Nitro Stunt Racing

I do screenshot comparisons of older games, and some like Formula 1 99, Official Formula 1 Racing and Motorhead (lovely old futuristic racing game!) gradually run slower and slower until they lock up! I'll keep trying new drivers and hope (in fact I have latest drivers to try and will report if they work soon).

Motorhead runs fine for me O_o (60fps solid, but some weird consistent jump-lag every half second or so... probably win7 being lame.)

btw - I didn't know up until that post that Motorhead existed on PC. xD. PC version > PSX version. menu is buggy though, damn Glide.

Mac wrote:Motorhead runs fine for me O_o (60fps solid, but some weird consistent jump-lag every half second or so... probably win7 being lame.)

btw - I didn't know up until that post that Motorhead existed on PC. xD. PC version > PSX version. menu is buggy though, damn Glide.

It might be my combination of XP+Nvidia card+driver set then, but I find after 2 laps the motion blur (assuming you got all that turned on and patched up) gets laggier and laggier. Games like Formula 1 99 are worse as they turn into a slide show after half a lap!

The menu in Motorhead isn't in Direct3D as far as I know, nor does it need Glide. It does, however, run at a weird resolution like 640x400! Incidentally Motorhead looks best with the 3.0 patch in Direct3D with the "Glenz" effect turned on (makes the reflections move across the car).

I think the menu used 640x480/256colours/software rendering.

And sorry for the spam Etienne but I forgot how good this game is.


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I'm playing it on Win7/ATI and it runs fine now that I've done the following:
a) forced compatibility mode to Win95,
b) disabled the in-game "triple buffering". I get a hella lot of jump-lag with it on, but most of the time with it off I don't see an fps drop and,
c) disabled desktop composition.

c) you can ignore as it's a Vista / Win7 thing but try the other two if you haven't done so. I still find it amusing the PC versions looks better than the PSX version. xD

(and I don't even know what/where the savefile is for the game. xD.

Etienne wrote:

IceMan wrote:And here's how the game looks with Depth of Field turned on... a bit like having a migrane!

Thanks for the screenshot, we've never seen that bug !
Are you sur you want to be able to play Directx 5 games ?

I just tried it with the latest drivers 185.85_desktop_winxp_32bit_international_whql.exe from Nvidia... and the same problem still happens. I tried with everything turned to maximum in Nvidia control panel and everything turned down, same. And tried graphics in game all minimum with just depth of field... same!

I'm using a Gainward 7800GS+ (which is an AGP board with 7900 chip on it!), 512MB RAM, pretty much the top AGP card you can get.

Incidentally if shader model is set to 1.3 instead of 2.0 the depth of field and bloom don't work at all.

IceMan wrote:I just tried it with the latest drivers 185.85_desktop_winxp_32bit_international_whql.exe from Nvidia... and the same problem still happens. I tried with everything turned to maximum in Nvidia control panel and everything turned down, same. And tried graphics in game all minimum with just depth of field... same!

Reeeallly strange. Hopefully you can play without this effect . And since we've never been able to reproduce this bug, it's going to be hard to correct it. Maybe this board is not supporting the 2.x shader model correctly (the DOF effects is pushing this standard to its limits). "2.x" shader model is an intermediate step between 2.0 and 3.0, you'll probably have to wait for 3.0 shader model in NSR.

IceMan wrote:Incidentally if shader model is set to 1.3 instead of 2.0 the depth of field and bloom don't work at all.

This is normal, since these effects are not implemented in shader model 1.3, and I haven't disabled the option in the game yet.

It's strange because I think my card can do shader 3.0 too!

IceMan wrote:It's strange because I think my card can do shader 3.0 too!

Well, maybe it's a driver bug that is specific to the shaders 2.x and your GPU. This board is quite rare, so it's gonna be difficult for us to reproduce the bug...

That's okay, the game still looks great! I will buy it soon, but I have a number of other games I have to buy also, I'll definitely get there!

