RCT3 demo tweaks

I did some playing around to see what I could get out of the game in terms of performance, and I've learned a few things.

First off, to actually measure the performance you're getting, download FRAPS to get a frame rate. This way you can tell instantly what option tweaking will do.

Most of the settings, in my experience, don't have huge impact on the frame rate. There are a couple of major things. Turning off water reflection boosted me 10 fps. Turning on simple terrain textures got me another 5 fps.

There's a file in the install directory called Options.txt. Open it, and there you'll find many treasures.

The first option is resolution, so if you want 1280x1024, you can get it. Most of the remaining items can be changed from within the game in real time, but here are a few more:
SkipBannerSequence - set it to 0 and begone silly Atari screens!
CorrectDayNightCycle - set it to 0 and night comes, but it's not dark.
Shadows - turn them off with 0 and get another 5 fps.

Most of the rest of the options are pretty self-explanatory, and as I said, many can be set in game.

For fun... what kind of frame rate are you getting and what is your hardware? I have a GeForce FX 5600 and an Athlon 2000+, and I generally get 15-22 fps at 1280x1024. Dropping down to 800x600 does not improve the frame rate (which is really weird).

One thing, The SkipBannerSequence, it was set to 0 by default somehow and the Atari screens are still there.

Anyway, Cool tweaks...They helped me a little. Here are my sad stats:

Athlon 2800+, 512 MB Ram, Geforce 3 128MB.

Getting around 10 - 15 FPS. Pretty sad, But I try to keep the textures pretty good or there is no point of playing. Once you bring the textures down below half way, It looks pretty stupid.

I have NO idea who came up with those minimum requirements for this game, But if they can't get this game to use less resources...People that have anything less then a 1.5 Ghz processor, 512 ram and a 128 MB GFX card won't be able to play this game with any normal textures. *** Edited 9/28/2004 1:15:21 AM UTC by Big D***

1024*768 I got 20 fps with all tweaks mentioned above and detail set to max.

1024*768 I got 15 fps with reflections, but all other tweaks mentioned above and detail set to max.

By raising and lowering the resolution a notch (800*600) and (1280*1024) my fps was raised or lowered 5 fps.

I have a P4 2.8 Ghz HT, 1 GB RAM, and 128 MB AGP Radeon 9200 SE so it's the video card that's hurting me.

Change the SkipBannerSequence to "1" from "0" and it will skip the silly banners.

Yeah, "1" means enabled and "0" means disabled.

Athlon 1.53, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 3 Ti200 64 MB

1024x768, allsettings about 75-90%, a few set to max, water reflections on

about 20-25 during gameplay, 15-30 during coastercam

Pentium 4 1.6 GHz, GeForce 2 MX200 (64 MB), 512 MB RAM...

I was getting worried after reading the posts in the other thread, but this seems to work out OK.

In 800x600 (I know, I know, get a bigger monitor! :)) I was routinely getting 15-25 fps with only slight variations based on detail. The biggest factor that I found (at least on my 2.5 year-old machine) was changing the color off of 32-bit. That easily gave me a 20-30% boost.

I found a little humor in the message window, where instead of "assessed", it got abbreviated to, well, you guessed it... ;)

ATI Radeon 9200 (128mb)

Things run smoothly withoutthe tweaks,except in heavy activities (Fireworks and all rides going), but still looks awesome, especially at night.

My game settings are right here

My setup is an Athlon at 2.14Ghz, ATI 9600 (256MB) and 1GB RAM

I'm getting between 26 and 32 frames depending on how much I put on the screen at a time during the day.

It drops to the 19-22 range when night comes.

If I jack up the vid card (base speed: 324mhz core, 189mhz memory) to 450/220 I squeeze out a few extra frames but get a lot of artifacts. The 3 or 4 frames isn't worth the mess onscreen.

Nothing is choppy at those FR's, I'm cool with the performance from a $100 vid card.

For the record, I did download some hacked drivers that let you OC the 9600 - I'm not using ATI's abysmal driver offering.

Still haven't crashed or gotten any weird graphics thing happening.

