Screen saver takes a little while to initalise 10-15 seconds and looks good when it starts. Ok may not be the best screensaver out there but if you want a F1 looking screensaver you probably won’t find one for free or that looks this good.

Well done GAOTD at last a screensaver for petrol heads.

Persoanlly and with respect, i have to vote Thumbs Down!

Please bear in mind that the developer(s) state the screensaver uses OpenGL — a type of hardware assist provided by the graphics card or on-board graphics chipset. When hardware graphics assist is unavailable, if & when possible it’s done by much less efficient, much slower software emulation. Oracle VirtualBox is the only VM host I’m aware of with any sort of graphics acceleration, & that’s experimental. So in a nutshell, while installing/running 3D Formula 1 Screensaver in a VM might be useful to see how it works, performance shouldn’t be expected to come close to what users might experience with actual [vs. virtual] hardware.

That warning out of the way, 3D Formula 1 Screensaver isn’t a one-file [.scr] screensaver, but relies on a program folder with 9 files at just under 15MB. As the docs show, it dates back to 2005, with system requirements [in the docs] going up to XP. OpenGL graphics are also listed. On an AMD quad it pretty much maxed 1 core, & did use the hardware graphics acceleration on my ATI 4870 [a once higher end last generation card]. While it’s not at the level of the latest games, this screensaver will probably stress systems with lower power graphics &/or CPUs. I did see some video glitches [different ones with/without vsync] that likely could be minimized or gotten rid of entirely if I bothered to play with the ATI settings. Using the mouse to stop the screensaver was iffy [using latest Logitech Setpoint drivers], & afterwards software screen calibration was off.

The visual quality is a matter of expectations… not terrible by any means, but if you’re a gamer who frets when you don’t see 100% of what the latest games have to offer, frankly you’ll probably laugh. The road surface is 1 repeating [tiled] texture, while the scenery is made up of relatively simple, static images. There’s some attention to detail — the driver’s head moves a bit side-to-side — but by & large the focus is on the cars themselves & their reflective surfaces. The audio isn’t terrible either, at least for the first couple of minutes, but it repetitive nature gets on your nerves sooner rather than later — inside the 14.5MB data.rar file are 4 .ogg files you might try swapping out if you wanted.

Personally I’m not a huge screensaver fan, & am inclined to give today’s GOTD a C+/B- grade… If I wanted something similar with more realism, I’d probably look at using actual race video, since there are several screensaver apps that’ll use it, & they wouldn’t require my PC to work so hard.