NEC TS 2012 Optimized

[Toripony]

Sounds like a good clean game machine! Way to go. So your fps drops from 50 to 15?!!! Mine drops from 30 to 15... and on HSC when I'm getting 15 it drops to "something".... maybe it's the same condition it's just more dramatic on the powerful pcs.

Yes, you're right about quiet wheels not getting the grease... even I am guilty of ignoring the most unique issues until the experts get everything working, but after a while, I start to take notice again. A persistent/consistent problem is a problem even if it's only happening to one person. It's hard to work on generalizations though. I admit I haven't reported certain issues because I cannot recreate them consistently enough to be sure how to describe them. To troubleshoot the developers need specific situations that they can recreate, like:

Run Scenario X
Drive X engine with X train/cars for 1 min 10 secs; performance 50 FPS
At road crossing X FPS drops to 15 for 15 seconds
Occured 4 of 6 times tried/tested

When I supported netork clients, I always liked getting those kind of problem reports the best because I could duplicate that exactly in just a few minutes, without any of my own guesswork or "interpretation" of what the user did exactly. Half the time I would not have the same problem but we had a precise starting point to troubleshoot together. I wish I could still troubleshoot systems long distance; wish I could help with the problems.

[snowstorm]

Was inspired by styckx's graphs to do my own first attempt at getting a broader perspective on TS2012 performance on a reasonably fast system (Core i5-2500K, Radeon 6850). I decided to have FRAPS log the FPS while completing an NEC activity, with TSX enabled and graphics detail set to High, but the launch window settings set to Low (i.e. no AA, no AF) as I found MLAA/MSAA/AF overhead on my graphics card to be small and I wanted to rule them out as major factors in relation to performance issues. I followed my TS2012 session with half an hour of BF: BC2, recording that one with FRAPS as well.

One problem I found with a line or bar graph is it doesn't clearly show momentary slowdowns that are quite noticable to the player, so I went with a scatter graph which emphasises them. The graphs should be zoomed to original size for any comparison as the scaled versions are a bit distorted.

Train Simulator 2012, 50 minute activity session (Northeast Corridor 'The Keystone' activity)
1680x1050, Low quality selected in launch window basic settings, High quality selected in in-game graphics settings


Battlefield Bad Company 2, 35 minute online multiplayer session (various maps)
1680x1050, High quality selected in in-game graphics settings


I don't know how accurate this FRAPS methodology is, but I would say the graphs are consistent with my subjective experience of the smoothness of the games and amount of choppiness (NEC on TS2012 was plagued with choppiness/stuttering, BFBC2 felt fluid throughout). The purpose of throwing the BFBC2 results in there wasn't to make TS2012 look bad, but to show how my computer handles a well-known resource-intensive game and verify my system doesn't have some general performance issue. If I do another comparison, I might use the Bus & Cable Car Simulator demo I have, which seems more similar to TS2012 in being a newly-released simulator with advanced graphics.


CONFIGURATION
Hardware: Intel DH67BL, Core i5-2500K, 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) Kingston DDR3-1333, MSI HD 6850 Cyclone PE OC, WD Green 2TB
Software: Windows 7 64-bit, latest DH67BL motherboard BIOS & drivers, Catalyst 11.9

SETTINGS
Catalyst: default 3D Application Settings
TS2012 launch window: TSX enabled, basic settings radio button set to Low, 1680x1050 full screen, 1x1 monitor, no command line or audio options checked
TS2012 in-game options: graphical detail set to High, Depth of Field unchecked, Adaptive Bloom unchecked

PROCEDURE
run TS2012 and make sure settings are as noted
disable startup of Speedfan and MSI Afterburner
switch off/unplug unncessary peripherals: printer, USB stick
shut down and power on PC
enter BIOS and set fan speeds to maximum
start Windows 7
close unnecessary programs: KeePass, Locate32, Logitech Mouse & Keyboard, Logitech Webcam Software
disable Microsoft Security Essentials Real-Time Protection
start FRAPS
start TS2012
start The Keystone scenario
hit F11 to start FRAPS FPS logging
begin playing as normal (default cab view position, headlight off, occasional switching between F4, F5 and no info displays)

[Shadders]

Hello Folks,

In my last post I gave some fps values for this route after the patch was issued. I've quoted below so that all the data is in one place.

Just time for a quick post before bed.

FPS taken from in game counter.
This after tonight's patch. All scenarios played for at least 10 minutes.
Acela Express < 14 FPS - Then I edited the scenario and turned off the rain, substituting Clear weather. Got worse FPS ~ 3 FPS.
Business Bullet - < 14 FPS it did raise to 18 for a about a minute, then went down to 14 and stayed there.
Early Clocker - < 14 FPS.
Lucky (can't remember the whole name) - < 14 FPS.

