Advice for the woodies?

OK, I finally have a super-powerful new computer now, but even with my insane system specs, the woodies in this game still run like crap!

Intel Pentium 4, 3.0GHZ
512MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB

Framerate drops to ZERO on some woodies???

I'm running the game at 1024x768x32 with all the options maxed out, and I'm not having any problems with any other coaster type or any other game, but even the simplest of SM woodies leaves ALOT to be desired on performance. They always start out at 60FPS, but they always end up at only half of that or even worse during the ride.

I can run the woodies in NL at 60FPS throughout the entire ride, and any other coaster type in SM or the other sims runs at 60FPS through the entire ride as well, but when I run a woodie in SM, you'd think that I was still using my crappy old 366MHZ Pentium 2 with a 32MB card! Is there anything that I can do to make the stupid things fly?

As it is right now, I typically get pop-up and draw-in for days on the silly things, despite the fact that I can run the most complex support art that anybody can dish out in this or any other sim with no problems at all. So what the heck is it about the SM woodies that makes them slow such a powerful system to a crawl? I'm beginning to think that even if I had a 256MB card and 2GB of RAM, it probably still wouldn't be enough power to satisfy these wretched woodies!

Its probally the ATI. Ive heard that they can cause such problems like u described.

The woodies on sm suc**!

No, I don't think it's the ATI, because I've heard plenty of people with Nvidia cards complaining about the same problems with woodies. Anyhow, I have figured out somewhat of a remedy for the problem now. I've noticed that performance is worst on the first cycle after you load the track, so if you just stay on the ride for a second cycle, the next trip runs much more smoothly, apparently because the system has memorized the layout, and it knows everything that it has to do.

The problem here is that the woodies in SM are not fully 'optimized' like they should be. This problem will be fixed in SM 2.0. Everything will run much smoother in SM 2.0. Also note SM 2.0 will be a free upgrade to those who own SM 1.xx.

I have an AMD 2400+ XP with 1024mb of ram and a GeForce 5600 FX 256MB card, and my FPS never drops below 15 on SM woodies with everything maxed and a res of 1024x768.

Disable vsync.

Originally posted by propaul80

Its probally the ATI. Ive heard that they can cause such problems like u described.

No. Definetly not. I have an ATI video card and I run NL at 100 fps usually (which is the highest framerate that NL allows) and I run SM woodies at 40-50 fps.

SM2's Woodies will run a lot faster than SM1's [:)] I think I spent maybe 4 days total on the woodies, and I know the code for them is pretty unoptimized. I haven't started on the new wooden code yet, but just off the top of my head, I can think of 3 fairly simple optimizations that will have a big impact on performance. Some of the performance problems are "caused" by different video cards, but mainly because I wasn't aware of the effects on the hardware vertex cache SM1's code can cause.

In English???

English... Modern video cards can remember the last 8-32 vertices it processes so if you re-use those vertices while they are still in the vertex cache, the card doesn't have to process them again. This happens quite often in most games. The code SM1 uses to render most objects (not just related to the woodies) isn't guaranteed to activate this vertex cache. So the video card will process every vertex when it should be able to ignore recently used duplicates. This slows things down considerably. Different video cards (and even different driver versions on the same card) can trigger this problem.

I didn't know that this could be an issue until well after SM was released since it isn't well documented, and worked fine on my test systems. SM2 uses different rendering techniques so it is guaranteed to use the vertex cache. It also has other improvements that will increase performance even on cards that it worked correctly on before.