Some Low-Spec PC tests

[Bird]

Supertuxkart always looked like a nice game, but a bit too hardware-hungry than you'd expect it from an free and open-source game.

Turns out, that assumption is wrong! It has lots of legacy compatibilites and modes. They're just a bit hidden.

My test system is a 2006 32-bit Windows XP machine with a Pentium D915 Dual-Core (2,8 GHz). Graphics are a bit newer, an ATI Radeon HD 3400 with 256 MB memory.

What should I say, it's a nice fluent experience, but that requires some tweaking in the config files (in %APPDATA%\supertuxkart\config-0.10, the config.xml file).

render_driver="directx9"
It's sooo nice that an DX9 mode is available in STK. Unfortuneatly, every Linux machine I tried had a rather poor graphic performance when comparing it to the same machine running Windows. The DirectX drivers seem to make more out of the same hardware.

real_width="640"
real_height="480"
width="640"
height="480"
STK works perfectly with low resultions. If it works so well, why not having it in the regular graphics settings options in the first place?

The max_fps setting behaves oddly. Setting it to 30 results in an FPS of around 20. Setting it to 60 results in actually 32 FPS. Setting it to 90 results in something between 50-60 FPS, but it's a bit inconsistent. So that's the limit of the old machine.

max_texture_size="512"
256 is too low. Some graphics get cropped. That made me notice that Amanda is the only kart to have a different sized icon (300x300 instead of 128x128).

An obvious constraint on the low-end graphics are the adjustable kart colours. That led to some blue / red arrow pointing at my kart in football games. Good idea, but its solution can be optimised. It blocks the vision to the most important part of the vision, the center of the screen.

Was the arrow there before? I don't remember an arrow blocking my vision when I played STK in 1.2 back then on a Linux machine.

That felt a bit untested. I'll modify the arrows PNG to be smaller. I think the best solution would be to remove the arrow, or to show it only in the first three seconds of a game starting. Or to make it semi-transparent. Players could also look at the map to see, which colour they have or if enemy or teammate is approaching them.

Though it would be perfectly understandable the developers say: Take your obsolete scrap and go back to the stoneage...

But the rest... is perfect! Almost as Supertuxkart is optimised for old machines, but for some reason doesn't show that on the first glance. Font looks readable and nice. The menus scale well.

Well done!
You know, there aren't many current games that can be played on Windows XP.

[benau]

ATI Radeon HD 3400 should support opengl 3.3 at least so you should be able to utilize kart color if you use the opengl renderer instead.

[Bird]

Ah, you're right. But it performs a bit worse in "gl" than in "directx9" mode on that particular machine.

[Bird]

Some more network tests showed, that online games are possible on most tracks, but it gets too laggy if there are more than 10 players around.
So that concludes the tests with the 2006 XP machine. It is useable, but only on a smaller scale. Fortuneately, Windows 7 machines are all over the place now for nothing and they'll be more than fine to run Supertuxkart.