Shad.

I noted RSAdam's post. It was very kind of him to share his PC specs and give some fps values. Very useful, thank you Adam.
Taking his lead, here's my specs in a bit more detail:
COMPUTER
=========================================
Processor Information:
Vendor: GenuineIntel i7 980x ee
Speed: 3.33 Ghz
12 logical processors
6 physical processors

Motherboard:
Asus P6T7 ws supercomputer

Operating System Version:
Windows 7 (64 bit)

Video Card:
Driver Version: 8.17.11.9745
DirectX Driver Version: 11.9 + 11.9 CAP2 Profiles
Desktop Color Depth: 32 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
DirectX Card: XFX Black ATI 5970 Dual GPU 2 x 1024MB
Desktop Resolution: 3840 x 1200 (2 x 1920x1200 monitors)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 2 x 1024 MB
Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x 16x

Memory:
RAM: 12279 Mb (I got my RAM size wrong in my first post, sorry. It was late ) 1600MHz

Train Simulator 2012 Settings
=========================================
TSX Enabled
High Setting
Resolution : 1920x1200 Full Screen
Texture Filtering x8
Post Processing Yes
Multi-Sampling Off
MLAA+MSAA Off - FXAA Injector used.

Extra Info:
RW3 resides on it's own SSD drive.
Anti-Virus (NOD) - set to exclude the railworks folder.
Running software: Tray icons for mouse, keyboard and sound card. Core Temp and Network Activity (restores XP style network icon).
If I minimise firefox now, there would be < 1% CPU usage.

I stated that I would try renaming the Lights folder again and repost the results. Instead I tried a slightly more precise method.
I renamed every light apart from the loco headlights.
The result was slightly better, but I was still seeing ~14fps every time I passed a loco.
So I turned off shadow casting in the loco headlights for the AEM-7 and for the Acela Express.
So that's no lights on the route, and headlights changed to cast no shadows.

Once again, I capped the time spent on each scenario to about 10-15 minutes, so I could get a rough feel for overall performance rather than one particular spot.
Acela Express - <14 - 17 fps
Business Bullet - 15 - 20 fps
Early Clocker - 14 - 22 fps
Lucky Northeast Corridor - 24-27 fps (with small dips when loading the next tile)

Note: Just after the first station you pass coming out of Philadelphia, there's a 50mph limit before a sharp, cambered left hand turn. Just before the speed limit RW stops for between 1 and 2 seconds. Is anyone else getting this?

Anyway, an improvement but not much of one sadly.

I mentioned that I don't get nearly as bad frame rates on other routes, so as an example I tried a scenario on MCML North as far as I know, this is one of the most resource intensive pre RW3 routes available from RSC.
I chose a scenario by Armstrong Powerhouse as I figured that would have a reasonable amount of AI traffic. Starting at Carlisle, the play waits on the platform for a pendolino to arrive from the south. There's two DMUs already at the station and an AI pendolino arriving from the north.
Start - 27 FPS, dipping to 24 FPS immediately outside of the station.
Passed another train (Voyager) - 29FPS
The route started to get a bit more rural, which was a little unfair so I stopped testing. By that time I was getting 37fps.

Another test I did was put my settings to exactly what Adam detailed, remembering to remove the FXAA injector first and restoring the lighting to its original state:
Train Simulator 2012 Settings
=========================================
TSX Enabled
High Setting
Resolution : 1280x1024 Full Screen
Texture Filtering x4
Post Processing Yes
Multi-Sampling X8
MLAA+MSAA x8
30FPS lock enabled

Ingame Options
=========================================
Custom
High or Highested on all settings
Proceedural Flora Ticked
Depth of Field Ticked

Drive By Train >> Silver Star Acela Scenario
Shift+Z @ start >> Adam 27fps Me 27fps
Passing Secaucus station @ 115mph >> Adam 30fps Me 21fps
Stop at Newark station >> Adam 21fps Me 23fps
Headlight on throughout

So let's get this straight I have a CPU 680Mhz faster per core, a GPU that has 61% more memory bandwidth, 348% better texel rate (think anisotropic filtering) and 348% improvement on Pixel rate (AA not that it's enabled in RW of course). My source is http://www.hwcompare.com/9467/geforce-gtx-285-2gb-vs-radeon-hd-5970/. I fully understand that this is the theoretical improvement based on the manufacturers specs. But I'm sorry, I should be getting better results than this.

Anyway, I've written a massive post again, sorry for the wall of text I hope it's informative to other users though.
Once I compile this lot into something a little more digestible for RSC to consume, I'll be posting it off to support.

