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Optimizing your framerate.

Introduction

This document is about playing with graphics settings. Many options exist and can have quite an effect on the framerate. Here is a list of things you can do:

• Running fullscreen
• Adding motion blur
• Using texture compression (advanced)

Improving framerate

A lot of settings have an influence on framerate. If you want to increase the number of frames rendered per second, here is a list of things you can adjust. Most settings talked about are in racer.ini.

• First thing is to examine if your installation uses FBO's or not; check the value of renderer.motion_blur.method; if 4, rendering is done offscreen. If it is something else, all offscreen related functions won't have an affect; in that case, proceed to the 'Method=0' section below. Otherwise, keep reading.

Method=4

When using offscreen rendering, try these:

• Reduce the amount of anti-aliasing by reducing the number of anti-aliasing samples; set renderer.motion_blur.samples to a value between 0 and 16, reducing it increase framerate (possible values are 0, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16).
• Reduce the amount of CSAA samples (coverage sampling) if available. This setting is in renderer.motion_blur.coverage.samples. Possible values are also 0, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16. This option is only available in v0.8.9+.
• Turn off bloom rendering; set renderer.bloom to 0 and renderer.motion_blur.fs_filter1 to passthrough.cg. This turns off bloom rendering and usage and should increase framerate a bit.
• Make sure renderer.motion_blur.velocity_map is set to 0. Otherwise the velocity of each pixel is rendered to a separate offscreen buffer, which is relatively expensive.

Next to these settings, you can also try the settings below (for method=0) to increase framerate, even with method=4.

Method=0

These settings also help when method=4 (FBO's).

• Set racer.ini's fx.visibility to a lower value (it's in meters, so 500 is a bit of a minimum)
• Set racer.ini's fx.sun.visibility_method to 0 (the default is 1). This will make the sun flare appear everywhere, but it can make things a lot faster. If renderer.motion_blur.method is set to 4, method 1 won't work anyway yet (v0.7.4).
• Reduce filter.max_anisotropy to 8, 4, 2, 1 or even 0. It will give more aliasing in textures, but be somewhat faster.

Other graphics tweaks

Did you know that...

• (v0.7.4+) You can turn car names on and off with racer.ini's graphics.names. Also use script commands 'show names' and 'hide names'. See below. This will be useful in multiplayer races so you can see the opponent's names.
  
  

MORE...

An older graphics setting reference guide can be found here.

(last updated November 13, 2012 )