IndyCar Racing II: The Rendition Experience

The texture limit appears to be already smashed. I can load MIPs (~122 MB) with a vertical resolution of ~16384, by replicating the texture vertically. The horizontal resolution has limits,
Rendition hardware supported horizonal resolutions of around 2048 in Windows (RRedline), but the limit may be lower in DOS. I'll dig up a list of valid horizontal resolutions. The vertical resolution can't be scaled higher than 16384 because modern OpenGL hardware doesn't support textures bigger than 16384x16384, the wrapper wouldn't be able to handle it. Original Rendition hardware doesn't have vertical limits, other than memory.

MD5: 75726862d06df3807f9932bd8845426e

Using this build of Dosbox-Rendition which supports 1.5 GB of RAM:
MD5: 0f9542b3008fb4fcd009c9527381f718

and these patched version of ICR2 (1200 MB) texture buffer:
MD5: 37b018cb355a3e9800716cec17f86319

For good measure this version of Denver with 16384 textures (43MB) can be loaded along with the carset. Performance is horrible, but it loads:
MD5: b80e6f54b7a1df30f6df1f4a11cbf663

So tracks with higher resolution textures should be possible, but there's a limit to how many total MIP map levels can be loaded. That looks to be my next task.
 
This track wouldn't reduce with
tredit <path to unpack dat dat> -reduce -convert <output folder>

It needed this version of TREdit:
MD5: bb57f14e880ffe665168b9b5106f88c6

used with the command line:
TREdit.exe <path to unpacked dat> -reduce -maxmips <maximum number of mipmaps per texture> -convert <output path>

e.g.
TREdit.exe c:\temp\mexicodat -reduce -maxmips 5 -convert c:\temp\mexicoreduce

(Apologies to Vogon tincup, I should have figure this out sooner)

Mexico City (Max 5 mip maps per texture) Now Rendition Ready:
MD5: 9280297856f9d6b1856a7ecb2608c2b8


Vid:
 
*************************************************
RReady Alpha 19, May 2025 (1.0.42, fully tested alpha release)
*************************************************
MD5: 51d669ac897fb52a01d001b9f711eab1

- Fixes Windows 7 crash bug introduced in March.
- Improves Formula 1 performance and allows for anti-aliasing to be disabled for this game.
- Games which use paletted textures (16 colour) should see slight speed improvement. There may be a slight improvment in ICR2 with the stock tracks, but these tracks always ran well.
- Team Apache: - Adds a workaround for nvidia drivers (after Win11 24H2 and the equivalent for Windows 10) which causes the game to freeze at the end of the first intro video. (Thread de-prioritization from real time)
-Team Apache: Campaign mode text rendering should be correct
- Team Apache: Loading progress bars for instant action missions should always load.
- Interstate '76 and Niitro have a new pre-configured DxWnd build for High an Regular DPI displays. Please see help file for details.
 
A quick update on another Rendition Ready Track: Elkhart Enhanced (Papyrus):

The 1997, 1998 and 2003 versions of the track are also in the video. A direct link to the enhanced track can be found in the video description.
 
GUI Based ICR2 carset/track MIP map reduction tool

https://nirvtek.com/downloads/GTREdit.V1.0.1.7z
MD5: d1948d3806377437157531874302f09f
(Correct freeze at end)

MD5: 7cd5e27a46a3fe8bff805ba3f95b2bf0


It should be fairly self-explanatory. An unzipped carset or track (with or without dat) is the source folder, the output folder is where the MIP reduced version goes, it's best if this is different to the final destination and it should be empty.
The number of MIP maps dropdown is used to select the maximum number of MIP maps to retain for each texture. If the texture has fewer it's left along, if not the smallest mip maps are removed.

