Maybe it's possible to disable mipmaps in honor of more free vmem?

Or maybe you can make TREdit in auto detection mode, like put in Icr2 folder run and it will scan files that need to be shrinked.

Or even more best way, full automatic-it runs before game launch every time.
Just my ideas, troughs.

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:15:

Maybe it's possible to disable mipmaps in honor of more free vmem? […]
Show full quote

Maybe it's possible to disable mipmaps in honor of more free vmem?

Or maybe you can make TREdit in auto detection mode, like put in Icr2 folder run and it will scan files that need to be shrinked.

Or even more best way, full automatic-it runs before game launch every time.
Just my ideas, troughs.

Those are good ideas. I'm looking at disabling MIP maps.

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 05:36:

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-23, 20:47:

Well - a little bit of feedback from me! […]
Show full quote

Well - a little bit of feedback from me!

So far I've run the Lola 95 carset in races at IMS, Denver, Laguna Seca New and Riverside without any crashes. Well lots of crashes but all on the track 😉

However I have had weird black lines flickering across the Riverside track continuously (SOLVED - by turning 'no line rendering' on in RLauncher Rendition settings this issue went away).

The cars do now noticeably seem to float above the tracks as soon as they are any distance ahead. When they step down in level of detail they suddenly appear to be floating. (Like the original Canam71 carset for Grand Prix Legends before the increased detail/LOD set was released).

Perhaps new to me (As I've never had Riverside on ICR2 before) is the fact that on Riverside you see 'through' the track - cars appear visible when the are the other side of the rises in the track and are rendered 'under/in' the track so to speak - which looks very weird.

I'll keep testing 😀

The tracks and carsets linked in my video are already modded and don't need to be MIP reduced. I think that's the problem you had with missing MIPS. I *forgot* to mention that in the video.

[EDIT] Half the low detail MIPs are in fact missing, but the high detail ones shouldn't make the cars floaty.[/EDIT]

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit misleading (sorry my fault). What happens is at a certain distance the wheels suddenly shrink and 'wobble' vertically for want of a better term - no longer looking smooth and in contact with the ground - which I assume is them dropping to a lower level mipmap? The Lola 95 carset doesn't do this or at least not in 'visible range'.

Ignore this for now I guess as it is maybe the detail in those carsets/mipmaps differing and not directly related to what you are doing!

Best wishes!

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 08:32:

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating […]
Show full quote

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating the texture vertically. The horizontal resolution has limits,
Rendition hardware supported horizonal resolutions of around 2048 in Windows (RRedline), but the limit may be lower in DOS. I'll dig up a list of valid horizontal resolutions. The vertical resolution can't be scaled higher than 16384 because modern OpenGL hardware doesn't support textures bigger than 16384x16384, the wrapper wouldn't be able to handle it. Original Rendition hardware doesn't have vertical limits, other than memory.

https://nirvtek.com/downloads/1982CART.x16384.7z
MD5: 75726862d06df3807f9932bd8845426e

Using this build of Dosbox-Rendition which supports 1.5 GB of RAM:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady.Alpha.20 … .1.5Gigs.001.7z
MD5: 0f9542b3008fb4fcd009c9527381f718

and these patched version of ICR2 (1200 MB) texture buffer:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/ICR2.1200%20MB% … ure%20Buffer.7z
MD5: 37b018cb355a3e9800716cec17f86319

For good measure this version of Denver with 16384 textures (43MB) can be loaded along with the carset. Performance is horrible, but it loads:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/denver.x16384.7z
MD5: b80e6f54b7a1df30f6df1f4a11cbf663

So tracks with higher resolution textures should be possible, but there's a limit to how many total MIP map levels can be loaded. That looks to be my next task.

I have all this now loaded and running successfully!

Performance is poor at times - dropping to 10-14fps (Using Cart 82 carset, Indianapolis or Denver) and I have experienced a lock up/freeze. (Cart 82 carset race at Indianapolis). Also I'm getting a flickering rpm display in the cockpit which is new.

I'll keep testing.

