GP2 - What is "Occupancy" rate ?

Once again I am asking the RAS gurus for help ! I have an HP P166 with 16meg ram and an S3 Trio chipset with a 1meg video card While racing GP2, I hit O for Occupancy rate and it says "150" What does this mean? Everyone talks about Occupancy rates below 100! Is this why it seems I'm in slow motion when going into the first turn with all of the other cars? Thanks !! Tim

First, a couple of things about your setup: The S3 has a problem with DOS SVGA in that a feature wasn't enabled. Download a program like Univbe (now part of scitech's "Disk Doctor") or the small util "s3spdup" to get a marked improvement in performance. At least this works with the 2MB version. And that's the second point: I've read a number of times that 2MB 64-bit cards like yours work better than 1MB ones. Something having to do with memory addressing. So, it is possible you might be losing out a bit. Can't say for sure. I had an old s3 Trio 2MB that worked fine (esp with Univbe). In fact, it gave the same Occupancy (PO) as much more heralded cards. It means that the game is using 1.5x as much of the processor as it "should". What does "should" mean here? In GP2 you set the framerate you want, ie frames per second (or fps as commonly abreviated). This is set in the options from the main menu. Most likely, you have left it on automatically selected, or have enabled more graphics options. The automatic setting is too optimistic. It'll run at <100 for a good part of the time. But especially at the start of races, where a whole bunch of cars and track/grandstand graphics are visible, it'll take a lot of CPU crunching. Most people, I believe, lower this setting and/or reduce graphics. A quick way to do so in driving mode is to use alt-D to lower the track detail level (though you lose a lot of the ambiance). The game strives to give you that frames per *game* time (not REAL time). So, if you set the framerate to say 15, it'll show 15 frames per second of game time. If your processor is overloaded, game time stretches out to more than a second of real time. So your framerate might match up in game time, but maybe 15 frames in 1.5 seconds of real time, ie 10 fps. Actually, I don't think it goes linearly with PO. Perhaps there is some reduction in gametime framerate as well as the slowdown. BTW, try it out. You'll note that a 1:20 second lap actually takes, say 1:25-1:30 of real time! Also note that Monaco is incredibly CPU intensive. Don't set your framerate for this track only as you can get a lot more of the default detail (or fps) at the others. After that, I'd say Hockenheim is next due to all the trees. On an editorial aside, I consider this an absolutely dreadful design choice. The game should (IMHO) hold real-time sacred, and let framerate fluctuate with graphical load. Hope this helps.

Very much so! Occupancy is GP2's way of measuring frame rate, in a way. It is like a race engine that puts out 100 hp. at half throttle, the engine is hardly doing any work and is using 50 hp. At full throttle, it is doing all the work it can handle, putting out a full 100 hp. Your occupancy is 150, which means you are overloading the engine so to speak. I would strive for an occupancy of 90-95%, no more. If at this level, you won't notice any slow down, because the processor still has power left over. Anything over 100, the processor does not have power in reserve and can't keep up, thus the slow down. On my p120, with all details on, my occupancy was over 320! It looked like I was watching still pictures. When I went to 320 by 200 mode, and lowered the graphics features, I could get about 110. Playable, but by no means perfect. With my new p266, I can max everything out in svga and get about 110, but I still try for 90-95%. It is just not acceptable to play the game to me any higher. Once again I am asking the RAS gurus for help ! I have an HP P166 with 16meg ram and an S3 Trio chipset with a 1meg video card While racing GP2, I hit O for Occupancy rate and it says "150" What does this mean? Everyone talks about Occupancy rates below 100! Is this why it seems I'm in slow motion when going into the first turn with all of the other cars? Thanks !! Tim

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>Once again I am asking the RAS gurus for help ! I have an HP P166 with 16meg ram and an S3 Trio chipset with a 1meg video card >While racing GP2, I hit O for Occupancy rate and it says "150" What does this mean? Everyone talks about Occupancy rates below 100! >Is this why it seems I'm in slow motion when going into the first turn with all of the other cars? >Thanks !! >Tim

David gave a good explanation what PO tells you. I should add that it only works in one direction. What I mean is that a PO of 200% average during a lap will mean that you will have driven TWICE as long in realtime as in gametime, but a PO of 50% doesn't mean that realtime is half gametime. You'll end up with realtime being about 97% of gametime. (a "1m40.5" at Hockenheim would be 1m40.0 on YOUR stopwatch in reality) There's a lot of discussion about people deliberately running with high PO to get better laptimes. Indeed, when you slow the game down you have more time to react and you can drive closer to the limit. So personally I agree that it is a form of cheating. Now some tips to get better performance on your P166!!!: - You should always set the framerate about 2fps lower than the "recommended" to get a fluid game(since, as David mentioned, the 'recommended' settings are too optimistic) . - Running in DOS makes another slight improvement (I "feel" the difference as 1-2 fps compared with running from Win95). - You could also replace the***pit graphic by one of the many available on the Net. Some have a bigger "display", leaving a smaller area of the screen to be updated. This can also make you gain some fps. (as smaller mirrors would do?) - AND you could overclock your processor. I've been running my P166 at 200Mhz for the last year without trouble. You should know what you're doing though, and visit [link lost in import] for more info (hope the URL's still correct) As you can see, lots of possibilities to get better performance! But don't let frustration for missing 2-3fps spoil the game for you. It's excellent stuff anyway! JoH Please remove *anti-spam* from the email when replying. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= When everything else failed, we can still become im- mortal by making an enormous blunder.... John Kenneth Galbraith =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=