If you have a Voodoo3 or Voodoo2 video card, you can run GPL reasonably well on almost any Pentium II or III class machine, including Celerons and AMD K6-2's and K6-3's, but you'll need to turn the graphics down and avoid the graphical add-ons like the GPLEA cars.
I recommend a P2-450 or faster or a Celeron running at 500 mhz or more or an equivalent AMD for optimum results.
GPL will run on a Pentium 200 or 233 or AMD K6-200, but graphics will be plain and the cars may be more difficult to drive.
If you have a machine under 450 mhz you will find it necessary to cut back on graphics detail and resolution to get the necessary 36 fps frame rate. This graphics cutback results in a less appealing display. Also, on slower machines, the car will not react quite as quickly to your controller inputs.
The best video card for machines under 400 mhz are those based on the Rendition 2x00 chipset. These are the most efficient of all video cards in terms of CPU utilization, so they work best with slower computers.
Although these cards are no longer in production, used cards such as the Hercules Thriller are available from auction sites such as eBay and Amazon.
Some people have successfully run GPL on an nVidia TNT2 or an ATI Rage Fury Pro 4x AGP. These cards will require either the OpenGL beta driver or the GPL Direct3D Rasterizer, both available from the GPL Download page at Papyrus.
They also need a faster CPU, since they are not as efficient as Rendition or even Voodoo cards.
If you have an older computer
and are using the game port, and/or need to use the pedals in
single-axis mode for games that don't support dual axis pedals,
I suggest the plain CH Pedals, $65, rather than CH Pro
Pedals. This is because the Pro Pedals slide when operating in
single-axis mode.
GPL uses dual pedal axes, so the Pro Pedals will work fine with
GPL. However, they are very awkward to use with some other racing
games which only support single-axis pedals, notably NASCAR 3
and NASCAR Legends.
But you can use the CH Pro Pedals for GPL and use the Logitech
pedals for single-axis games, since these sims generally don't
require such precise pedal operation. That's what I do on the
rare occasions that I drive games that don't support dual-axis
pedals.
This was a device which replaced the game controller port on your sound card, and was much more efficient. However, it's essentially been obsoleted by USB controllers, and it doesn't work on Windows XP.
Still, the L4 is the most efficient way to interface with a game controller, so for older computers it could be useful. If you are using any analog (game port) game controllers, including an analog wheel and pedals or just analog pedals, the L4 yields a big reduction in CPU overhead and a big improvement in game play.
A USB controller will also give a big reduction in CPU overhead, but the L4 may be slightly more efficient and is also the only option if you don't have a USB port on your computer and/or you're running Windows 95. If you're running Windows 98 or newer, adding a PCI USB controller might be a good alternative to an L4, but an L4 won't work under Win95.
If you're using a Logitech Force Feedback wheel or other USB device, the L4 is only useful if you also want to use non-USB CH Pedals or other analog pedals.
PDPI is out of business, but you might want to try eBay or other auction sites.