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[Alayan]

Super interesting results.

Linux, 64-bit
CPU: Intel i3-4170 (3,7 GHz Dual-Core)
GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics 4th Generation (256 MB Memory)

A correction here, the integrated graphics don't have dedicated memory. Instead, they share the memory pool of the CPU. The main downside is that bandwidth of standard RAM is lower than of VRAM and there is even less because the bandwidth is shared with the CPU, however it means capacity is rarely if ever the limiting factor for its performance.

60 FPS cap (removing this results in less images), Render driver: Open GL

Frame-limiting can be useful indeed, as the CPU/GPU saves power by idling after fast frames and so have more power/thermal margin for boosting on slow frames.

Windows XP, 32-bit
CPU: Intel Pentium D915 (2,8 GHz Dual-Core)
GPU: ATI Radeon HD 3450 (256 MB Memory)
30 FPS cap, Render driver: directx9
Frames: 986
Difficult to play on this 2007 machine on a handful of tracks (most notably Black Forest).

That one is really reaching for the limits of what can be considered playable. It's using the legacy OpenGL 2 renderer which looks really bad, the resolution is super small and on Black Forest that FPS is so low the player experience must be awful. 30 FPS is already unpleasant.

Your 2015 Haswell renders 2.5x the pixels at 2x the FPS and better quality, and my computer with a 2022 CPU / 2019 GPU can render 12x the pixels at 5x the FPS at a much higher visual quality.

Interesting to see how over time, the "trash-worthy" 10-year-old hardware crossed the boundaries of the "bloated Mario Kart clone for Linux". It feels like the game became so much more playable through basically just waiting for the hardware to catch up. Hopefully this will be good PR for STK.

I think there are several factors at play here:
- STK's tracks have not got more graphically complex for several years. A few higher graphics options have been added (2048 shadows + PCSS takes away about 20% of my FPS) but when it comes to running the game on a weak machine that doesn't matter.
- There has been some optimizations to the rendering engine (mostly reducing how CPU-limited it can be), at equal settings 1.5 has a higher performance than 1.0. It still is very far from optimal, though.
- Hardware progress was fast but is slowing down. The fast part means that between your 2007 and your 2015 machine, there has been a massive jump in hardware capabilities. The slowing down part means that the gap between 10-years old hardware and the newest hardware is getting lower than it used to be, and it takes more time for the performance of old hardware to become completely obsolete.