[Christopher Magan]

Hi everyone,

I participated in the Caterham Academy 2017 race at Brands yesterday when I noticed my frames regularly dipped below 30 FPS. I didn't feel comfortable driving the rest of lap 1 so I teleported to pits. I would like to join in on the fun, however, so I have a couple of questions.

• Does anybody else experience a massive drop in FPS with the Caterham?
  
• Are there any known solutions?
  

I did some testing over 1 lap at Brands and here's what I found so far:
24x GT3 class, graphic settings very high, resolution 1920x1080 = 93FPS (avg) 70 FPS (min)
24x Tatuus, graphic settings very high, resolution 1920x1080 = 86 FPS (avg) 67 FPS (min). These results from the GT3 cars and Tatuus are what I expected and have regularly experienced in other full grid races.
24x Caterham, graphic settings very high, resolution 1920x1080 = 44 FPS (avg) 26 FPS (min)
24x Caterham, graphic settings minimum, resolution 1920x1080 = 39 FPS (avg) 27 FPS (min)
24x Caterham, graphic settings minimum, resolution 1280x720 = 40 FPS (avg) 25 FPS (min)

It appears that with the Caterham, FPS is roughly halved. And weirdly enough, changing the graphic settings does not seem to have any influence (or perhaps the FPS dips are less frequent). The liveries on the Caterham are not 4k so that does not seem to be the problem. There are also 4 LOD models and their size appears to be in the same ballpark as other cars. Googling the problem didn't provide any helpful result so I have reached the limit of my expertise. What are your thoughts?

[Matteo Venuti]

i had this problem too, when i joined the server.
Maybe it's something related to the ppfilter you use? (now i switched to "NaturalMod" and, at least in an offline race, i haven't found this issue)

[Christopher Magan]

i had this problem too, when i joined the server.
Maybe it's something related to the ppfilter you use? (now i switched to "NaturalMod" and, at least in an offline race, i haven't found this issue)

The previous tests were performed with the _Sol filter. Sadly, both the Natural Graphics and Default filter give roughly the same results. I hadn't considered the post-processing filters yet, however, so thank you for the suggestion.

[Russell Sobie]

I believe it is the car itself. When I race in the Caterham I turn my settings down to its most ugly to reduce the FPS issue. You'll note that you probably don't see much FPS drop when there aren't a lot of cars in front of you. So the solution is to just be faster than everyone else in Qualifying and then don't let anyone pass you during the race.

[Christopher Magan]

Thanks for the advice, Russel. I'll let the other drivers know they're not supposed to pass me, haha. If it's the car itself, then I suppose there is not much left to tweak.
I think, for now, the solution for me is to run with lower graphic settings and to only race in servers with up to 10 drivers. I also replaced the LOD_B and LOD_C models with the lower quality LOD_D model. This also seems to help somewhat.

[Russell Sobie]

I'm not really sure how the LODs are actually referenced in game, but I just tried swapping B and C with D for both LHD and RHD and tried a solo race with me in 20th place at Brands and framerate still chugged in traffic. Only thing I noticed was that even more cars are without wheels. o_O

[Christopher Magan]

I'm not really sure how the LODs are actually referenced in game, but I just tried swapping B and C with D for both LHD and RHD and tried a solo race with me in 20th place at Brands and framerate still chugged in traffic. Only thing I noticed was that even more cars are without wheels. o_O

In my 1 lap test the framerate measured avg/min = 49/25 for the lower quality models compared to the 39/27 for the regular models. Whether this actually means fewer dips or just a higher average in the low traffic parts at the end of the lap is not quite clear. To me, it felt like a slight improvement at least.