GRID Stutter on Core i7 FIX

[coolmiester]

I just wish i was able to find all this information in one place as it would have saved me a lot of wasted time hunting around all over the place.........hence this post!

Well, at long last I decided to get Codemasters Grid up and running but right from the start line i ran into various game issues, not least the damn in-game stuttering, so went on a quest to see if i could find a fix which turned into some kind of crazy wild goose chase full of false promises of a v1.3 patch which was due out in January 09 but is still yet to materialise.

After scraping around all over the web i found what i was looking for and eventually have the game running flawlessly on both i7 and Skulltrail after much trial and error so though i'd compile a quick how to that worked for me.

First i installed the full version of Grid and went ahead and added the GRID v1.2 [ENGLISH] NO-DVD/FIXED EXE (8.15MB) as i did think the initial stuttering was from CD lag but alas it wasn't.

After a bit more searching around i found two patches for the game -
GRID v1.1 PC-DVD Patch which weighs in at 188.71MB
GRID v1.2 PC-DVD Patch which weighs in at 192.78MB

It became apparent that the first was not actually needed as all the original fixes were also packaged in the second so went ahead and installed v1.2

Needless to say, i was pretty disappointed when the game still had this annoying split second stutter which practically makes game play impossible as it's enough to completely throw you off line and into the barrier so back online to see what else i could find.

Codemaster had promised a v1.3 patch to address this problem but 9 months later and still no sign and it looks like they have decided not to bother so we're all hung out to dry.........or maybe not....

The following fix looks a little daunting at first but is pretty easy and it works a treat on Core i7 machines.

Thanks to Barroz86 on the Codemasters forum for the following:

In your program/GRID/System folder there's two files called:

*hardware_settings_config.xml
*hardware_settings_restrictions.xml

*REMEMBER TO ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR FILES*

What i did was first opening the config.xml file and change "false" into "true"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<hardware_settings_config version="39" >

<cpu>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="false" workerMapFile="system/workerMap.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="0" dvdStorageProcessor="0" dataSetMonitorProcessor="0" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="0" fileStreamProcessor="0"/>
</cpu>

Then close and save the file.

Now open the second file called restrictions.xml

Change all "2" into your core number (in my case i changed them into "4" cores as you can see in the quote)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<hardware_settings_restrictions>

<cpu>
<restrict_info>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_eq" value="4">
<restrict_add>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap2Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="1" dvdStorageProcessor="1" dataSetMonitorProcessor="0" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="1" fileStreamProcessor="1" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_eq" value="4">
<restrict_add>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap2Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="1" dvdStorageProcessor="1" dataSetMonitorProcessor="0" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="1" fileStreamProcessor="1" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_eq" value="4">
<restrict_add>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap4Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="3" dvdStorageProcessor="3" dataSetMonitorProcessor="1" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="2" fileStreamProcessor="3" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_eq" value="4">
<restrict_add>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap4Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="3" dvdStorageProcessor="3" dataSetMonitorProcessor="1" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="2" fileStreamProcessor="3" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_eq" value="4">
<restrict_add>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap4Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="3" dvdStorageProcessor="3" dataSetMonitorProcessor="1" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="2" fileStreamProcessor="3" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_eq" value="4">
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap4Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="3" dvdStorageProcessor="3" dataSetMonitorProcessor="1" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="2" fileStreamProcessor="3" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>
<restrict_if name="cores" op="int_ge" value="4">
<restrict_add>
<threadStrategy parallelUpdateRender="true" workerMapFile="system/workerMap8Core.xml" forceFeedbackProcessor="3" dvdStorageProcessor="4" dataSetMonitorProcessor="5" renderProcessor="0" updateProcessor="2" fileStreamProcessor="7" />
</restrict_add>
</restrict_if>

Then save the file and run the game