Thanks for all the advice on a USB modem for GPL online racing. I bought a
Creative Modem Blaster USB on Friday and in general the results were good.
Much more stable on-line racing - less warping, no disconnects (so far), and
other cars don't jump around nearly as much. (I did get a 6 second lap at
Monza due to one warp, but that server was very flaky).
However, the warnings about frame rate hits were very true. I had to drop
back to 800x600 and turn a bunch of stuff off to get a driveable fps. With
my old winmodem I could run at 1024x768 and get 36fps consistently.
Anybody have any tips on hardware tweaks to get the fps back up (especially
at Spa)?
Specs: PII 333, 128MB RAM, Voodoo 3 3000 (oc'ed to 183), Diamond MX-300
sound card, LWFF USB wheel.
I'm gonna keep the modem because even though GPL is pretty ugly at 800x600
with low detail bias, it's nice to be able to race close without fear of
jumpy cars. And I got my first win in my second race with the new modem, so
it's obviously lucky!
Thanks!
--
Rob
Had that happen to me with the same modem. I think it has to do with
interrupt sharing and which interrupts are used. Interesting you have
a V3. I was beginning to suspect it was only with the V2 such as I
have, but I guess not.
I'll be glad when I can toss a new mobo in my machine so I can move
this DSL modem from the printer port to it's very own ethernet NIC.
(sounds weird, I know, but the printer port *is* parallel and doesn't
share and interrupt with anything so it actually has less impact on
the CPU burden than the USB port did...)
Regards,
Brett C. Cammack
That's Racing! Motorsports
Pompano Beach, FL
