NASCAR 2002/2003 GAME TWEAKS

**THIS INFORMATION WAS ACQUIRED FROM ONE OF THE MANY SIM RACING SITES OUT THERE, I HAVE NOT MODIFIED IT IN ANY WAY. BACKUP YOUR FILES BEFORE MAKING ANY CHANGES, I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY BAD THINGS THAT HAPPEN. **
 

These tweaks and suggestions are to help improve your frame rates and game playability.

The idea is to free up as much system resources as possible to get the most performance out of your racing experience.

Second, You should take a look into your video card drivers. The latest isn't always the greatest and performance can vary with different adjustments made from within them. The main trouble from them is caused when you have V-sync and FSAA turned on. So be sure to turn those two things off. They can be found under Start/settings/control panel, then under display/settings/advanced, Select your video card and click on Additional Properties. Most people claim you'll get better performance in openGL rather then D3D,and I agree. You'll want to make sure these two things get turned off as they will have a serious affect on your systems performance and will cause a major frame loss.

Unless your running a G4 4400/ti4600/The new FX or a ATI 9700pro you'll want to consider this.



Next, we’ll take an in-depth look into those ini.files and slam every last drop of performance out of your system.



Open up your C:/papyrus/Nascar4/Nascar2002 or Nascar2003 racing season directory. These ini.file adjustments will work with all three sims. The performance gain hasn't been as great for 2003 as it was for 2002 but it'll still get you some frames.

Look for your core.ini and open it with notepad or just by double clicking it. Look for the line that reads,



[FileLRUCache]

Cachesize=4194304



Just put a 1 in front of the number, So it'll read



[FileLRUCache]

Cachesize=14194304



Next, look for the



[Memory]

Maxblocksize=131072



You'll have to calculate the amount of RAM you have. Just multiply your ram by 1024

Example: 512x1024=524288


Then insert that number so it reads,



[Memory]

Maxblocksize=524288

Or whatever amount of ram you have.

Save the core.ini file and close it.



Next, open the rend_ogl or the rend_d3d file, Whichever your running the game in, OpenGL or D3D.

look for the line that reads.



TextureSetSize= "????????"



The "number" is what you want to replace. There is a formula for this...

( Mb of video ram) x (1048576) - ( 4 x Screen Width) x ( Screen Height) x (BPP) Bits Per Pixel, use (2) for 16bit or (4) for 32bit color.

NOTE: 16bit color will be less of a performance hog then 32bit color

HUH! WHAT THE?

I listed the proper settings here, Just look and match up your resolution with your color depth and you'll find the answer to the formula for your TextureSetSize.



32mb video card running in 16bit "Don't even try 32bit, it'll be a waste of your time"

640x480= 31096832

800x600= 29714432

1024x768= 27262974

1152x864= 25591801

1280x960= 23724032

1600x1200= 18194432



64mb video card running in 16bit

1024x768= 60817408

1152x864= 59146240

1280x960= 57278464

1600x1200= 51748864



64mb video card running in 32bit

1024x768= 54525952

1152x864= 51183616

1280x960= 47448064

1600x1200= 56388864



128mb video card running in 16bit "Crank it up"

1024x768= 127926272

1152x864= 126255104

1280x960= 1246387328

1600x1200= 118857728



128mb video card running in 32bit "Crank it up"

1024x768= 121634816

1152x864= 118292480

1280x960= 114556928

1600x1200= 103497728



256mb video card running in 16bit "It'll happen"

1024x768= 262144000

1152x864= 260472832

1280x960= 258605056

1600x1200= 253075456



256mb video card running in 32bit "It'll happen"

1024x768= 255852544

1152x864= 252510208

1280x960= 248774656

1600x1200= 237715456



Then look for the,



AnistropicLevel=8



Change the 8 to a 0



AnistropicLevel=0



Save these changes and close the file.

Then, In your players directory. Open the Player file

Look for the line that reads



[Graphic Options]

texture_quality= -1



Change this number to a value between -1 and 100 for a increase in picture quality. This will give some performance hit, but the increase in eye candy is well worth it.



[Graphic Options]

texture_quality= 100



There's a few more general things to keep in mind. The number of cars you draw ahead and behind will affect your FPS.

The draw distance and mirror detail will affect FPS along with anisotropic filtering, lightmaps, reflections and shadows from cars or structures. Last but not least, Maximum Sounds Played has a affect on FPS. Lowering this to 8 seems to really help on many machines. These changes can be made under your options menu in the sims main menu screen. To tweak the most out of your system you'll want to play around with these settings until your happy with your FPS.



You can also take control of your Virtual memory settings. Under: Settings/Control panel/System/Performance/Virtual memory Select "let me Specify" Ignore the Windows warning Then set your minimum and maximum to the same setting. Let's say, at least 500mb each or if you can spare it 1000mb minimum and maximum. This will prevent your HD from resizing it's memory Swap file during racing and eliminate some stuttering that occurs during game play. It’s best to defrag often or even partition your HD with a 1gig partition and assign your virtual memory to that.