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:40:

I have all this now loaded and running successfully! […]
Show full quote

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 08:32:

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating […]
Show full quote

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating the texture vertically. The horizontal resolution has limits,
Rendition hardware supported horizonal resolutions of around 2048 in Windows (RRedline), but the limit may be lower in DOS. I'll dig up a list of valid horizontal resolutions. The vertical resolution can't be scaled higher than 16384 because modern OpenGL hardware doesn't support textures bigger than 16384x16384, the wrapper wouldn't be able to handle it. Original Rendition hardware doesn't have vertical limits, other than memory.

https://nirvtek.com/downloads/1982CART.x16384.7z
MD5: 75726862d06df3807f9932bd8845426e

Using this build of Dosbox-Rendition which supports 1.5 GB of RAM:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady.Alpha.20 … .1.5Gigs.001.7z
MD5: 0f9542b3008fb4fcd009c9527381f718

and these patched version of ICR2 (1200 MB) texture buffer:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/ICR2.1200%20MB% … ure%20Buffer.7z
MD5: 37b018cb355a3e9800716cec17f86319

For good measure this version of Denver with 16384 textures (43MB) can be loaded along with the carset. Performance is horrible, but it loads:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/denver.x16384.7z
MD5: b80e6f54b7a1df30f6df1f4a11cbf663

So tracks with higher resolution textures should be possible, but there's a limit to how many total MIP map levels can be loaded. That looks to be my next task.

I have all this now loaded and running successfully!

Performance is poor at times - dropping to 10-14fps (Using Cart 82 carset, Indianapolis or Denver) and I have experienced a lock up/freeze. (Cart 82 carset race at Indianapolis). Also I'm getting a flickering rpm display in the cockpit which is new.

I'll keep testing.

No don't test the two with insanely large textures, there's no extra detail. They're just proof of concepts and not for actual playing around. I should've restricted these to icr2.net.

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:15:

Maybe it's possible to disable mipmaps in honor of more free vmem? […]
Show full quote

Maybe it's possible to disable mipmaps in honor of more free vmem?

Or maybe you can make TREdit in auto detection mode, like put in Icr2 folder run and it will scan files that need to be shrinked.

Or even more best way, full automatic-it runs before game launch every time.
Just my ideas, troughs.

I think a GUI based app is what's needed.

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:25:

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit mi […]
Show full quote

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 05:36:

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-23, 20:47:

Well - a little bit of feedback from me! […]
Show full quote

Well - a little bit of feedback from me!

So far I've run the Lola 95 carset in races at IMS, Denver, Laguna Seca New and Riverside without any crashes. Well lots of crashes but all on the track 😉

However I have had weird black lines flickering across the Riverside track continuously (SOLVED - by turning 'no line rendering' on in RLauncher Rendition settings this issue went away).

The cars do now noticeably seem to float above the tracks as soon as they are any distance ahead. When they step down in level of detail they suddenly appear to be floating. (Like the original Canam71 carset for Grand Prix Legends before the increased detail/LOD set was released).

Perhaps new to me (As I've never had Riverside on ICR2 before) is the fact that on Riverside you see 'through' the track - cars appear visible when the are the other side of the rises in the track and are rendered 'under/in' the track so to speak - which looks very weird.

I'll keep testing 😀

The tracks and carsets linked in my video are already modded and don't need to be MIP reduced. I think that's the problem you had with missing MIPS. I *forgot* to mention that in the video.

[EDIT] Half the low detail MIPs are in fact missing, but the high detail ones shouldn't make the cars floaty.[/EDIT]

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit misleading (sorry my fault). What happens is at a certain distance the wheels suddenly shrink and 'wobble' vertically for want of a better term - no longer looking smooth and in contact with the ground - which I assume is them dropping to a lower level mipmap? The Lola 95 carset doesn't do this or at least not in 'visible range'.

Ignore this for now I guess as it is maybe the detail in those carsets/mipmaps differing and not directly related to what you are doing!

Best wishes!

I think the square wheels are part of those carsets. Earlier on in this thread @robertmo3 noticed the square wheels and colour cycling helmets, back in April/May last year when ICR2 first became runnable. 1982cart (which needs to be MIP reduced, I haven't actually uploaded this) and lola 1995 don't suffer from the helmet cycling bug, but I guess they fixed the wheels as well at low detail in lola at least. Not sure whether 1982 cart has that fixed as well.

