Boosting GTL's Frame Rate 2

The default values with the High preset selected

In the first part of this guide, I talked about how you could improve the frame rate in GT Legends by changing a few settings in the external GTLconfig.exe utility. This time, I’ll be looking at some of the settings you can make from within GTL itself. I'll leave the more advanced settings for next time, so the options I’ll discuss in this post are found from the main menu by selecting Options and then Video.

High as a kite

GT Legends offers you a range of several presets for graphics settings, and that’s the best place to start. Your choices are Low, Medium, High and Full. Unless you’re stuck playing GTL on a very underpowered PC indeed, you can probably ignore the first two settings. High is a reasonable place to start. As you can see from the screenshot above, this gives you maximum detail for the circuit – which is after all what you’ll be looking at most – and high levels for other cars. Other settings are at medium except for Draw distance. This is set to Very Far even on Low setting, and I’d strongly advise keeping it that way unless you have no option. Lots of pop-up is extremely distracting while you’re racing. Be aware, though, that even at Very Far you’ll still get a bitof pop-up in the far distance on some tracks.

Note the cars on the right's exhaust smoke, invisible at lower graphics settings

Do it yourself

Although it’s not that obvious, there is another setting Full, and this is called Custom. You can access it by picking a preset and then changing one or more of the individual settings below. Custom is a godsend if you have a moderate system like mine, since it means you can do a I do: ratchet every setting up as high as it will go except for those which take the most processing oomph. In general, these are Shadows and Special Effects. Headlight Effects are also draining, but frankly night racing in general is a huge fps hog thanks to the multiple extra light sources it introduces.

How much can you gain from fiddling about with these options? A bit. I know that's a vague answer, but it really is dependent on too many things for me to give you a better one. It all depends on what you consider an acceptable trade-off between looks and performance. Of course, if you have a super-rig that can blast through GTL at 150 fps with everything maxed out, then lucky you! 

In the final part of this guide, I’ll take a look at the Advanced menu, which offers options to fine-tune your visual experience and – if your PC has the grunt – to make GT Legends look really pretty darn good for a 2005 game.

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM JOLLY GTL!

How Fast is Fast Enough?

Tyre and detailed laptime info provided by the free app XD -- more on this soon

Pretty much every new sim racer asks this question at some point in their early days. I know I did back when I got hold of Grand Prix Legends on its launch in 1998. (Yes, I'm that old.) I suppose most of us are looking for a nice, straightforward answer, a target to aim at. The snag is that there often isn’t one, at least not one that can be given in black and white terms. But to get you started, here are a few tips that should help give you some idea of what you need to do to be competitive.

Speed is not everything

That may sound paradoxical in a racing game – after all, isn’t the whole point to cross the finish line ahead of everybody else? Well, yes… but both parts of that are important. If you don’t reach the finish line, it doesn’t matter a jot if you were three seconds faster than anyone else on the track. Driving smoothly and consistently is better than throwing the car around on the very edge the whole time. (At least in races it is – hotlapping, the art of pushing to get the quickest possible single-lap time, is another matter.)

If you happen to be racing online, it’s even more important to be smooth. Most of your competitors will be fine with drivers who are a bit slow, provided they’re not absurdly so – but if you keep losing control and hitting other cars because you’re trying too hard, that will quickly get you into trouble. Keep doing it and you may be warned, be banned, or worst of all gain a reputation as someone to steer clear of. You do not want to become known as a wrecker. One of the nicest compliments I ever had in online GTL came after a thrilling race-long battle around Hockenheim Short, when my rival sent me a simple message: “Clean Driver.”

Keeping things competitive

Obviously, being a clean driver who’s 30 seconds a lap slower than everyone else is pretty dull, for you and your rivals. If you’re playing online, your server or league may have its own rules or guidelines, so follow those. Offline, racing against the AI, it’s more a case of giving yourself a competitive race. GT Legends doesn’t have such fine control over AI skill as many more recent simulations, so the best thing to do is to start with the lowest level (Beginner) on a track you’ve practised and see how you go. Once you can win easily, step up a level, and keep going.

Ideally, you want to be at a level where competing at the front is tough but achievable, although some people (including me, sometimes) also enjoy battling it out in midfield. Although GTL doesn’t have penalties for contact with the AI cars, smoothness and consistency are still important as being punted off the track because you couldn’t keep control is going to lose you plenty of time – annoying in a long race, potentially disastrous in a five-lap sprint.

