I like the idea of trying to perform some kind of hardware detection and changing the parameters according to your hardware however you don't realize how complicated coding something like that is:
1) you have thousand of different configurations, drivers and different hardware to take into account. To give you an example I saw a massive improvement on my computer by simply switching the GPU from a PCI slot to a PCI-E slot. SuperTuxKart was the only one affected. Which mean even with the same hardware you can have big differences
2) There is no easy way to know which GPU is there. Sometime the driver just answer something like: INTEL HD GENERIC but gives no information about the model. And even a model can give various different answer depending on the OS and the drivers installed.
3) Which means in order to detect properly we have to parse thousand of different strings and vendors and try to find the most appropriate parameters. It's pretty hard and we aren't working full time on the project.
People forget sometime how hard it can be to create such "simple" option.
If you want to help us, then please submit a patch that can categorize GPU by rendering power and capabilities.
It would help us a lot. I was thinking to only use the VRAM and the number of render core to have some kind of easy to use value to set some preset.
Also recommended hardware isn't for ultra settings. Ultra setting are truly demanding. If you want to achieve a 60 constant FPS no matter want it would be more like a GTX 970 or equivalent ATI
If you have some sort of codding knowledge I'm willing to help you for the detect your hardware and set an option accordingly.
As for #2801
It's unofficial so we can't do much about it. Also it's a feature (updating automatically supertuxkart) not a feature as we explained intended to allow people to have an easy way to build the last version
Not everyone is going to like what you make.
And that's perfectly fine. We never tried to please everyone (it's impossible) and we don't force people to like what we do. You are free to not play the game or to modify it to better suit your needs. That's the power of Open source
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Also about older tracks being better, I just want to point out that Tux Tollway was highly unoptimized compared to newer tracks. It had literally polygons insides sections you where never able to see, like in a tree trunk.
Newer tracks are more demanding but we don't waste resources like that.
The upcoming version of SuperTuxKart is also improved and we reduced by roughly half the VRAM usage so we are making progress.
Sam