MicroProse Grand Prix 4 Portable
Kanisha Dezarn
I'm having trouble running Grand Prix 3 (Directx7 game) with decent speed on my Windows 7 64 machine.
It should be flying just like GP4 but for some reason its very slow.
I've tried some compatibility modes and also dgvoodoo but I'm not having any luck.
Haven't ever tried these games on windows 7, only xp years ago. Then i discovered GPL and well they just didn't cut it anymore ? Mind you a lot of it is to do with the circuits and seasons they represent. For that, GP2 is a lot better. Well, you can get traxk mods though.
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately the problem is not with HT.
I've been on grandprixgames.org and there are already some topics about this issue but sofar without a solution
I've uploaded a small clip to illustrate the problem. -4Q
You could also try downloading microsoft's application compatibility toolkit to see if there is a profile for it in there.
I assume these profiles are only applied if you then create them yourself? Or are they by default part of windows but the ACT just shows you what they do?
I remember using one for Rally Championship 2000 anyway.
How did you record so smoothly on your XP machine? Judging from your specs it seems that your computer is about the same as my althon 64 3200+ and x1950 pro - well you have a better gpu but for recording such a game i dont think that makes a difference?
I've never really been able to record on this computer!
But yer, your CPU occupancy shouldn't be going over 100 or else the game will go into slow motion. (Obviously recording won't help matters - you could try putting the recorder set to use a different cpu core than the game, though obviously not on your single core system).
I've seen a topic say to make a virtual machine and put XP on that but then if you're going to do that you might as well dual boot xp - i'm sure there will be drivers for your hardware, it's not THAT new.
I noticed that Pink ring as well so I installed an old Nvidia FX5200 card in the XP pc and now it's gone. The game is also running a bit faster and that's not something I expected. So I just ordered a cheap Nvidia card for my Win7 pc.
BTW the pink lines surrounding your tyre are just a transparency issue - they won't be what's affecting the performance. You can either set a transparency setting somewhere with some tweaker tool for your card (i dunno if such a thing exists), or i think there is a setting for it in DGVoodoo 2, though i haven't tried it as my pc is too old.
The speed of the game is down to the "optimisation test" that it does not running correctly. If i remember i even had this problem on xp 10 years ago. Although maybe it was Grand Prix 4 i had the problem in? I can't remember - thinking about it maybe GP4 doesn't even have this mode.
Either way, your PCs are both well powerful enough, just try DGVoodoo 2 when calibrating.
You won't be able to do that on your XP machine, only your Windows 7 one as DGVoodoo 2 is for DX 10 and above.
FYI: I did notice that the driver version can have a high impact on gameplay capture. With the standard XP driver processor utilization was above 500% and with the latest nividia driver below 100%. This was on the XP pc with the old nvida fx5200 card at 1280x1024.
It's a known issue. This game has a really bad rendering technique for ingame rendering, that's why dgVoodoo runs at low peformance.
'Fast videomemory access' helps a bit but it's not enough. This method is planned to be improved some day, I hope that will fix the issue.