Yes, but how fast should I be?

All right, I admit it: smoothness isn’t everything in motor racing, speed is important too. You want something more specific? Choose the Lotus Cortina in an Open Practice session at Donington National; make sure the “Private Test” box is ticked. Then, go into the setup to reduce your fuel load to a few laps’ worth. Leave all the other numbers at their default settings. Use as few driver aids as you can manage; in particular, change gears manually if possible. Drive with the controller you prefer – you can have plenty of fun as a keyboard driver, whatever some hardcore sim racers may insist!

Try to complete a clean, no-contact lap of Donington National in the Cortina inside one minute, thirty seconds. To reach 1:30 you won’t need to be perfect, but you will need to avoid any huge mistakes. As such, it’s not a bad time to keep in mind. When you’re done, watch the replay of your hotlap to see where you can still improve – and then try to do it. Eventually, try to drive so that you can stay below 1:30 consistently for several flying laps in a row. As with most things GTL, it may look a long way away at first, but you can get there. Good luck!

Track Guide 2: Amaroo Park 1967

Exiting Cattai Curve, looking down towards The Cutting

AMAROO PARK 1967

New South Wales, Australia
Length: 1.20 miles (clockwise)
Max grid: 24
Laps: 3 to 60

Amaroo Park, in full Amaroo Park Raceway, was a relatively short-lived track in what are now the western suburbs of Sydney. The circuit opened in 1967, and this is the era replicated by the GT Legends version – which, like a number of GTL tracks, started out in Grand Prix Legends. The real Amaroo existed for just over three decades, closing in 1998 as a victim of the Australian Racing Drivers Club’s financial woes in the late 1990s. The ARDC had spent heavily promoting the Bathurst 1000’s foray into Super Touring, a formula which lacked the same mass appeal in Australia that it had in Europe and South America.

Yellow text added by me

Driver aids

Amaroo Park is another of those short tracks that packs a lot of variety into its compact dimensions. The thing you’ll notice straight away about the circuit is just how steep the gradients are. Soon after the start line, you’re heading steeply uphill into a blind left-hander, The Crest – which requires careful placement for Box Hill Corner, the right-hander that quickly follows. However, the trickiest bend here may be Cattai Curve, a fast downhill right-hander where it’s all too easy to either slide into the grass to the left or get penalised for track-cutting on the right. Amaroo’s aptly named final bend, Speedway Corner, also demands attention – cutting inside will not only get you a penalty but also risks a head-on collision with an unyielding tyre wall that can spell the end of your race!

Pick a car, any car

This is not really the place for fast cars that take a while to get into their stride; there just aren’t any straights long enough for them. What you need at Amaroo Park is fast acceleration and sharp cornering. You’d expect Minis to be a fun ride here, and so they are – but you’ll have to put in some work to win races in them, especially if you’re competing against faster machines. The hill after the start also means some of the slowest cars struggle even to keep pace at all. As seems so often to be the case, the Lotus Cortina is a solid all-rounder.

AI AI oh

Amaroo Park’s AI is on the slow side; I can usually challenge for class victory and fastest lap even on the Professional setting, which isn’t the case everywhere by any means. If you’re a more accomplished driver than me, you may need to take the wheel of a less competitive car for a real challenge. However, the computer-controlled cars do usually race pretty solidly around the circuit. The one big exception to this is that the AI drivers tend to brake very early for the Hairpin. If you stay calm you can go down the inside and pass quite easily. Don’t overdo it, though, as the corner has its name for a reason and damaging contact is all too easy.

Look at that!

I’ve never visited semi-rural New South Wales, but there’s a nice sense of place and time here; you can believe you’ve been transported back to late-Sixties Australia. I’ve no idea whether all the trackside billboards are appropriate for 1967, but all of them look right – and the exotic (to my English eyes) names like Peters Two-in-One (a double choc ice) and TB Bitter mix well with the usual selection of Dunlops and Coca-Colas. Look out for the line of VW Kombis (what Australians call the Campervan) parked by the Control Tower; there’s another on the inside of the last corner. You can also catch occasional glimpses of what looks like a small reservoir on the inside of the track, though it’s hard to see from cockpit view, at least unless you’re doing a wrong-way lap in open practice!

