Great game but having 2 major issues

[GTracer01]

I don't have the best or newest computer (A Windows 7 with 4GB of ram and a GeForce GT710 graphics card) and so I run everything on minimum graphics and resolution possible, and while the framerate isn't great it's playable enough to go around the best circuit on the planet.

But what is significantly far more problematic is that the game sometimes decides to place grass 'bumps', 'mounds' or 'banks' in the middle of the road, for lack of a better word of explaining it (link to picture gallery https://imgur.com/a/O9KEJ ).

It's not a graphical glitch as in you can just go through it like it's not there and stay on the tarmac... but it is something that if you hit it, the game believes it to be actually real, it believes the grass mounds on the roads to be the proper surface where you should be going, so your bike goes up the grass mound/bank/ramp, losing all the grip you have with now being on grass, and then your bike goes flying out of control, usually right up into the air, in any direction the 'ramp' on track decides to take you.

The worst issues with the grass almost always occur on the track are (and maybe get a map out or something lol); between Ago's Leap and Quarterbridge (where either the entire left hand lane is unusable usually where you get on the brakes into QB, or there are motocross style rivet bumps going across the track the whole way down), in Doran's Bend and into Laurel Bank 1 (on both the left and right at Doran's, and on what should be the racing line on the left at Laurel 1), coming out of the bottom of Barregarrow on rider's right, the right-hander just after the K Tree on the run to Ramsey (again on what should be the racing line), the run into Brandish (everywhere) and finally at Cronk-ny-Mona (racing line), is where it's so bad you sometimes have less than 1 lane of the road able to be ridden on, and sometimes, no road at all.

Smaller patches and bumps can appear and disappear almost on the game's whim pretty much on the white lines at some places around the course (sometimes it can appear on the apex at Bray Hill, right before Ballagarey and Handley's, but the above line is where it's almost 100% always prevalent every single lap no matter what. Whether big or small issues though, the bumps tend to be different each time the track is loaded up too, so you never quite know what's going to be coming ahead.

It is extremely frustrating when one's on a hotlap, and you go around a corner and there's a giant grass bank just existing in the middle of the road and you can't hit slow down in time before hitting either a speedbump, an earth bank, or a ramp and flying either half a mile into the sky or just crashing straight off the bike on landing. It happens regardless of what bike is being used and what time of day it is.

On top of that, the game sometimes decides to outright not render or believe a part of the track even exists, and you can just fall through the earth and get reset back above where the track should be, only for it to still not have been created yet and you fall through again, and a couple more times until the game decides to suddenly work and put a track under you to ride on. That's even more frustrating as the two places that has (has happened in at least 3 of my full laps) happened is right at the end of the lap at Brandish and Cronk-ny-Mona and so sometimes a clean and/or fast lap to there can be all for naught and there's nothing you can do about it.

The link is a gallery of screenshots that have been taken showing both the above issues on the run to Quarterbridge, coming out of the bottom of Barregarrow, Brandish and Cronk-ny-Mona:

Image gallery [imgur.com]

Are these something other people have experienced and have fixed, or at least a known issue so I don't need to worry too much, or is my computer too old and outdated and I need to replace it, or did something get bugged somewhere in the install and will need to spend a week again with shoddy internet downloading and then reinstall the game again?

However I'm still absolutely loving the game and the challenge (and some added unexpected challenges on top of that) of finally competing on the full course after years of the abbreviated layout that's been an add on track in GPL for many years that I'm having to get rid of my old habits from doing at least hundreds of laps around that layout.

[davez29]

I would guess your graphics card is struggling. I do like the beach front scenes, quite fetching. Honestly I think the limits have been matched. maybe look at what drivers you have, it may help to try a driver less demanding (old). If its not that you can put it back to where you were happy with other games. Use a driver uninstaller each time so you dont get conflicts. You will find these on the net.

[Sniffer]

What I can say that when you referenced the 'bumps' or 'mounds' of grass appearing in the road happened to me...

Solution for me was to install the game onto my main C: drive; whereas before I had it installed on a secondary drive.

In short, by doing this it cleared up any issues I was experiencing; including the odd stutter etc...

Now everything is as silk at maximum graphics settings! ;)

[Jez Hammond]

Similar to PAWANH44 except I also turned up all of the GFX settings to high...they defaulted at medium where I once seen a single mound of grass on the road, but nothing like the crazy screenshots posted by the OP! Perhaps check if turning up world detail helps to resolve this, even though it won't help your fps at all. Loved GPL's TT back in the day :)

[GTracer01]

Cheers for the above advice on all counts. After a bit of fiddling around on the graphics card side of things, I found that ingame turning up the graphics detail, while it didn't totally cure it, did reduce both the amount and severity in what was seen on track, such that no instaces of the grass going all the way across the track have so far been seen, and a couple of corners (like Doran's) it's almost night and day, present, but you now have far more room on the road to sort things out.

Of course it did hurt an already somewhat average FPS and now it's more a balancing act in to see what can work without making the game too slow but making it more predictable in where grass may show up. Over the mountain bit of the track where there's less stuff for the game to show has been fine either way and that, not had a single issue on that part of the course at least.

I found that, similar to letting the world render underneath when you can fall through (of which so far that hasn't come up yet after being present almost every lap yesterday), by slowing down to a crawl on track the game and world has time to update itself and the worst bits go away, as do the majority of the smaller ones. Of course that goes against the whole point of going fast if you're sitting around for a few seconds to let the game decide what to do, but if you want a clean lap, that can be what's needed. (Though I'm still crashing often enough in bits that don't have any such obstacles at all so I have no excuses there, and have easy areas to make up time)

Also going through some stuff I saw my CPU is pretty much hopelessly outdated as well, and doesn't even come that close to meeting the minimum system requirements as per the Steam Store, and so that certainly doesn't help either. So I'm going to chalk that bit up on me... Having some reasonably outdated equipment is never going to help at all, but it's enough atm to be able to turn in some quick enough laps that are also now starting to get pretty clean, with or without any extra obstacles on course for added 'fun' lol, so so far it's enough for now. Cheers again and thanks to all 3 above posts :)