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 11:08:

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:40:

I have all this now loaded and running successfully! […]
Show full quote

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 08:32:

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating […]
Show full quote

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating the texture vertically. The horizontal resolution has limits,
Rendition hardware supported horizonal resolutions of around 2048 in Windows (RRedline), but the limit may be lower in DOS. I'll dig up a list of valid horizontal resolutions. The vertical resolution can't be scaled higher than 16384 because modern OpenGL hardware doesn't support textures bigger than 16384x16384, the wrapper wouldn't be able to handle it. Original Rendition hardware doesn't have vertical limits, other than memory.

https://nirvtek.com/downloads/1982CART.x16384.7z
MD5: 75726862d06df3807f9932bd8845426e

Using this build of Dosbox-Rendition which supports 1.5 GB of RAM:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady.Alpha.20 … .1.5Gigs.001.7z
MD5: 0f9542b3008fb4fcd009c9527381f718

and these patched version of ICR2 (1200 MB) texture buffer:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/ICR2.1200%20MB% … ure%20Buffer.7z
MD5: 37b018cb355a3e9800716cec17f86319

For good measure this version of Denver with 16384 textures (43MB) can be loaded along with the carset. Performance is horrible, but it loads:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/denver.x16384.7z
MD5: b80e6f54b7a1df30f6df1f4a11cbf663

So tracks with higher resolution textures should be possible, but there's a limit to how many total MIP map levels can be loaded. That looks to be my next task.

I have all this now loaded and running successfully!

Performance is poor at times - dropping to 10-14fps (Using Cart 82 carset, Indianapolis or Denver) and I have experienced a lock up/freeze. (Cart 82 carset race at Indianapolis). Also I'm getting a flickering rpm display in the cockpit which is new.

I'll keep testing.

No don't test the two with insanely large textures, there's no extra detail. They're just proof of concepts and not for actual playing around. I should've restricted these to icr2.net.

I'll be quiet then! I'm not complaining though I promise!

Best wishes.

The 'wobbly' wheels are due to the carset car model itself. The car models have different LoD (level of detail) models which switch to a lower polygon version in the distance to help FPS. Some of the mods have a higher quality distant LoD or switch at a further distance.

We should be able to update these carsets to have higher quality distant LoDs once we can reliably run this version of the game with them, as long as it doesnt harm the framerate!

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:25:

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit mi […]
Show full quote

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 05:36:

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-23, 20:47:

Well - a little bit of feedback from me! […]
Show full quote

Well - a little bit of feedback from me!

So far I've run the Lola 95 carset in races at IMS, Denver, Laguna Seca New and Riverside without any crashes. Well lots of crashes but all on the track 😉

However I have had weird black lines flickering across the Riverside track continuously (SOLVED - by turning 'no line rendering' on in RLauncher Rendition settings this issue went away).

The cars do now noticeably seem to float above the tracks as soon as they are any distance ahead. When they step down in level of detail they suddenly appear to be floating. (Like the original Canam71 carset for Grand Prix Legends before the increased detail/LOD set was released).

Perhaps new to me (As I've never had Riverside on ICR2 before) is the fact that on Riverside you see 'through' the track - cars appear visible when the are the other side of the rises in the track and are rendered 'under/in' the track so to speak - which looks very weird.

I'll keep testing 😀

The tracks and carsets linked in my video are already modded and don't need to be MIP reduced. I think that's the problem you had with missing MIPS. I *forgot* to mention that in the video.

[EDIT] Half the low detail MIPs are in fact missing, but the high detail ones shouldn't make the cars floaty.[/EDIT]

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit misleading (sorry my fault). What happens is at a certain distance the wheels suddenly shrink and 'wobble' vertically for want of a better term - no longer looking smooth and in contact with the ground - which I assume is them dropping to a lower level mipmap? The Lola 95 carset doesn't do this or at least not in 'visible range'.

Ignore this for now I guess as it is maybe the detail in those carsets/mipmaps differing and not directly related to what you are doing!

Best wishes!

gplaps wrote on 2025-03-26, 13:11:

The 'wobbly' wheels are due to the carset car model itself. The car models have different LoD (level of detail) models which switch to a lower polygon version in the distance to help FPS. Some of the mods have a higher quality distant LoD or switch at a further distance.

We should be able to update these carsets to have higher quality distant LoDs once we can reliably run this version of the game with them, as long as it doesnt harm the framerate!