Incidentally Burnout Paradise won't work at all on my card, I just get lots of corrupt mess (though that might be the old drivers again...)

I don't actually have an AGP card to be able to test this myself, but:

Do you have an option to set the AGP aperture / bandwidth useage anywhere in nVidia Control Panel or through your BiOS?

On games such as Trackmania, the graphics become horribly scrambled after a short period of time because AGP cards work a little differently to PCI-e cards which tends to play havoc with their bandwidth. With regards to Trackmania, it has a manual option to limit the amount of AGP bandwidth that can be used in-game to resolve the graphics problem, but NSR and Burnout don't use those so that's why I asked the above.

If you can find such an option, if you can play with it, you might be able to resolve it? Otherwise.... I dunno.

I have two XFX 9800GTX+ cards so I can run everything on full-whack without problems... well, except SSAO on Burnout, but that might be because they haven't implemented SLI in it yet...

And the 7800GS supports shader 3.0 - it's been supported since the Geforce 6 series (my old desktop has a 6150LE chipset and can run SM3.0 but rather laggy)
Also I'm pretty sure I've seen either an 8-series or 9-series card that uses AGP. :/ either way, just play around with any AGP settings you can find - or if possible, try a different graphics card.


@ Etienne - NSR in 3.0 will support bump mapping? Please say yes - that would look awesome.

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Okay, this is something that I want to ask if it's possible for you to do:

Can you at some point add an option to increase/lower the draw distance (view) of the environment?

On low-end systems (such as my laptop) there's pretty much no point in the game drawing a couple miles of background (at most points there's no point in it even drawing the other side of the track!) so it's pretty much just wasting the game resources which could probably be better used on giving lower-end systems less to do (and thus give them more performance)

It might help my laptop stay over 30 fps. lol.

Mac wrote:@ Etienne - NSR in 3.0 will support bump mapping? Please say yes - that would look awesome.

NSR already supports Bump Mapping in shader 1.3 and 2.0. We've not abused it, but it's there (look at the tires for example). Thanks for noticing

Mac wrote:Can you at some point add an option to increase/lower the draw distance (view) of the environment? It might help my laptop stay over 30 fps. lol.

How much FPS do you get by putting the resolution, shader and all graphical options to minimum ?
Clipping the display is something we've always refused to do. We've done level of detail to solve the problem, so we don't draw millions of polygons that are very far.
There's still room for optimization on the 3D engine, but we can't focus the optimizing work on old, low-end configurations, rather on recent once (otherwise we'll spend our life on it, instead of improving much more important aspects of the game).

I'd assumed the shine on the tyres had been done by the standard alpha-layer method and not specifically a bump-mapping method. silly me ^^;

As for the draw distance... well, my laptop is widescreen which is why I have to run the game on 1280x800 (else the display is all stretched). Since you don't want to add a 640x480 resolution (to which a 720x480 resolution could be added alongside as a widescreen variant) then that's all I could think of.

I'll have to check what 800x600 runs as, but like I said I have a widescreen display... :/

An alternate could be that you could code in a internal widescreen display mode? It would basically force a 16:9 display onto a 4:3 resolution (GTA4 does it) That way I could run the game on 800x600 but change the internal display to force a 16:9 aspect ratio on that display to match my screen size.

just an idea.

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According to Fraps, with settings on the absolute minimum:

800x600 - the game runs between 14 and 35 fps (depending on the number of cars on-screen at once)
1280x800 - the game runs between 10 and 20 fps, depending on the number of cars on screen.

Considering this laptop is horrid (ATI radeon x200 mobility for graphics) I think being able to play the game at 15fps with every car on display is a good frame rate. Maybe with a minimal draw-distancing implementation it might steady out at 25fps but as you don't want to implement that, I'll have to make do or play the game on my epicly awesome desktop PC ;]


Btw there may be a bug: Shadows don't work if the shader is disbled, right? When I changed the shadow setting from Low to High, there was absolutely -no- graphics change, but the frame rate dropped from 20 to 8. xD.