Download links

Amaroo Park is included in the Australian Track Pack collection:
Altbierbude
RaceDepartment

Credit card

Sunalp2 – GTL version
David Hingston (Hingo) – updates
Neil Faichney (Krunch) – some textures
Bud Lucas – rFactor version
Sergio Loro & Doc Roberto – GPL original

Gallery

Boosting GTL's frame rate 1

96 fps showing while hotlapping at Donington National, not a very visually demanding track

GT Legends is a great choice if you don’t have a particularly fast PC. Well, it’s a great choice anyway, but being a 2005 game it’s not enormously demanding. However, that doesn’t mean you can necessarily hike every setting up to maximum and revel in 200 fps. A big reason for this is that GTL was made before the multi-core age, meaning that it only takes advantage of one processor core. Your 16-core monster won’t have quite the same power with this game as it will with a brand new AAA title.

The good news is that you can play GT Legends very pleasantly with a lower-spec computer. For example, my current PC is an old Dell Optiplex 7010 with an i3-3220 CPU, 6 GB of RAM and a GeForce GT 1030 graphics card. Indeed, until recently I didn’t have the GT 1030 and was relying on the i3’s own Intel HD 2500 GPU. Even with what by today’s standards is an ancient, wheezing GPU, the game was still playable with just a few compromises. In this first post, the first couple of tips...

Ctrl-F is your friend

At any time while sitting in the car (but not in the game’s menus) you can press CTRL-F to see your current frame rate; it will appear in white at the top right of the screen. See the head of this post for an example. There’s nothing to stop you using an external utility such as Fraps to do this, but you don’t need to. Try a range of scenarios, ranging from hotlapping on your own to mid-race cruising to sitting at the back of a full grid. Get a feel for the kinds of numbers you’re seeing. People differ, and the lower bound of “smooth enough” can be anywhere between 30 and 80 fps – it really is highly subjective. If it’s too low for you, you’ll need to fiddle with some settings.

GTLConfig's one and only screen

GTLConfig

The need to use a separate utility (GTLConfig.exe) to change some settings is one area where GT Legends really does show its age. Still, you won’t need to do this that often. The important settings to consider here are:

• Video Driver – check and double-check that GTL is using the right video driver, especially if you have more than one card installed. I don’t have this setup so can’t give numbers, but if this is set wrongly it could mean a very large fps penalty indeed.
  

• Resolution – this is the obvious one, though I generally see only a 10-15% difference in frame rate between 1920x1080 and 1280x720. Always use 32-bit modes, which (perhaps surprisingly) give higher frame rates than their 16-bit cousins. Unless you’re one of the few people still using a CRT monitor (and if you don't know, you're not), most of the modes listed will look terrible and some may not work at all. Stick to the two I mentioned if at all possible.
  

• Fullscreen Anti-Aliasing – exactly what you see here will depend on your GPU. Mine gives me four levels to pick from; others may see 2x, 4x and so on. The higher this goes, the smoother edges will look – but that does come with a noticeable frame rate hit. For me it’s about 10% when hotlapping, a bit more with other cars on screen.

The other settings aren’t really that significant – even an old PC today should be able to run DirectX 9 without a hitch, so you can leave the Shader Level setting on Auto unless you have a really good reason not to. The Refresh Rate, Vertical Sync and Windowed Mode settings are more to do with your monitor and your personal preference than anything else.

In part two of this guide, I’ll take a look at some of the things you can change from the in-game Video menu, and I'll discuss how much of an impact these can have on both fps and visual appeal.

Track Guide 1: Knockhill

Yellow text added by me

KNOCKHILL

Scotland, United Kingdom
Length: 1.270 miles (clockwise)
Max grid: 24
Laps: 3 to 101

Knockhill is Scotland’s premier racing circuit. Located in Fife in the east of the country, it’s at over 200 metres above sea level, which does make it rather exposed to the elements; it’s prone to changeable weather and gusty showers. There’s no rain in GT Legends, of course, but you’ll find yourself here on a rather grey day with only glimmers of blue sky showing between the clouds.

Driver aids

Knockhill is a deceptive track. It’s less than 1.3 miles in length and takes only about a minute to get around. Must be easy, right? Wrong. Knockhill is chock-full of blind corners, significant gradients and odd cambers. It’s definitely a rhythm track, but it’s all too easy to overdo it, especially on the sequence from Duffus Dip to the chicane. That goes double if you’re driving a car like the Porsche 911 which has a lot of weight at the back.

