TOCA Race Driver GRID - Performance Optimization

We all 90's folks remember and know the TOCA racing games. And it's true that TOCA as being around for longer than Gran Turismo, even if just a few months.

They came from this:

Toca Touring Car Championship - The First One

To this:

Toca Race Driver: Grid - The third most recent title

And now this:

Toca Race Driver Grid: Autosport

You may thank TOCA for the rewind system in a racing game, they were the ones who invented it.

Enough history, let's tweak this things.



First of all. Set:

Resolution to 640x480 (the lower the resolution the smaller textures are, so the faster the game will load them)

Disable:
Anisotropic Filtering (reduces textures treatment)

Anti-Aliasing (Decreases diagonal tearing)

VSync [optional*] (Syncs the FPS rate to the monitor refresh rate [if 60Hz, means it can only show 60 fps, more than that is an expense of GPU power])

Mirror (grants you rearview mirror, but remember, in games, mirrors are 3d models, not reflections, reflections are too expensive for GPU so they avoid that so the game is playable)

Shadows: Seriously, who needs shadows? first thing to turn down when doing performance tweakings FOR ALL GAMES

All those weird named stuff -> Low or Off, not even bother searching the meanings, it all counts to increase graphics are slow computers down.

*Vsync: This has to do with the end user of this guide. My game ran at 25 fps and after fully tweaking it I'm getting 60/85 fps. If your game is ALWAYS above 60 fps, I recommend you turn on Vsync. If your monitor only supports 60 fps (60 fps = 60Hz Refresh Rate), more than that is useless.

Advanced Tweaking.

Ever thought why GRID looks so different than its predecestor Race Driver 3? Well, that's because Codemaster used a feature called PostProcess (Screenshot in the previous post), that's what gives the game that yellowish look.

Let's code!

In Windows 7, open Documents/Codemasters/GRID/hardwaresettings

Open hardware_settings_config with wordpad or notepad++ (not notepad)

set <multisampling option="on"> to "off" - This is a special kind of antialiasing designed for fullscreen. You won't need it.

set <shadows enabled... to false and the size to 512 (or even lower, as long it is dividable by 4 (1024, 512, 256 and so on) maskquality to 1 too

set particles to false (in Wordpad, the search hotkey is Control +  L by the way, thought it would be useful

Set crowd, cloth, postprocess, blur, ground cover to false.

If you hate trees and love performance tweaks, set trees visibility to 180, low 180, high 60, lodquality to 0

If you want ghost cars to race, set vehicles character quality to 0 and lod quality to 0, so the 3d model for drivers is not rendered in every vehicle (specially heavy for 15+ opponents races)

reflections? Zero! Size 256. I believe forcebilinear increases the performance, since bilinear is the lightest texture compression method of all time.

Real man look behind, forget mirros! set mirrors to false, the other two are optional, set for true and 256 if you still want your mirror

 Skidmarks? Why? false
dynamic... You probably understand by now that everything that's dynamic is evil for low end computers...
reflections give the game a cooler look, but it pins down the performance, set to false

Not sure what that psysics stuff does, but set it to false. vehicle damage to false

motions enabled set to false. it probably means motion blur.


As always, I recommend using Razer Cortex to squeeze a couple more fps for your game and avoid stuttering, it's simple to set and download, I use it myself. The link is here