I was examining the D3D Update of GPL on my ATI Rage Pro and Voodoo². Of course i use Glide for playing on my Voodoo² and you don't need the D3D Update for my trick but i found out that there is one Parameter in the D3D Update that is usable in Glide as well. It's TossHighestMip. With this Option set the highest texture quality (used when very near to something for example) is never drawn so only 25% of texturememory is needed (according to the Readme in the D3D Update. This has the effect that the horizon (sky) in general and signs (and other things that come very near) look more blurry. But framerate is significantly increased. Especially in addon tracks with tons of textures like Sachsenring which are very big (more than 30megs unzipped). Without this parameter i had 5fps in city-straight and with TossHighestMip=1 i get 20fps and that makes this track playable in the end. Here is how my CORE.INI looks:

[ Int Profile Values ]
Value3=Profile:TossHighestMip:1

[ Profile ]
TossHighestMip=1

I can only speak for the 106 Realtracks that i downloaded from Magnust's trackdatabase because i am not interested in fantasytracks but there are not many tracks that are such big and slow: Sachenring, Watkins Glen (still very slow even if TossHihghestMip is set and the textures look very strange, maybe too much polygons to calculate for a 90Mhz Voodoo), Laguna Seca and maybe 10 others. But i have a 12MB Voodoo² with 8MB texture memory so i think 8MB Voodoo² users with only 4MB texture memory will run in fps trouble with more tracks so i think they really need this option to make the bigger addon tracks playable. Maybe 8MB Voodoo3 users can profit from this option as well.

There is also a problem that some addon tracks are to specialized for a specific api and don't work Software, Glide, D3D or OGL Mode. I found out that if there is no glide-fix you can use the software-fix for Glide as well. Eastlondon is such a track for example.

Happy Racing,
Andreas