Pick a car, any car

In real life, this circuit is on the British Touring Car Championship calendar to this day. It’s incredibly exciting to watch BTCC cars tearing around Knockhill, but it’s something of a white-knuckle ride for cars that quick – and the same applies for GTL’s GTC-TC-76 roster, especially if you drive with all the aids switched off. I find Knockhill is actually more fun in slightly slower cars, and the Lotus Elan is a particular favourite of mine owing to its mix of responsive acceleration and reasonably dependable agility.

AI AI oh

As usual in GTL, the AI isn’t very good at coping with slow corners as a pack. Although things aren’t quite as bad here as at Mondello Park’s infamous first corner, you’ll still need to keep your eyes peeled. The computer-controlled cars are also rather slow into the final hairpin, but keep your wits about you there. For one, it’s very easy to tail-end another car at some speed and damage your own. For another, the stewards are pretty hot on track-cutting here. It is a good place to overtake, but overdoing it can ruin your race day. All the more so if you’re racing at night – this really is not a place you want to be stuck without headlights.

Look at that!

In GTL, as in real life, Knockhill isn’t the prettiest of circuits. It’s set among a mixture of hill country, farmland and scrubby tree plantations, and the most noticeable landmark is the collection of communications masts that stand atop Knock Hill (two words!) from which Knockhill (one word!) takes its name. The paddock area is quite bare, with only the multiple start light columns really standing out – and they’re still invisible from some cockpits when you’re on pole!

Download links

Altbierbude
RaceDepartment

Credit card

Der Dumeklemmer – GTL conversion
Culmone67 – texture updates
Meinicke – TV cameras
Ricardo Werther – testing
CY-33 – Great Britain map
Ferrari27 – rFactor version
RacerM/British GT Track Pack Project – GTR2 version

Gallery

The Ethics of... Cheats

“The Ethics of…” is planned as a little series of posts exploring some of the things that have been known to nip at people’s consciences when playing GT Legends. Track-cutting, pausing, that kind of thing. Of course, if you’re playing online then things are more clear-cut: obey both the letter and the spirit of the rules laid down by the organising body. You really don’t want to gain a reputation as someone who isn’t a fair competitor.

Offline, though, things are rather different – and these days, that’s how most of us will enjoy GTL. When you’re simply experiencing the single-player game against AI cars (or alone, if you’re practising or hotlapping) then it’s largely just down to what you feel comfortable with. This time, I’ll look at the two most popular GT Legends cheats, both of which I have used for many years without any real qualms.

 

File info screen in Windows 7 (my game is not installed in the standard Steam directory)

Unlock all cars and tracks

When you first install GTL, you’ll notice that only two cars and a handful of tracks are available for you to race with. (You can drive other cars in the Test Drive mode accessible via the Car Dealer section, but that’s all.) To get hold of the rest, the “official” way is to do well enough in the Cup Challenge career mode to unlock new stuff and earn enough credits to buy those cars. If that’s how you like to play GTL, then you don’t need to read any further.

However, it is possible to have all the built-in cars and tracks available to you from the start. Back when I was playing GT Legends online a decade and more ago, everyone had activated this cheat. That made the attempts of one of the developers (10tacle I think, but memory may be faulty) to threaten forums that included it – to the extent of mentioning lawyers at least once or twice – look particularly silly. Thankfully those days are long gone. Here’s what to do:

1. Start with a clean install of GTL from Steam

2. Find the directory where the game is stored – from your Steam library, right-click on GT Legends and go to Manage → Browse Local Files…
   

3. Check that the file GTL.exe is here to make sure you have the right directory

4. From Windows, use Notepad (not a more complex word processor) to create a brand new empty file called TG2001.DYN – the name must be in all caps, and you should check that Windows hasn’t actually called it TG2001.DYN.txt as that won’t work!

5. Check that the new file has a size of 0 bytes (zero)

6. Launch GT Legends

7. Set up a new player profile

8. You should now be able to drive anything, anywhere!

If you already have GTL installed, don’t panic – you can still add the TG2001.DYN file. From that point on, any new driver profile will have the cheat applied, though existing profiles will not. Addon cars will be available from the start, though you may still need to find the credits to buy them. Fortunately, there’s a solution to that problem too...