GTREdit.ICR%202%20Graphical%20MIP%20map%20reduction%20tool.Screenshot%202025-06-16%20141457.png

MD5: d1948d3806377437157531874302f09f
MD5: 7cd5e27a46a3fe8bff805ba3f95b2bf0

 
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ICR2 performance comparison (4-way test) on the Houston track on Pentium 4 3.2 GHz (software+V100) vs (Ryzen 2700X, software(vanilla dosbox-staging) + RReady):


Visually, the Reynard '99 carset runs the smoothest on Pentium 4 in software mode. Well at least it looks that way to me.
 
I'm going to attempt to go through each of tracks one by one to test compatibility, at the rate of one a day if I can, so here's the Texas Speedway:

29/06/2025
Sanair 1985 (Quebec), now Rendition Ready:

30/06/2025
Long Beach '91 & '96:

Update: 01/07/2025
Cicero Oval, Chicago:

This is already Rendition Ready.
 
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ICR2: Tamiami Park, Florida (Now Rendition Ready)

[Update 04/07/2024]
Riverside '82 (4 MIP maps)

[Update: 07/07/2205]
Vancouver '93, '95, '99 and '03
 
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GPL appears to be working fine, so at some point next week I'll have to gear up for a release with the vQuake fixes, though they don't appear to be urgent.
Replays of Mexico City, Monza and Mosport are here:

Some users with AMD card like the RX6700 XT are reporting issues.
 
ICR2 More Rendition Ready tracks:
Richmond, South Boston and Rio
Richmond needs a MIP map reduced version which is linked to in the video details.

GPL: Built-in replays Rouen. Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps
These appear to work fairly well as well. Hopefully I'll access to an AMD GPU powered laptop soon, so some AMD testing with this game can be done. AMD GPU are hard to come by here.


- vQuake: cvars d_bilerp and d_dither should now work correctly
- vQuake: Particle background transparency should be correct when large numbers of particles are rendered.

This will not go into a store release just yet (unless requested). Vogon Raven-05 is busy running everything through its paces.
 
One more Rendition Ready track: Toronto 2003 (not sure how I missed this in my earlier Toronto '95/'96 video):

and a few F1'96 (RRedline) demos:
 
Miami and Norisring (Nascar conversion) now Rendition Ready:

Norisiring has issues with some of the trees. Probably something was lost in conversion.
 
ICR2 Rendition Ready Tracks Meadownlands (Road + Oval), Cleveland ('85 and latest):


MD5: 52b6f8516f3bd937f78aff7f601a4746

- Rebel Moon The edge filtering should be working now. Chroma keying should be a bit better, but not perfect.
- vQuake fixes
- New keyboard handler (may be buggy, but [ALT+B] should work reliably in ICR2).
- This adds Sleep(0)s to every single critical timing loop, should allow for other threads to run more freely. Hopefully won't kill performance.
- Maybe better performance on dual core systems

To allow rendition Dosbox settings to be manually configured for a dual thread system, set the new parameter 'override2core' to true:
[rendition]
override2core=true (default false)

Otherwise on dual thread systems it'll default to:
[rendition]
threadsafe=true
highperformance=true
picdma=false;
 
This is looking like the next release candidate:
MD5: c32b89f0ac8c80bad0708b90b031ef6b
- vQuake cvars d_dither and d_bilerp should work correctly
- Rebel Moon all chroma keying bugs should be fixed.
- ICR2 [ALT+B] (autobrake) should function correctly.
- Formula 1 RRedline performance boost (including for everything using paletted textures).
- Improved dual core performance in a default config. (Needs more testing). The minimum required GPU (Intel HD4000) should perform better on the minimum CPU dual core 3 GHz (Haswell).

I think it's better to do incremental updates instead of massive ones with lots of fixes. It's a lot easier to test and isolate problems.

Or with the same optimization extended to quad cores and beyond:
MD5: 031f0bd95305993dc4cd34cd97218f09

Detroit Belle Isle (2004-1995, 2/4 of these are regurgitated), Detroit Downtown HQ (new) and Houston:
 
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