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From: Antony Bowers <bowers@cs.bris.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: GPL - weird problem!
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Dave Hawnt wrote:
> I have a weird problem when I use GPL.... after about 15/20
> minutes of racing (on or off line), I get a sudden reduction
> in frame rate (FPS)...
> I normally obtain about 25 fps.  which is not to bad, but it
> will then drop to about 3/4 fps... this makes the sim
> undrivable and turns it into a slide show!

I have had problems similar to this. My favourite suspect would be 
something running in background stealing your cpu cycles.

Have you met the little yellow man from AOL? If you have Netscape 4.07, 
he sits on a button on the toolbar. If you accidentally click this button
(don't do it!) he goes to live permanently in your system tray.

Unfortunately for me, my wife activated this guy and didn't tell me. I 
found GPL was getting slower, and stuttering. I went out and bought a fan
to cool my Voodoo2. Soon after, I started a GPL race with a frame rate of 
about 0.5 (I kid you not).

Then I noticed the yellow man and killed him off (fire him up, there's a
checkbox in there somewhere that disables him). I have not had a problem 
since, but now I make sure there is *nothing* in the system tray, and always double check what's running with CTRL-ALT-DEL before
running GPL (if I see 
anything I don't recognise, I'll reboot).

It's nice to have a "real gamer's" minimal system. Hope this helps,

   Anton

-- 
Antony Bowers, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK.
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~bowers/
