V-sunk

I ran with Vsync on ever since getting into the beta in June 08 because with it turned off I was getting a bizarre texture squirming that made me dizzy. The top part of the screen would be from one frame, the bottom from an earlier frame, so the whole sense motion was distorted in a very unsettling way.

Vsync cured this. I also set Frames Rendered Ahead in the nVidia Control Panel to 0 to eliminate display and controller lag.

That was with an nVidia 8800GT. Over the winter I got a 9800GTX+ OC, but I kept Vsync on and just cranked up my graphics details. Ah, full shadows! Wonderful!

But I wasn't racing very much and when I was, I felt frustrated. In retrospect, I think this was because I never felt connected to the car; I was always reacting to things that had already happened instead of what was going on right now, and my inputs took a little time to get to the car's physics.

Then Todd Bettenhausen convinced me to turn off Vsync. Suddenly my experience with iRacing was transformed! I felt totally connected to the car. Its responses to my inputs were instant, precise. On road courses I immediately gained a couple of seconds in lap times.

At first I was running with frame rate uncapped. Frame rate was mostly between 150 and 250 FPS. I read that this overworks the video card, so I capped the frame rate at the default 82 FPS. The immediacy went away; I felt disconnected again. So I removed the frame rate cap.

At a few corners on some tracks (Road America, for example) the frame flow got choppy and/or the screen squirming came back, so I turned off shadows. It seems that as long as the frame rate is running above 150 or so, everything is quite smooth and there's no squirming.

I tried the steering wheel test: I turned on the on-screen wheel and got in the car. I turned my G25's wheel back and forth rapidly. With Vsyc off, the wheel on the screen moves in perfect synchronization with the actual wheel.

Then I turned on Vsync and restarted the sim. With Vsync on, there is a very, very noticeable delay. The on-screen wheel's motion lags the real wheel by a significant amount.

I suspect that the video card and driver have an impact on this. Perhaps some (ATI?) cards don't exhibit the same behavior. Perhaps there are other settings in iRacing or in the video card control panel that will minimize the delay with Vsync turned on. (Todd tells me that now he is running with Vsync on, but he's turned off AA and AF in iRacing and instead turned them on in the CP - and that this gives him very minimal lag.)

But as far as I'm concerned, based on my own experience, zero lag trumps everything else. I need that instant response to my control inputs, and I need that instant feedback through the wheel and on the screen. I don't care if I'm overworking my video card. If it cooks itself I'll get a new one.

No more V-sunk for me!

Alison

From a comment on an inRacing forum thread:

http://www.inracingnews.com/iracing-news/v-sunk/

iRacing Treats

After many months of only running an occasional practice session in iRacing, my enthusiasm is back! There are several reasons for this.

Leagues

The new "hosted racing" feature is a big factor. This allows people to run leagues as they have done for many years with other sims. It also sidesteps iRacing's iRating, Safety Rating, and Series Championships systems, all of which seem to take a lot of the fun out of sim racing for me.

For the older generation, the big news is that the old GPL league for middle-aged racers, MARA, has started up again, but this time using iRacing. A thousand thanks to Ed Crawford for stepping up to the plate and making this happen.

I raced in MARA's first-ever iRacing race tonight and had a blast. Second fastest in practice (by .010 seconds!), pole, and second in the race. I led for several laps before making one mistake that let my good sim racing buddy Jim Locking get by me. Chased him for the rest of the race and closed the gap from 11 seconds to only four at the end. Really fun!

MARA sets a minimum age limit (50, I think). This keeps out the really fast hotshoes, giving the rest of us a chance. After racing tonight, I feel this is a lot more fair in many ways than pitting us nearly over-the-hill folks against young whippersnappers with super-quick reflexes and ultra-sharp eye-hand coordination - and the energy to practice for hour after endless hour. In MARA, we all get to race with people who have more or less the same physical handicaps. After all, they do it in golf, why not racing?

If you're interested see this forum thread:

iRacing Member Forums: Middle-Aged Racers Association (MARA)

Or apply to join here:

MARA-iRacing Yahoo Group

MARA will normally run on Sunday evenings.

Cars and Tracks

Another thing that has got me fired up is the new content. The Corvette is terrific, a real challenge but also perhaps the most realistic-feeling sim car I've ever driven. I like the Dallara Indy car too, but it's so fast that it's really over my head. The 'Vette is a perfect combination of power, grip, and weight, and the tires are wonderful. I've posted a few setups in the shared folder.

As you know, Mosport is also new, and it's superb. In the Vette it drives just as I remember it from real life, except the Vette has a lot more power than my Cobra, even more than the Lotus Esprit twin turbo V8 that I drove there a few years ago. With NHMS, Watkins Glen, Lime Rock, and Summit Point also in the sim, I can now practice on every track that I have competed on in real life in recent years except Mont Tremblant.

I found the Vette to be a blast at Mosport, but at the Glen it was more challenging than I expected. It really makes you concentrate; you can hang it out a little but go too far and it will bite you. I'm looking forward to trying it at other tracks like Road Atlanta, Sears Point, and of course my old fave, Summit Point.

iSpeed Real Time Splits

The newest thing (to me, anyway) is a utility called iSpeed. This gives you a display with split times and speed and time deltas from your previous best lap (or any best lap from anyone, provided they've saved and sent you a little file with the data).

This is just as fantastic as the real-world data loggers I've used that have real-time splits/performance monitoring/whatever you call it, like the Farringdon dash in my brother Nate's Spec Miata . It is such a great learning tool! You know instantly if you've messed up a corner, or if you've really nailed one. The instant feedback really helps you hone your skill.

