minimal disk space usage & video card

[super7]

1. How much space would a bare-bones yet functional sd install require (on linux)? Disk space is a critical issue for me, and buying a new drive's not an option just now. I've got a lot of tracks and cars from torcs and this forum, so those wouldn't have to be added (I hope). I'd like to know this in advance rather than running out of space during installation and dealing with all that mess.

2. The wiki says that a video card with 128MB is the bare minimum (like my nvidia), but does that work at all in a race? In my torcs races, even with multitexturing disabled and on my graphically light tracks, that card often appears to choke with 20+ cars (all the graphics settings like texture size and detail level have been decreased). Solo runs are usually fine, even on tracks like corkscrew, but in a race context, that card is struggling a lot. Again, buying another one's not realistic right now, so I wanted to know if my existing card could be used. Frankly, I'd like to try out sd to find out if its robots are as anal and infuriating as the torcs troop.

[mungewell]

In terms of space, for a minimal install you need 'speed-dreams-base' and 'speed-dreams-base-data'.Which according to:


So 1525414 + 163856830, totaling 165382244 bytes.

Regarding the GFX card, no one can really give a good evaluation. It's really a case of 'suck it and see'. You can improve performance by choosing simpler tracks to race on (who needs eye candy) and experimenting with settings, but still expect problems with a 20+ field.

It could be that your processor is struggling with such a field. Did you turn multithreading on, and which sim engine are you running?
Simon.

[super7]

My own tracks (which I keep working on and testing in races) have none of the additional stuff like grandstands that would cause an additional burden on the processor (2,4 GHz) and/or video card. The graphics settings are pretty low already, detail level as low as possible, no smoke or mirrors, texture size limit down to 512 (lower values don't make much of a difference in performance), and usually that does the trick, but especially at the start of the race, with the whole field together, the video card can barely keep up. And when the daily wreckathon starts and several cars get lifted off the track simultaneously, the framerate takes a nosedive and occasionally, the game freezes too.

In nvidia-settings, there's the antialiasing option, which might be turned on to avoid some graphics troubles, but I noticed that when it was turned on, the framerate was even lower, even when driving alone, so I don't have it selected anymore. That card's seems to be using all its horsepower as is. Of course, it's not like I'm expecting miracles either.

I don't understand "multithreading". I run torcs with the -s option, which should be lighter than the default. I'm not sure if speed dreams can be run with the same option too. Simuv2 is the engine I'm mostly running, except for those high-banked (19+ degrees) ovals where it fails.

I suppose I should give it a try when I can.

[Nic KERS]

If it's a Geforce card it's worth using the Nvidia 310 driver as it is said to double the performance (in some tests) of the 304 one:

http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/N ... g-8ac.aspx

[super7]

It's a really old Geforce FX 5200, so that new driver you suggested probably won't work (at least how I interpreted that article). The current (functional) driver is 173.14 installed normally in ubuntu. And I'd rather not mess with the graphics on my own, risk breaking things or otherwise adversely affect my everyday use.

[super7]

Well, it's been installed now, and working more or less (though a few annoying crashes have occurred when loading a track, and going to tty1 and killing the game in top doesn't work for some reason, forcing me to kill the entire session and lose whatever's open:(. Graphics settings have been set low, bells and whistles turned off, and driving by myself is all right, but a race with even 15 other cars is too demanding for the weak nvidia of mine. Game menus, though hardly a priority, seem pretty slow too. Anyway, at least I can test my tracks in this game too (and quite the differences there appear to be between racing in torcs and speed dreams, like 2-5 seconds slower laps in the latter).