Mugello Question

Hello

First off thanks to all here at Radiators for the great work on Mugello. Its really a masterpiece of a track!

I had a question though. The track runs smooth in general but starts skipping a few times on leaving the pit and in T1. It always skips in those spots. I was wondering if that's normal or just a problem I'm having. I have high FPS so I don't think that's the problem, and I've more or less sorted out my ATI problems aside from the occasional flickering of textures.

Thanks for any help

I have same problems. Sometimes not just skipping few times. More like few sec freeze. Not yet found any solution. Lower resolution or no AA doesn't make any difference.

I also have low FPS (25-50) on Mugello, and that skip when leaving the pits. On all other tracks I have a high FPS (90-160).

Hmm. I did few laps in Redline server today and it worked much better now. It's still very unstable. If someone joins middle of the corner it means crash. Well I'm not gonna cry if these issues are unfixable. In netkar Mugello wasn't as fun as I expected. My brain drives FVA version and in this some places needs different approach. There is also some typical addon track problems like offroad bumps in elevation changes and poor grip.

I actually think Mugello is one of the best addon tracks released yet. Not had any problems that i've noticed. I have seen a lot of drivers are struggling to drive the track. I think i was actually faster than a few people when i raced the other day, so theres definately something wrong there!

yeah I guess some have problems and other don't. Mine still skips in exactly the same spots on the track. It's like something is loading at the same time. As Henrizio said it doesn't change by setting the graphics lower...It's a nice track anyway, don't mean to complain!

I also have problems at this track even although it is still obvious that CULMONE67 and the other guys who have worked on this track have done an amazing job.

Anyway , I have a fairly old system which probably doesn’t help with specs. as follows :

Windows XP Professional.
3GHZ P4 Processor.
2GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800GS Graphics Card (256 MB RAM)

I am running Netkar at 1280 * 1024 (32 bit) and refresh rate at 72. I have AA set to 4X and AF set to 16X. Reducing AA and/or AF doesn’t seem to have much effect on the problems here.



Having tried various other settings this is what I have found.



Initially with ‘V-Synch’ Off and the ‘Texture Quality’ setting at 3 out of 4 within the video settings then in the pits at the start with engine off frame rate is as follows :



Looking ahead : 68

Looking Right : 64

Looking Left : 39



This seems rather a large difference and although I may be wrong maybe this implies that some of the textures for this track are too large for my graphics card which only has 256 MB RAM.



Start the engine and leave the pits and although the frame rate apparantly doesn’t drop below 50 whilst turning right the stutter is really bad. Driving round the circuit the frame rate fluctuates between approx. 36 and 115 but with a lot of stuttering at various points.



The worst sections for me are as follows :



1) From turn 1 (San Donato) to turn 2 (Luco)

2) From turn 3 (Poggio Secco) to turn 4 (Materassi)

3) From turn 10 (Scarperia) to turn 11 (Palagio)

4) From turn 15 (Bucine) to just after the pits on the main straight.



To try and reduce the stutter I set ‘V-Synch’ On to limit the frame rate to the refresh rate of 72 and and reduced the ‘Texture Quality’ setting from 3 out of 4 to its lowest setting of 1 out of 4. I have also had to do this to smooth the display out in ‘Ferrari Virtual Academy’.



This has smoothed the display out a lot and although I still have problems at the four areas above the rest of the track is now fine and even at this lowest ‘Texture Quality’ setting (although the car cockpit now looks naff) the track still looks fantastic.



Anyway – I still reckon that this might be a texture issue as approx 75% of the track seems fine to me now. Anyone else got any further ideas ?

Sorry to keep bringing this topic up but I think I found a possible (partial) cause for those with ATI cards.

I've recently started using the atiumdag file I found at race department for mipmap issues. I removed it from the main NK directory and I now have a noticeable improvement, although I still have some skipping it's very little and not really even a problem.

can you give some more details about it? what have you done exactly? is it a configuration settings? Can you do a screenshot? I think it will help. Thanks

I 've always had problems with mipmap, shimmering and blinking textures. So I followed the post over at Racedepartment

http://www.racedepartment.com/netkar-pro/30512-ati-graphics-optimization-4.html

I downloaded the modified dll and placed it in the Netkar directory as it said. It never really did anything I could really see so I removed it and it seems to have made Mugello in particular run smoother. Don't know if this is an incompatibility with the way the dll handles lod clamp or something

Don't know if this will help others but if you did download the atiumdag.dll from lukija try removing it and seeing how Mugello runs.

also, I should say I have a FPS on full settings of over 200 while driving Mugello offlin. So this can't be a FPS problem I guess

I have said before too, I have no idea why, but a restart of windows greatly improves netkars performance for me

I have a little skipping too when leaving the pits. But this does not have to do with the Mugello-track in particular (-I guess it's because of a particular heavy load of this green-transparencies and everything there in the box-), because this little performance lose is since v1.2x at all tracks I think.
In general I think since v1.2x the graphics looks a bit less fluend than before, especially when the picture moves left<->right... .
Framerate does not seem to be more bad in v1.2.., but all those get stuck -skipping- of the graphic in some cases wasn't there before in v1.1.

