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.