it drops considerably whilest it's loading the new areas - 1GB of ram with Vista just isn't enough. Thankfully though I've got 2GB coming tomorrow!

zytok · 14 Mar 2007 at 12:44

already got 2GB, doesn't help TDU.......

SkeeterUK · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:08

I wouldnt have thought more ram would help in a racing game.

Mortster · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:37

it would appear that the regular 'hitching' moments are just related to the streaming nature of the engine.

</flameproof vest=ON> Remember that this game is a port of a 360 game, so the game was designed with the weedy 512MB of the 360 in mind </flameproof vest=OFF>

I just wish I had enough memory to convert my TDU disk to an .iso and then mount it into a big friggin' RAMDISK, this _might_ solve the problem lol

FreeStream · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:39

Mines been dispatched for the total of £18

mortals · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:39

Concorde Rules said:
Mines been dispatched for the total of £18

mine is also

hopefully they are not lying tho haha

silversurfer · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:41

I dont remember any pauses with the beta hosted on HDD. You might want to try the .iso idea using a hdd. The seek time will be much better which is probably that hitch you are refering to ?

Surely this is how the downloaded version works anyway

Mortster · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:42

silversurfer said:
I dont remember any pauses with the beta hosted on HDD. You might want to try the .iso idea using a hdd. The seek time will be much better which is probably that hitch you are refering to ?

Surely this is how the downloaded version works anyway

you would need a few things for this to work.

1) >6 GB of main RAM (2Gb for the game, 4Gb to allow for mounting an .iso into RAM)

2) a working crack for TDU to allow you to mount the image in this way.

There are a number of different reasons for stuttering on TDU.

I ran the closed and open beta, and alway has stuttering during the car showroom and house sections of the game.

I never had much stuttering in game though with my X1900 XT, but since I upgraded to a 8800GTX I have had a fair amount of stuttering/hitching in-game.

zytok · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:48

so if it was designed to work with an xbox with 512MB RAM and streaming the scenery off a poxy DVD drive then why the hell can't it run on a pc with 2GB RAM running it off a hard drive???? It ain't about the resolution of the xbox as it stutters badly even at 640x480.....

Mortster · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:49

zytok said:
so if it was designed to work with an xbox with 512MB RAM and streaming the scenery off a poxy DVD drive then why the hell can't it run on a pc with 2GB RAM running it off a hard drive???? It ain't about the resolution of the xbox as it stutters badly even at 640x480.....

I think the common factor is that we both have G80's.

There are a number of reasons for stuttering caused by the engine used in this game, but a recurring pattern is stuttering in-game if you have a 8800 series GPU. I believe it is related to an inefficiency in how texture information is being loaded into and flushed from the memory of the G80, but whether this is to be resolved by an NVidia driver revision or a patch for TDU is open to debate.

Do you have stutters just before loading in new areas of the game whilst driving around ? particularly in the city ?

mortals · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:50

Doesn't SecuROM stop the game from working on any virtual drive, it stops the game from running if you even have deamon tools running I think :confused:

A mix of SecuROM + DVD usage is probably causing a lot of lag (like in nwn2

)

silversurfer · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:53

Well maybe I had some stutter in the house, etc but that was down to low fps and my gfx card I figured, 6600gt. Fraps pretty much showed 20fps at this time, it never bothered me

Mortster · 14 Mar 2007 at 13:57

mortals said:
Doesn't SecuROM stop the game from working on any virtual drive, it stops the game from running if you even have deamon tools running I think

A mix of SecuROM + DVD usage is probably causing a lot of lag (like in nwn2 )

True, this could be a reason tbh.

I will be honest and say that I did 'test' a version of TDU using daemon tools and a SR hider and it stuttered noticeable more than the retail version that I have now.

I think a number of factors are causing stutters and general performance problems with TDU, but the overall factor in all of this is lack of optimisation by Eden games.

I understand that this game is a port, and it's better than R6:VEGAS for example, but more work imo should have been put in.

For example, the lack of graphic details options is inexcusable. Sure, you can control level of detail, but all this really does is affect the visibility of grass and the view distance for certain roadside objects.

We have no options for shadows or LOD detail on NPC traffic for example. This would make a big difference for people trying to run this game on older cards such as X800's and 6800's.

silversurfer · 14 Mar 2007 at 14:08

npc traffic is part of the challenge of the game of course. The game scales enough to be playable on a 6600gt too

Mortster · 14 Mar 2007 at 14:10

silversurfer said:
npc traffic is part of the challenge of the game of course. The game scales enough to be playable on a 6600gt too

what resolution do you play in ?

mortals · 14 Mar 2007 at 14:15

silversurfer said:
npc traffic is part of the challenge of the game of course. The game scales enough to be playable on a 6600gt too

That's cool as my bro is thinking of ordering it and he only has a 6600gt atm.

Cuchulain · 14 Mar 2007 at 14:18

Mortster said:
you would need a few things for this to work.

1) >6 GB of main RAM (2Gb for the game, 4Gb to allow for mounting an .iso into RAM)

2) a working crack for TDU to allow you to mount the image in this way.

You don't mount the ISO into ram, it uses the HDD and the only thing you'd need is an application to hide D-tools virtual drives, and there's a lot of stuff that'll manage that.

silversurfer · 14 Mar 2007 at 14:19

Mortster said:
what resolution do you play in ?

I dont play it now just tried the beta but I was upto 220mph in a ford gt, etc and it was ok.
I usually play at 1152x864. I remember hdr was too much but I think everything else was on medium, no AA

Mortster · 14 Mar 2007 at 14:20

Cuchulain said:
You don't mount the ISO into ram, it uses the HDD and the only thing you'd need is an application to hide D-tools virtual drives, and there's a lot of stuff that'll manage that.

you misunderstand what I am trying to say.

If you mount an .iso into RAM then you take the HDD out of the equation.

I am talking about resolving an engine weakness rather than circumventing copy protection.

Of course the RAM drive thingy is pure tongue in cheek to be honest, but I would love to have the resources available to give it a test