I've posted the current version of iSpeed and a link to the web site in the Shared folder, and the lap data from my best lap so far in the Vette at the Glen in the Shared Large folder.

iSpeed doesn't run as an overlay. You can run it one of three ways:

1. In a second monitor.
2. In your main monitor with iRacing in windowed mode.
3. In another computer or a PDA, connected across your LAN.

I'm using a second monitor. I had one lying around anyway that I wasn't using. But you can also use your laptop, set up next to your racing computer's monitor, and run a browser on the laptop and connect to iSpeed on your racing computer. The info will all display in the browser on the laptop. All is explained at the iSpeed site:

Nessoft.com iSpeed

Note that there used to be a utility called THUD which had similar functionality, but the iRacing build in early September disabled it. But since iSpeed operates outside of iRacing (rather than using the telemetry interface as THUD did), it still works and as far as I know, it's perfectly legal. iRacing has said that they will implement something similar sometime "soon," but they were saying that last year and we still don't have it. Until they do, iSpeed fills the gap admirably.

I hope you will be able to find the time to try all these new goodies. I had a terrific time this evening, and I'm looking forward to more.

That Smokin' Computer

Last week my nephew Amos and I upgraded his computer. We ripped out the venerable Asus A7N8X and AGP 7600 GT video card (along with CPU and memory) and slapped in a Gigabyte socket 775 mobo, Intel E7300 Core 2 Duo, 9600GT and two gigs of DDR2. Now that thing runs iRacing real well!

But that's not what I'm going to write about. I have a new computer story you might be interested in. When Amos was considering his upgrade - nervous about the necessary Windows reinstall it would entail - I bragged about how my main computer was running great since I reinstalled Windows on my main machine in December, hoping to ease his trepidation.

This computer, my main desktop, has an Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe mobo with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and a GeForce 7600 GT in a gorgeous Antec LAN Boy aluminum case. It's known as the NightMonster, and it served as my racing computer until I built a new machine for iRacing last spring.

A few days ago the NightMonster moved from the top of my desk to a stand on the floor after a second 19" monitor finally arrived (two and a half weeks after I bought it off of eBay, damn the Postal Service!) I loved that computer so much that when I built it I even gave it a page on my web site, complete with a photo shoot.

Well, last night it went kaput. I was sitting there, innocently typing a PM to a fellow racer in the iRacing member site, when both monitors went completely dark and the video card fan spun up to max loud.

Tried rebooting several times. I'd get into Windows, but within a few seconds the same thing would happen. Monitors went dark, fan spun up. I tried unplugging one monitor but no joy. Eventually it quit entirely; I'd hit the power button and nothing at all would happen.

I was really bummed when I went to bed last night, as you can imagine! My main computer was dead (thank the silicon gods for Mozy backup!) and I didn't know why.

This morning after procrastinating for a while I ripped that beastly NightMonster - the most troublesome computer I've ever built - out from under the desk.

I put the old lug on the table and tore into it. I unplugged everything - hard drives, optical drives, USB card reader, even the sound card - but it was still dead. Ripped out the power supply and plugged in the one that was in my Pat Dotson G-Seat. Nothing.

As a last resort I ripped out the video card and hit the power button again. Presto!! Booted right up! I was able to copy a big file (which had taken hours to acquire via my pokey "broadband" connection) from its shared folder across the LAN to another computer. Happy, happy!

But I couldn't log into it. I tried Remote Desktop, but no joy; I'd never thought to configure the NightMonster to allow logging in through Remote Desktop since the reinstall.

But some experimenting and and a little research led to the discovery of a series of keystrokes that would allow me to turn on Remote Desktop even though I couldn't see anything! Took a number of tries but I got it.

Now it's back under my desk, nothing but air where a video card should be - and I'm logged into it across the LAN from my laptop. Heehee!

This is called a "headless" system. Well, to be strictly accurate a headless system has no keyboard and mouse, either. I plugged my spare keyboard and mouse into the NightMonster but they aren't really necessary; I can do everything I need to, including shutting it down, from the laptop.

I was going to order a replacement 9600 GT like Amos's, but after poking around a little and reading customer comments on Newegg I decided to take a look at the 9800GTX+. I thought these killer cards were too big to fit in my compact little LAN Boy.

The original 9800 cards were 10.5" long, about a quarter of an inch too much for the LAN Boy, but it turns out that the newest rev is only 9.5" long and it should fit. When it comes I'm going to put it into Wolf (my iRacing computer, which also is inside a LAN Boy) and put Wolf's 8800 GT into the NightMonster.

But meanwhile I can run the NightMonster headless and still sync my calendar to my Treo and sync podcasts to my iPod. I'm up and running. Heh.

Update: I plugged one of my 19" monitors into the laptop's VGA out port and now I've got the NightMonster displaying its desktop on the monitor (via Remote Desktop), right next to the laptop, which is displaying its desktop on its own screen. Dual monitors again. Yay!

The downsides? The laptop's monitor is a squished 1440x900 resolution rather than the nice 1280x1024 I have when using the NightMonster with its usual monitor. Also I can't drag a window from the NightMonster's display to the laptop's like I do when I am running dual monitors, although I can drag windows from the laptop's display to the external monitor.

Last but not least, iTunes - apparently in a fit of pique because it can't detect a video card, ha ha - refuses to show anything in Cover Flow and has turned its normally tasteful black, white, and gray song listing a bizarre shade of lavender.

Other than these few niggles, it's great - and now I'm essentially running four CPU's (both machines are dual core) so everything's even faster than usual!

__________________

Footnote. After the dust had settled I took a closer look at the dead video card and noticed that about half of its biggest capacitors had blown up. Seriously; their tops were split wide open. I slapped that thing into a zip lock bag real fast. Who knows what kind of nasty chemicals (PCBs? Mercury? Lead? Plutonium?) are inside those things.