I have the same problems with GTA SA at 4.31Ghz or higher interesting you described the exact same symptoms in Sports car GT I thought it was unique to GTA SA seems that high core clock speeds are breaking some games like certain old DOS games. Could try overclocking from within windows that worked partially for GTA SA but the physics were still not on time.

Wonder how many games are affected and if there is a pattern? both GTA SA and Sports car GT are PlayStation ported games one from PS2 and other from PS1.

.

What about other CPU architectures? Like a Core 2 Duo or newer?

.

I looked at the wikipedia page, and it's been released before Windows XP.

Why is this game so demanding? Are the graphics processed by the CPU?

Does it run on these CPUs at a certain clock speed, but maybe it will run when you lower it? They get more work done per clock, so the limit might be lower.

.

So the aim of the game is to get max FPS from Sports Car GT?

Challenge accepted!

.

kithylin wrote:

Hah! Well.. here I thought it was unique to SCGT and now you're saying GT SA does this too at a certain speed? Now I'm scratchin […]
Show full quote

stuvize wrote:

I have the same problems with GTA SA at 4.31Ghz or higher interesting you described the exact same symptoms in Sports car GT I thought it was unique to GTA SA seems that high core clock speeds are breaking some games like certain old DOS games. Could try overclocking from within windows that worked partially for GTA SA but the physics were still not on time.

Wonder how many games are affected and if there is a pattern? both GTA SA and Sports car GT are PlayStation ported games one from PS2 and other from PS1.

Hah! Well.. here I thought it was unique to SCGT and now you're saying GT SA does this too at a certain speed? Now I'm scratching my head.

But it's not just the speed.. I'll clarify again. 4.6 ghz.. Boot to hard drive with XP-64-SP2, game runs perfect. Exact same hardware settings and clock speeds, reboot to XP-32-SP1A, load game, SuperHyperTurboSpeed.

So.. so far I can tell that something inside XP 32-bit goes in to "insanity fast" mode for certain games it seems.

I'm using XP-64 for now, and dealing with the slightly slower graphics speed. Sports Car GT runs normal and fine for now, and is mostly nearly 50 - 55 FPS, so is close to being playable.

I forgot to add that Sports Car GT also won't run on anything with more than 1 cpu core. If it detects dual core, it freaks out and crashes to desktop with an error code (totally random timing during running) sometimes right away sometimes an hour later sometimes 10 minutes into the first race.

And a P4 CedarMill @ 4.6 ghz isn't enough cpu power to get the game to full 60 FPS.. And the game won't run in any emulator that exists. It's bugged me for years trying to enjoy this game. To get any kind of good performance I have to overclock the crap out of whatever I have just to run it close to 60 FPS.

Anyway, all that aside... If anyone else out there has experienced this with any other titles (other than these 2 we confirmed here) then post and I guess we can start a list.

As to Stuvize: Were you using XP-32 when you experienced this with GTA SA? Also, could you tell me exactly which CPU you were using?

Yes I was running XP32 bit when this occurred CPU was P4 670, 4294Mhz was the highest it would go without going insane fast. Also had it happen on a FX-8120 at 4.4Ghz drop it down to 4.2Ghz GTA SA would run fine, well as fine as it would on that system. Strange that XP64 doesn't do this and all CPUs mentioned so far are 64bit cores I don't have XP64 to test with but WIN8.1 does not go insane fast with GTA SA at 4.4Ghz. Wonder if XP32 would still do this on a 32bit core at high speeds or if it something else

.

Have you tried running it with glide wrapper? nGlide supports it, says to run it in 95 compatibility mode.
http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide/compatibility

.

Have you tried limiting the framerate through Vsync or an actual frame limiter?

.

Nglide may be your best bet, otherwise it's just a game acting weird under very specific circumstances. I used to own Fifa 2002 and couldn't get it running properly on anything that was faster than 2GHz. It would always crash before the match began and it seems like it was a very well known issue, to which EA never released any patch or fix...

You said it crashes on dual core systems. Have you tried setting the CPU affinity so it only uses one core?
It probably has a multithreading bug where it's able to use multiple CPUs, but doing so enables situations that can result in a crash. It's a pretty common type of programming bug, and not something that was as rigorously tested back before multi-CPUs was common.
If it works when locked to a single core, then maybe a more modern CPU would still be faster even with that restriction. It's inconvenient though, because there's no way to save the affinity settings in the shortcut - you have to do it manually in the task manager. I don't know if there's some utility out there that would automate this.

I could test the game with a Pentium M machine if you want me to under xp and windows 7. I wouldn't be a bad idea to get a first or second gen i3 and disable a core plus the hyper threading just to see how the game runs.

This thread reminded me of Gothic 3 😀

Well, you got me interested in the game.
I just tried it out on an i7 2600, Win10 x64 and a modern-yet-slow NVidia 630 with latest drivers.
It installed correctly from the CD.
The only thing I did was right click on the .exe and set compatibility mode to Win98/ME.

It just works. On software mode, on Direct3D and on 3fdx with nglide. I didn't play more that half an hour continuously, but it wasn't a 2 minutes test either.

Unless you've noticed that it crashes after a lot of time, which I wasn't able to experience, maybe you could revisit the possibility of playing it on today's hardware?

One of my favorite oldies, i've played this game for years. On my systems it's running perfecty fine, ranging from p233mmx + voodoo1 to p3-s 1400 and voodoo5.

I don't know the fps but to me it feels very smooth on the faster system, and even perfectly playable on the 233mmx (at low res ofcourse).