[donadigo]

I'm not sure about your particular case, but if your environment really is headless, then it should absolutely be possible to run it a lot faster than realtime. It depends on what the environment is and if you have access to its source code (we do not have that in TrackMania so it's a lot harder). Either the environment is purposely throttling the amount of time it simulates, or it just takes so much time to simulate the environment that it's not possible to speed it up anymore.

We're lucky in case of TrackMania because it internally has systems to both set the relative game speed and also completely disable all rendering and just run physics. Linesight achieves about ~10x speedup where the most time spent now is in rendering game frames and running the inference on the network. They also parallelize training by running more game instances and implementing a training queue. For the "raw" speedup ratios, TM usually achieves about ~60x (one minute is simulated in one second) and I use this speedup to implement bruteforce functionality in the tool (coupled with a custom save states implementation).