I found that torcs runs very choppy on my desktop box. I have a pentium 4 with 256meg ram and an nvidia tnt 32 meg video card. I manually installed the legacy nvidia driver. I can get the best performance in torcs if run in a window with the lowest resolution. The game starts and runs ok, then after about 1/2 minute, starts to get choppy and looks like a slide show where I can see the long pauses between frames. I have about 29 processes running and the cpu usage looks like 80 percent and most of the ram used up. Are there processes that can be shut down to save resources? What should I be looking for to improve performance?

That's easy. You need more ram (at least 512MB) and you need a better graphics card. 3d games need faster hardware than what you have.

I have a GeForce 8600 GTS and an Athlon64 X2 4200+ with 1GB of ram. Torcs runs great running at 1400x1050 resolution.

I just installed an additional 256mb ram and that seemed to cure the choppy game performance. If I was to replace the video card, how much additional performance would I gain? I have an agp slot.