Platform: PC

Manufacturer: ISI / EA Sports

EA's upcoming F1 Championship Season 2000 title (hereafter referred to as "F1CS2K") is an updated follow-on to their earlier F1 2000, which was released back in the spring of this year. F1 2000 was released near the beginning of the 2000 F1 season (hence the catchy "F1 2000" name), and to date, it is the only simulation to feature all the venues on the 2000 schedule, including the new U.S. Grand Prix circuit at Indianapolis.

Both F1 2000 and F1CS2K were developed by ISI, the same people who brought us EA's excellent Sports Car GT (SCGT) simulation. F1 2000 featured excellent physics but received little acclaim due to its steep hardware requirements - so steep, in fact, that people with anything less than 700 MHz PIII and Athlon systems have reported performance problems with F1 2000. In order to get F1 2000 to run at playable frame rates, many users with high-end systems still had to scale back the graphic options considerably, and people with midrange PII, Celeron, or K6-2 systems in the 450 MHz range suffered even worse performance. Thankfully, F1CS2K addresses this issue with an optimized graphics engine that should allow for better performance on even midrange systems.

In addition to an enhanced graphics engine, F1CS2K is also intended to serve as an end-of-season update by more accurately depicting the various venues on the F1 circuit as they appeared during the 2000 season. Significant changes in this area involve track graphics at Indianapolis, and actual circuit changes at Monza and Spa, for example. These changes alone may seem to be the sort of things that would merely constitute a "patch" to the existing F1 2000 game, but ISI has also added a new "Driving School" mode that provides additional immersion, accessibility, and gameplay.

Still, are these changes alone enough to justify the release of this game only six-to-eight months after the original release of F1 2000? Does F1CS2K represent a worthwhile purchase if you already own F1 2000, and does it stand on its own merits if you don't already own its predecessor? When the folks at ISI were kind enough to extend me the invitation to do some hardware evaluation on a late beta version of F1CS2K, I jumped at the chance in order to try to answer some of these questions for myself.

TEST CONFIGURATION:

Primary System:

• Processor: AMD Duron 600
  
• RAM: 96 MB PC100
  
• Video: Aopen PA3020 16 MB TNT2 Ultra (160 core/183 memory)
  
• Audio: Built-in (MSI K7T Pro2 motherboard)
  
• Game port: Built-in (MSI K7T Pro2 motherboard)
  
• Game controller: TSW2
  
• 3DMark2000 score (default benchmark): 2714
  
• CPUMark99 score: 50.2

Secondary System:

• Processor: AMD K6-2 500
  
• RAM: 96 MB
  
• Video: Guillemot Maxi Gamer Cougar TNT2 M64 (150 core/175memory)
  
• Audio: Generic ISA Soundblaster compatible
  
• Game port: PDPI L4
  
• Game controller: TSW2
  
• 3DMark2000 score (default benchmark): 1187

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS:

Prior to testing F1CS2K, I had been playing F1 2000 extensively after just coming off my US Grand Prix experience. I was very fond of ISI's physics modeling in F1 2000, so I expected to find more of the same in F1CS2K. After completing the installation, I went into the setup menus and cranked the graphics details up to max in order to test the newly-optimized graphics engine. If you're familiar with the menus in F1 2000, then F1CS2K will look very familiar; if you're new to F1CS2K, what you will find is a fairly straightforward menu system that is easy to navigate, and considerably more intuitive than the menu system in GP3. After tweaking the graphics settings, I then made sure that all the driving aids were disabled in order to ensure that I could experience the physics model in its full, unimpeded glory. From there I selected a Test Session, grabbed my favorite Ferrari, picked the Indy track, and sat back while it all loaded.

The track graphics at Indy were dead-on, too, and after sitting through that race in the rain, I was delighted to find that I was now able to choose from a variety of weather conditions, including: Dry; Overcast; Wet; Random; and Season 2000. The "Wet" and "Overcast" settings brought with them different sky textures, fog effects, and grip levels; your view can be obscured by the spray from cars in front of you, and you can even see your own rooster-tails kicking up in your rear-view mirrors. There are no falling raindrop effects, though, nor are there any varying rain conditions during a race; once the track is wet, it stays wet and it doesn't seem to dry. These are two areas where GP3 tends to excel over F1CS2K, but I still feel that the lively physics model in F1CS2K more than makes up for these omissions.

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