Grafix wrote on 2025-03-26, 09:25:

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit mi […]
Show full quote

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 05:36:

The tracks and carsets linked in my video are already modded and don't need to be MIP reduced. I think that's the problem you had with missing MIPS. I *forgot* to mention that in the video.

[EDIT] Half the low detail MIPs are in fact missing, but the high detail ones shouldn't make the cars floaty.[/EDIT]

OK - I've more carefully looked at it and the issue only affects 1995 cars and 2020 cars - not the Lola 95. Floating is a bit misleading (sorry my fault). What happens is at a certain distance the wheels suddenly shrink and 'wobble' vertically for want of a better term - no longer looking smooth and in contact with the ground - which I assume is them dropping to a lower level mipmap? The Lola 95 carset doesn't do this or at least not in 'visible range'.

Ignore this for now I guess as it is maybe the detail in those carsets/mipmaps differing and not directly related to what you are doing!

Best wishes!

I don't know if the missing mipmaps affect the rendering a whole lot. Denver does have a lot of pop in.

Lola 1995 doesn't seem to suffer very much from losing the lower 50pc of its mipmaps.

Is the 128 mb version not stable? I haven't tested this in anger, but probably should at this point.

Testing: I had some free time so I took a shot at TREDIT. First pass was testing a light carset with a complte set of the best/heaviest addon tracks 1990-2001, to identify tracks that needed reducing. A fair number didn't load so I reduced those. Then I switched to Pavel's nice/heavy carsets 1990-2001 and uncovered a lot more tracks that didn't load (even some of the tracks reduced in step 1). So I then reduced all Pavel 90-01 carsets and re-tested. More tracks ran but still enough that didn't - so reduced those tracks to.

So, my take is so far ...a combination of reducing all heavy Pavel carsets 1990-2001, and reducing of about half addon tracks (a little more/less depending on year and version) to run complete seasons 1990-2001 using all the best/heaviest addon content. Quite a bit of fussy work but MAN looks great!

So far ~60 fps tootling around the track. I've just begun testing performance under race conditions - seems race start FPS vary quite a bit track to track high; 20s-mid 40 for the most part. Is this drop mip related too? Also I don't know what graphic falloff there is from reduction since many tracks never loaded un-reduced.

I gotta say that the Rendtiion version of this game in all its flaming addon glory is amazing. And ICR2 is still the only true dedicated and racable CART sim out there - and probably the only one that will ever be.

Thanks for your work.

tincup wrote on 2025-03-26, 16:25:

Testing: I had some free time so I took a shot at TREDIT. First pass was testing a light carset with a complte set of the best/h […]
Show full quote

Testing: I had some free time so I took a shot at TREDIT. First pass was testing a light carset with a complte set of the best/heaviest addon tracks 1990-2001, to identify tracks that needed reducing. A fair number didn't load so I reduced those. Then I switched to Pavel's nice/heavy carsets 1990-2001 and uncovered a lot more tracks that didn't load (even some of the tracks reduced in step 1). So I then reduced all Pavel 90-01 carsets and re-tested. More tracks ran but still enough that didn't - so reduced those tracks to.

So, my take is so far ...a combination of reducing all heavy Pavel carsets 1990-2001, and reducing of about half addon tracks (a little more/less depending on year and version) to run complete seasons 1990-2001 using all the best/heaviest addon content. Quite a bit of fussy work but MAN looks great!

So far ~60 fps tootling around the track. I've just begun testing performance under race conditions - seems race start FPS vary quite a bit track to track high; 20s-mid 40 for the most part. Is this drop mip related too? Also I don't know what graphic falloff there is from reduction since many tracks never loaded un-reduced.

I gotta say that the Rendtiion version of this game in all its flaming addon glory is amazing. And ICR2 is still the only true dedicated and racable CART sim out there - and probably the only one that will ever be.

Thanks for your work.

Thank you! It's good to know everything you tested works.

I don't what causes the slowdown at race start. I do know it performs a lot better if physics and car damage is turned off. That probably can't be turned off, it's not a sim without an actual simulation.

Dropping the low res mips means some distant textures won't load until the camera is closer. The software rendered DOS also has a little pop-in. Though the distant textures do appear to load. But because of the pixellation (@320x200 I think) I couldn't see very far. Need to figure out how to run it @640x480.

Also because the frame rate is slower (at least on my Dev machine), the pop-in is less noticeable. By the time an object comes into the frame, it has already popped in during a dropped frame.