For Ati-Users reducing the mipmapdetail form = 2.5 to 0 in some nkpro.cfg file should help also a bit (read it in another forum / edit: I see this option is not there since v1.2 anymore, so can't try this),
also deactivate the Catalyst A.I. option in the Catalyst Control Center !, this helped for me to gain a bit more performance.

Laurent said also something about a change in the code for multithread CPUs since v1.2 in the Mugello thread.., which causes less performance than before with v1.1.

wow so this is a CPU isssue then as it appears? I wonder if this will be fixed in 1.3 or if it's going to stay that way now? This would probably explain why FVA doesn't run as well as it did before it was updated.
My GPU I'm gonna upgrade in the next months. Not so great though if this is an issue with my CPU as I don't plan to upgrade that anytime in the near future

(I'm currently at 2,93 dual core, seems to be ok for all other games I play)

- Also, I can confirm as well that disabling Catalyst AI is a good idea. Netkar has a very strange relationship to ATI's CCC, its settings are extremely important somehow to how the game runs. It would be nice if like rFactor the application could take care of all that instead.

chez ATI ,les drivers sont et ont toujours été un problème , icompatibilité, bugs, plantage etc etc......
a priori cela continue, dommage car leur cartes sont bonnes, chez Nvidia au moins pas de surprises!!! vous installez ,et cela marche avec tout ,quand cela ne fonctionne pas, dans les 10 jours qui suivent c'est corrigé!!!!par d'autres drivers

Just to report a little bit:
I tried the new Catalyst 10.12 driver, but it does not offer more FPS in NKPro (I have 95-202 FPS in Mugello) .
Tried also all kind of settings in the CCC, but none makes a different btw. -disabling Catalyst A.I. does not help with 10.12 but it did a little in 10.6.. .
The v10.6 I had installed before over a long time-period had a slightly better performance regarding the FPS.. than v10.12.

Now I will try v10.5 (which is called to be a good one), 10.8 and maybe10.10 and then report later which one makes best FPS values in NK Pro.
..but you never know: newer drivers maybe have better performance in race conditions (more stable FPS) even when they might have a bit less FPS... .

So finally did a little FPS test on my Asus Radeon 5770 (WinXP Pro, Athlon II 435 X3, 4GB DDR2 5-5-5-15 Corsair Ram, Sounblaster Audigy 2ZS, Biostar-mainboard,..) on Mugello track in free-practice mode, 32bpp 1920x1080, no AA with some ATI drivers. Here is the (my) ranking:

1. v10.06
2. very closely followed by v10.07

3. v10.08 (also quite good, as a first impression I thought the picture/textures were more clear here somehow)
4. v10.11

5. v10.05, v10.10(bad) and v10.12 (with this three I discovered the worst performance)


Sometimes they do not differ much (0-5 FPS), but especially v10.05 and v10.10 deliver the lowest average FPS.
v10.06, v10.07 and v10.08 also seem to deliver a slighlty more smooth moving.. of the trackside things where I noticed this when the picture moves left<->right, so in other words: when you're steering.
---
So the v10.06 which I already used all the time before was/is already the best choice, ..so all the testing for 'nothing' regarding to gain more FPS by using another driver -lol-.

wow so you uninstalled and installed all those versions of ATI drivers just to test performance, or did you just test different versions of CCC? Don't get what you meant by "some ATI drivers"?

I'm using 10.12 and I can say it does seem to be worse than before. Maybe I'll just go back to 10.6 as you say and give it a try. Don't know what consequences that has for other application though?

Paul Hamwa wrote:wow so you uninstalled and installed all those versions of ATI drivers just to test performance, or did you just test different versions of CCC? Don't get what you meant by "some ATI drivers"?

I'm using 10.12 and I can say it does seem to be worse than before. Maybe I'll just go back to 10.6 as you say and give it a try. Don't know what consequences that has for other application though?

