Can you even see a wire fence at 1200m? Remember, if the object is 800m long alongside the track, it will disappear at 800m away, not 1200m. The LOD distance you set is to the centre of the object.
Are you using the new X-tree shader?
Depending on the time you have, these rFactor tracks are made really badly for modern GFX systems/performance. I was looking at the Targa Florio quickly last night. Almost 2000 textures! I imagine most of them could be put down into about 40 textures, meaning about 40 shaders, tops.
It would also then be much easier to add a spec map to them all, and normal maps where needed, to really add some more depth to the track. AND, it'd probably run a good chunk faster too!
Well over 1000 shaders and textures is not an optimal way to work for todays GPU's it seems. Again, reading the Nvidia web docs is a great idea... one of the biggest costs for a GPU is the loading of a new texture and then the loading of a shader, and painting the scene with it.
I'm not sure how accurate this analogy is, but it seems quite suitable.
Imagine painting each frame, and each shader is a brush, and each paint colour is a texture. Swapping brushes and putting new paints on them is time consuming, before you even put them on the canvas.
If you can cut down the texture/shader count you should cut out a lot of time. Even if the swaps are relatively quick, thousands of them are starting to be COSTLY!
The end result is that you might halve FPS for no apparent gain in quality. That means you could either double FPS for the same visual look (or possibly better look a bit), OR, you could retain the same FPS and more than double the quality...
This is why, imo, Racer tracks look so poor relative to the frame rates we achieve. To get the quality new GPU's can achieve, we need to optimise our work for them to get the best from them
Also, probably CSM is still far from perfect... hehe...
Dave
