QEMU Grand Prix 3 & Season 2000 Expansion (2000, 2001)

Grand Prix 3 & Season 2000 expansion by Geoff Crammond, another challenging games for modern system. These games being an exemplary of CPU hog outright lied about CPU requirement of Pentium II 266MHz. Perhaps the software 3D at the lowest resolution & graphic details would crank 10 FPS and be called "playable". Without hardware virtualization, no CPU emulation would reach such performance. So who said **"Virtualization is only good for speed & bad for games compatibility"**? QEMU KVM on modern Linux delivers superb CPU performance for these games at the perfect 25.6 FPS that these games were designed for.

These games' simulation use a lot of CPU and in the race the more cars in front of the player's view, the more CPU power is required. When the player successfully led the pack, CPU occupancy dropped accordingly and frame rate locked at 25.6 FPS. Using hardware 3D acceleration and high resolution rendering incur higher CPU demand. The demo used QEMU specific WineD3D scaling to scale up from 800x600 to keep the frame rate high at all time. QEMU specific WineD3D scaling is essentially free on modern GPUs. For single-car practice drive, the game basically just locked at 25.6 FPS even at native 1280x1024 rendering. High performance desktop-class CPUs can probably manage these games at any native rendering without scaling at any circumstances (such as weather effects).

No unofficial patches at all, GP3 was patched with the last official v1.13. GP3 Season 2000 already had updated game engine & assets. Both games were played at pristine condition on Windows XP VM. Game musics, sound effects, intro FMV and in-game FMV were all played back perfectly.

System Specs:-
Huawei MateBook D (AMD) Ryzen 2500U
Host OS: Arch Linux x86_64

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