 

Brickyard Legends Team's Renault 8 Gordini [RD], purchased using the money cheat
Your interface will look slightly different if you're not using the HQ Anniversary Patch [RD]

Make yourself rich

Even with the above cheat applied, you still won’t have many credits in your account, and that can be a problem when adding third-party mod cars as some of those are expensive. The simplest way to change this is to make the game pay you for buying a car! This is how to do it:

1. You’ll need a car you don’t currently own, so if you’ve already applied the cheat above that will mean downloading a third-party car from somewhere

2. Make sure Windows is set to display all file extensions. It’s best to Google this as the method varies between versions of Windows

3. Install the car to the game as explained by its readme, and note down the class it belongs to, but do not start driving it and do not launch GTL

4. In your GTL directory, head to GameData → Teams → [class] → [car directory]

5. From here, go into the subdirectory of the first car and look for a file that has a filetype of .car or .xcar

6. Load this file into Notepad (it's a plain text file) and scroll right down to the bottom

7. You’ll see a line like value=15000 – change that number to a big negative one, eg value=-500000000

8. Save the file and launch GTL

9. At the Car Dealer, choose the exact car you edited. You’ll see its price listed as “POA”

10. Buy the car; it will appear in your garage (still listed as “POA”) and you’ll be a multi-millionaire!

I have used both of these cheats for a long, long time, and I have absolutely no pangs about that. Remember, GT Legends came out in 2005, years before gamers had to worry about automated cheat detection and bans from gaming networks. As I said earlier, it was absolutely the norm for the “unlock everything” cheat to be used, whatever 10tacle may have felt about it. If you’re not happy with these cheats, then don’t use them – but if you do, I don’t think there’s any need to feel guilty.

Welcome to Jolly GTL!

HELLO THERE!

This is – or will be, once it actually has more content than just this page – a blog about GT Legends. At this point, those of you who haven’t already left will probably be asking why I’m starting such a thing now, a decade and a half after the game appeared. You may also wonder what I’m planning to write about, who this blog is aimed at, why it has that cheesy name, and so on. So, here’s a quick start guide:

• I love this game – GT Legends is my favourite driving game of all time: even all these years on I still play it all the time. I hope some of that enthusiasm will come through here.

• It is a game – yes, GTL is a sim, not an arcade racer, but it’s still a game. I want to emphasise enjoyment, not micromanaging obsession. These days, those who want realism and rock-hard competition above all else are probably playing iRacing anyway.

• It’s a low-risk choice – you can pick up GTL for £4.99 on Steam (and similar prices in other countries) even when it’s not on sale. It’s also very useable on older PCs without feeling like a total museum piece.

• GTL is mod-friendly – this is a huge reason for the game’s longevity. You can find literally hundreds of add-on tracks and cars, many of them of extremely high quality. Few more recent sims (the original Assetto Corsa is an exception) are so open to third-party additions.

“Yes, Logan,” I hear you say, “but you still haven’t explained that blog name!” Well, several reasons for that, too:

• It sounds nicely old-fashioned English – as an old-fashioned Englishman myself, I feel very comfortable with such things!

• It emphasises the fun aspect – “jolly” isn’t a word to use when you’re being deadly serious. It’s a word to use when you’re being light-hearted and happy.

• There’s an echo of real-life motorsport – Jolly Club is a legendary name in rallying. Completely unconnected to this site, but it’s a nice coincidence!

• Alliteration is fun – no, really it is.

Finally, what will actually be on this blog? In general, it’ll be much the same as every other blog I’ve ever produced: me rambling on semi-coherently about stuff that interests or amuses me. But among other things, you can expect to find:

• Help and tips – a lot of the useful information about how to enjoy GTL to the full has either disappeared or is lost in a mire of ancient forum threads. I’ll try to pick out some of the most useful tips.

• Track guides – expect plenty of these, aimed mostly at people who are more interested in being able to compete with the AI, not so much at those desperate to shave 0.02s off their existing world record.

• Car guides – every so often, I’ll take a look at one of the cars available for GTL and suggest a few things to help you drive it more effectively. Well, a bit more effectively...

I think I’ve probably waffled on for long enough to outstay my welcome now! But to end with, the most important tip of all:

Do not use the DVD version of GT Legends! Always buy it through Steam!
This is because the DVD version contains DRM called StarForce, which was by a mile the most unpopular feature of the game back in the 2000s. It can cause all kinds of problems, doesn’t uninstall properly and isn’t even compatible with newer versions of Windows. The only reason to get the DVD is for something to put on your shelf. We’re in a looking-glass world with this game where it’s actually the Steam version that is DRM-free! And yes, it retains all the licences, so Ferrari and Porsche cars are present and correct. Get the Steam one. You will regret it if you don’t.