Can not say much about that, because I have no other games (except FVA) installed, of course older versions may not function as good as newer ones with some other new games of course.
Yes, everytime I uninstalled the current CCC and the display driver itself but kept the southbridge driver at 10.12.... Unistalling and installing a catalyst driver does not take that much time beside that you have to restart your PC much times. Even the CCC settings keep the same after uninstall and installing a different driver, so there was not that much to do to test all the drivers .

v10.12 seems indeed not to be the best choice, other versions -even v10.11- seem to deliver better performance, but I don't know about behaviour with some AA activated,
maybe then I would notice other results (but don't think so really).

Did not try v10.09 so far... maybe I'll do that later too, but I guess it will not be a better one than v10.06 - v10.08.

Would be excellent to get a database of what drivers work best with what cards.

I went ahead and tried 10.6, didn't do it for me. Made my FPS go down considerably, however, I did have AA and AF on, Catalyst AI off. Didn't see the point to test without AA and AF since the game looks lame and runs worse for me with them off, funny enough.

---I originally made a mistake saying I had 10.12, actually I had 10.11. I downloaded 10.12 though and it runs pretty good for me. Still have all the flickering and light skipping but not worse than before.

I'm really amazed at how smoothly Kart Racing Pro runs with perfect texture rending rain effects, 3D grass and all (offline mode only, online is still really laggy). Much smoother compared to Netkar. It makes me think its not entirely ATI's fault.

chercher pas trop ,tu as raison Paul tout n'est pas a mettre sur le dos de notre matériel, la derniere version de NetKar est une des pires que j'ai connue,(quoique dans la version 1.01 il y en a eut une pas triste!!!lol) mais je pense qu'ils en sont conscient et qu'ils vont corriger les différentes imperfections et surtout la bonne gestion de nos différentes configurations (processeurs et carte graphiques)

Paul Hamwa wrote:I went ahead and tried 10.6, didn't do it for me. Made my FPS go down considerably, however, I did have AA and AF on, Catalyst AI off. Didn't see the point to test without AA and AF since the game looks lame and runs worse for me with them off, funny enough.

---I originally made a mistake saying I had 10.12, actually I had 10.11. I downloaded 10.12 though and it runs pretty good for me. Still have all the flickering and light skipping but not worse than before.

I'm really amazed at how smoothly Kart Racing Pro runs with perfect texture rending rain effects, 3D grass and all (offline mode only, online is still really laggy). Much smoother compared to Netkar. It makes me think its not entirely ATI's fault.

Which Radeon model do you use (5770, 5870 etc. ) btw. ?
I like it more pure and clear, that's why I don't use AA this was always the case for me. But overall you're right: NKPro looks nicer as a whole with some AA.
I will test with AA again and see if it makes a difference to the results I posted above.

edit:
------

Ok, I tested once more.
v10.06 seems still the best for me at Mugello. AA performance is veery good with this driver too (with this driver 8xAA strangely brings very slightly more FPS than 4xAA, -with v10.07 it is the opposite case btw.)
As I tested v10.09 now for the first time: I have to say it is also among the worst, especially with this driver FPS goes down much more than with the older drivers once I use AA.. !

But I can say that with newer drivers (also with v10.09) the FPS is a bit better on tracks which have less graphic-demand !:
At Barcelona where I have always between 200-300 FPS, the v10.09 e.g. seems to be a glitch better than v10.06 or v10.07, but it lacks at more demandig tracks like Mugello.. .
I tend to take most care of the best performance on more demanding tracks like Mugello and there v10.06 or v.10.07 are clearly the best, so I stick to this older versions with my HD 5770.

Thought I should post again since getting a new card. On my 6870 the quality of Mugello is now fluid which is a sign that this track as beautiful as it is, is very heavy. Only when I set Super Sampling in the CCC, does it begin to skip a little, as well as a drop in FPS to around 90ish to 120

So by setting Adaptive Multi-sample the quality is perfect.
Unfortunatly, other tracks like Monza and some others show a whole new problem when set to Adaptive Multi-sample. Large black swatches and the skid marks on the road become opaque black lines.

The downside is to be able to run these tracks where that happens I have to set SuperSample, which in turn drops the FPS.

Anyone have an idea if something can be easily edited in these tracks to get this to stop happening?

My old ATI HD4850 is now in the garbage can and Nvidia GTX460 is installed.

Result: Mugello works fine now. Well it worked fine but those strangely lagging moments are gone. Generally new card doesn't give anything to Netkar, but iRacing looks a lot nicer.

normal iRacing is much more resource intensive graphic NetKar, but this is compensated by circuits much more detailed and finer than netKar over the cockpit of cars (Mazda and others are more complete) and the code is totally different , Netkar uses much more CPU processor reso,also try GTR2 if you did, you should also find a lot of changesurces