I originally thought that people reporting 100+ fps rates in the RCT forums were making stuff up. In doing a little bit of research, however, I can see through various bench marks that it's attainable if you have the latest generation cards. More to the point, these cards take advantage of DirectX 9.0c, which moves a lot of stuff to hardware and takes the burden off of your CPU.

During regular game play, I'm sure most people will find 15-20 fps acceptable, but I can't take it for the cam view. That and there's so much eye candy. A price cut on these new parts sure would be nice right about now...

Ok question, What graphic cards take advantage of the 9.0c?

The other thing, i can't get the game to start i got all the requirements, i think except my graphics card, here are my stats 1800 AMD Duron (1.8Ghz), 256 MB of SDDR RAM, a 5.1 Sound Blaster card. 9.0c DirectX, and my graphics card is a 64 MB Radeon 7000. The message i get goes something like this "*** FATAL ERROR *** : IDirect3D::CreateDevice failed." Can anyone help me? Oh, and thanks for the tips Jeff, I"ll keep those in mind!

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Big D said:

I have NO idea who came up with those minimum requirements for this game, But if they can't get this game to use less resources...People that have anything less then a 1.5 Ghz processor, 512 ram and a 128 MB GFX card won't be able to play this game with any normal textures.

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The first rule of system requirements is:

Minimum requirements = minimum performance

I'd say it holds true here. You can run the game with the minimum specs, but you'll be doing the absolute least the game can do - hence, minimum requirements.

DC2: That sounds like old drivers.

The Nvidia 6800's and the ATI X000 cards are the new DirectX parts.

Can we expect the same kind of performance once the game is released? I don't know what kind of graphics card I have, but I think it's pretty powerful. I have a fairly new computer that runs Counter Strike and NoLimits with ease. This demo just runs slowly with lots of lag, and it's pretty disappointing. I'll try your suggestions Jeff, but I'm just hoping all that won't be necessary for the real game, because you want to get the full affect, right?

I unchecked growing grass and got up to about 30 FPS an 1024*768 so I'm happy now. I got the IDirect3D::CreateDevice failed error the first time I loaded the game, but ever since all has gone well. When I quit the game, the game crashes which is kinda weird, but that doesn't really bother me. It shouldn't do that though.

It's hard to say what the retail release will do. Somewhere in some FAQ it said that the demo is based on beta code, but if that's true, a month in your final beta cycle isn't very long for a product of this magnitude. I guess we'll see.

I have most of my visual settings near max and am running at a res of 1024*768. I get about 12-15 fps with water reflections on, about 18-20 off, which is perfectly acceptable by my standards. The water reflections is the only setting that really had any affect. I'm using a P4 1.6GHz, 768 MB RAM, with a slightly overclocked GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. Oddly, the only noticeable lag I get is during the intro movie/menu when I only get about 5 fps and choppy music...

BTW, is the grass growing option strictly a visual setting or will this keep my handymen from walking right over puke to mow some more lawn??? ;) *** Edited 9/28/2004 4:35:39 AM UTC by astrosgp***

Ok, here are our stats:

Amd Athlon xp 2600+ just slightly over clocked, 512 meg ddr 2700, xtasy 9200se nvidia chipset 128meg vid card

daytime @1024x768 maxed out on everything about 7fps, strange enough turn of grow grass it shoots to 17 fps

daytime @ 800x600 maxed out 17 fps grow grass off between 27 and 32 depending on zoom level. Very playable, allthough night drops frame rate dramically to around 10 fps.

Something bizzare we found is if you turn off 3d trees and plants the trees sway back and forth quite vigorously. We thought that was kinda strange.

Really like what we see so far.

mine:

Intel 3ghz, 1gig ddr 3200, radeon pro 9800 128mb.

daytime @ extreme graphyics at 1024x768 was stable at at least 50fps

everything is fine for me... but i do have a good comp (1 month old)

2 Ghz, Pentium 4, NVIDIA, GeForce4 440 Go

At 1024x768 I'm hitting somewhere between 27-35 fps. I'll be honest and say that I have no idea what my graphics card is and what it can do. I am not very hip on all this 3-D graphics stuff.