Radeon 8500 and Nascar 4 / 2002. Which drivers?

[moocat]

I'm using the Win98 9012s right now and they work fine other than the considerable slow down when there is any smoke present. Does Anistropic really give a frame hit when rendering smoke (aside from the normal performance hit)? I just don't remember it being this bad before but I don't know which tweak might have done it. I don't use FSAA since the performance hit is intolerable.

Any suggestions as to drivers or settings with current drivers?

 

[tenoc]

Try going back to the 9009's. Any driver newer is Beta = possibly buggy.

 

[moocat]

I'm using the 9021s right now and they seem much improved for N2k2. There is some occasional stuttering but for the most part they are more consistent than the 9012s. I am using the same settings I was with the 9012s and fps seldom drops under the high 30s. The 9012s experienced fairly major slowdowns while driving through wrecks, sometimes in the low 20s.

The stuttering often happens on the first lap or when a new objects are introduced into your view so I have to assume it's some major file swapping that's causing the problem. Once you get past the first lap the stuttering is done.

I haven't had gobs of time to mess with these so there may be more untapped performance. I haven't done any tweaking to the N2k2 *.ini files.

 

[moocat]

After experiencing several 2d bugs I went to the 9009 set. Quite disappointing after the 9021s. Way slower in general, worse IQ, and major slowdowns (20-30 fps) in wrecks. Here's hoping an official release of drivers with performance closer to the 9021s is out soon.