At least that's what I think is happening.

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 17:32:

I don't what causes the slowdown at race start

There are a lot of cars at race start

choose nest session, qualify - no enemy cars, no slowdowns

robertmo3 wrote on 2025-03-26, 18:09:

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-26, 17:32:

I don't what causes the slowdown at race start

There are a lot of cars at race start

That's true, but turning off car damage helps a lot.

@tincup, what would you say the worst performing tracks and carsets are? I can look at optimising performance.

The tracks that I have, don't suffer a massive performance hit while racing.

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-27, 04:35:

@tincup, what would you say the worst performing tracks and carsets are? I can look at optimising performance.

The tracks that I have, don't suffer a massive performance hit while racing.

I'll need to go through things in more detail. Till now I've tested almost exclusively using Pavel's carsets 1990-2001 in Practice mode/damage off, and out on the track FPS stayed more or less pegged. I tried a few race starts since they're typically the biggest resource hogs in most racing games - and notice a fair fall off until the pack spead out. I'll take take notes and get back.

The indy05, indy06 and ccws2k6 carsets have the biggest dats and I run into occasional track loading issues with them - it comes and goes - and sometimes restarting the game fixes it, and sometimes reloading a carset works. But those carsets are really beyond the original games CART years focus so I'm not too concerned if they're a bit wonky.

As I'm typing I just encountered a CTD about 5 seconds after starting the formation lap at Houston Street - first CTD yet.

Let me do some race/all damage testing and get back.

tincup wrote on 2025-03-27, 18:38:

I'll need to go through things in more detail. Till now I've tested almost exclusively using Pavel's carsets 1990-2001 in Practi […]
Show full quote

sharangad wrote on 2025-03-27, 04:35:

@tincup, what would you say the worst performing tracks and carsets are? I can look at optimising performance.

The tracks that I have, don't suffer a massive performance hit while racing.

I'll need to go through things in more detail. Till now I've tested almost exclusively using Pavel's carsets 1990-2001 in Practice mode/damage off, and out on the track FPS stayed more or less pegged. I tried a few race starts since they're typically the biggest resource hogs in most racing games - and notice a fair fall off until the pack spead out. I'll take take notes and get back.

The indy05, indy06 and ccws2k6 carsets have the biggest dats and I run into occasional track loading issues with them - it comes and goes - and sometimes restarting the game fixes it, and sometimes reloading a carset works. But those carsets are really beyond the original games CART years focus so I'm not too concerned if they're a bit wonky.

As I'm typing I just encountered a CTD about 5 seconds after starting the formation lap at Houston Street - first CTD yet.

Let me do some race/all damage testing and get back.

Thanks.

Quick observation regarding carsets vs tracks: heavy carsets seem account for most/all performance dropoff. Simpler carsets barely dropoff during formation laps and first corner or two before the pack spreads out. OTOH the whole library of nice Pavel cars 1990-2001 (lola1990-95, reyn1996-2000) suffer a consistent 10-20 FPS dropoff more or less regardless of track: ie mid 40's/ low 50's, with a rare occasional dip into the mid/high30's. But they do snap back to 60 pretty soon after it goes green and the cars spread out. Maybe the Reyn99 car suffers a bit more than the others? Tracks *might* contribute about 5 FPS? but then again only with the heavy carsets.

IRL carsets (irl96a-b thru irl99a-b etc.: Pavel/Claudio I beleive): negligible fall off - may be based on the simpler 2k model?

Champcar sets (Blackcat indy05 & indy06, CCWS2k6): much larger ~8mb dats and wonky issues. Even reduced won't always load (or load consistently) some reduced tracks (ims2000, sears07, sears08, denver91). And sometimes a save error loading/switching between these cars - and the Houston CTD mentioned before. Also a bigger dropoff to low 30's. But again these aren't true CART era cars.

So right now it looks like carsets have the biggest performance impact pound for pound.

EDIT: Probably the worst combo I've seen is reyn1999 + Clevland (7-23-2012 dat); formation lap never above 30s. Add more info

The Houston track with and without full simulation ( no frame interpolation):
https://youtu.be/0laV4FkA9f4

Without physics it's a solid 30 (60) fps, with it enabled it hovers around 16 (32) fps. I think my installation of ICR2 has lots of options turned on. Cart Racing has almost everything disabled.