Just in case people are forming an opinion of me that I'm just coming on here to moan. Please understand that it's not the case at all. It's taken me over two hours to put this post together, not counting the time to configure and run the tests. Believe me, I'd rather just be playing the darn thing!
I like RSC and I want them to succeed, I've got 60 items of DLC purchased from Steam. They have my support in most aspects of RW.
And if this poor performance turns out be caused by something I have done, I'll be falling over myself to apologise publicly. Sharing any information in case it helps others.

Kind regards,

Shad.

[Griphos]

That is an incredibly well thought out, researched, and informative post. I hope RSC notes it. There does seem to me to be more than just the usual grumbling at new implementations of software, but something wrong with the implementation. I am quite happy with most of the content of the sim, but am not that pleased with the performance of HSC relative to the rest of the routes, even though I love it. I'll be waiting to buy any of the new DLC for 2012 until things get sorted.

[fredborg]

Note: Just after the first station you pass coming out of Philadelphia, there's a 50mph limit before a sharp, cambered left hand turn. Just before the speed limit RW stops for between 1 and 2 seconds. Is anyone else getting this?

Yes, same thing here. A bit strange since it's not happening anywhere else on the route.

[Kali]

Hmm. After driving around HSC a while and watching my GPU usage I'm starting to think I should write a little logging script that just timestamps where the engine is at a given moment, and then lay that on top of FRAPS FPS/CPU usage/GPU usage. My machine seems to be a little CPU bottlenecked for RW anyway - original i7 920 overclocked a few % - but if you do meander around HSC or indeed any other route you can find what I call FPS boundaries where something in the engine is suddenly requesting more CPU. It's not the game engine suddenly having too many things to render and the GPU choking because at that point my GPU usage plummets, so ... well I can't really speculate what it is without knowing the game engine, but maybe there is some thrashing going on where assets are at a marginal distance for the engine to decide if they need to be rendered, or maybe there's just points where there's too many assets being posted. Only RSC can tell though.

Would anyone actually bother using a "you are here" wagon? it'd just log x/y/z coords every second and the time since the scenario started or something along those lines.

[Andimax]

Note: Just after the first station you pass coming out of Philadelphia, there's a 50mph limit before a sharp, cambered left hand turn. Just before the speed limit RW stops for between 1 and 2 seconds. Is anyone else getting this?

Exactly same problem here, today it stopped for 10 seconds! I was awaiting the CTD error, but it did run after these 10 seconds, sure that this is only happening on one spot on the NEC, nothing where else

[HbgRdgLine]

I just built a new machine and was all excited to try out RW and see how smooth it was after playing on a 5 year old HP.

Intel i7 2600
Asus Sabertooth P67 Motherboard
8 gb DDR3 Ram
EVGA GTX560TI

Framerates are 14 on NEC, are you kidding me? What am I doing wrong? Can you say DISAPPOINTED!

[MugHug]

I just built a new machine and was all excited to try out RW and see how smooth it was after playing on a 5 year old HP.

Intel i7 2600
Asus Sabertooth P67 Motherboard
8 gb DDR3 Ram
EVGA GTX560TI

Framerates are 14 on NEC, are you kidding me? What am I doing wrong? Can you say DISAPPOINTED!

Admit the NEC does push our machines, but there is a guide on UKTrainSim I used. The approach to testing settings is quite good. I basically have 25FPS on NEC and 40Fps on HSC. My other routes are a lot better. using i5-2500K o/c and GTX 460. Link for guide is a sticky up top of forum. I finished with the command line -FPSLimit=40 in the Steam starup options to smooth out the spikes. Adjust the 40 to just above your average FPS. For me, the Adaptive Bloom seem to hurt FPSs a lot and to be honest, with it off TS2012 still looks really nice.

Lession for me was that It took a lot of tunning and testing, but I am happy with the results.

[ATSF3814]

Well I just did some benchmarking as well so I'll post my results. The game used for this comparison is RAGE and FRAPS is used for the benchmarking. I don't know how to plot the data onto a graph unfortunately so I'm just posting the average FPS result.

I only did a few minutes of gameplay for each so this isn't very extensive but it should give pretty good data.

My specs:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHZ
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560ti 2GB
Memory: 4GB Corsair Dual Channel DDR3 1333MHZ

RAGE

Settings Used:



Results:

Frames: 33318
Time (ms): 579969
FPS Min: 0
FPS Max: 61
Average FPS: 57.448

Train Simulator 2012

Route used:

Horseshoe Curve

Settings Used:




Results:

Frames: 9321
Time (ms): 498125
FPS Min: 6
FPS Max: 26
Average FPS: 18.712

The gameplay in TS2012 was still fairly smooth with only a few hiccups here and there but based on my results with RAGE, I'd say it could be much better.

[MugHug]

Have RAGE too and I wonder if it is a good game to compare with due to the corridor approach of the game, the use of Megatextues, limited graphic settings, and RAGE using OpenGL which can perform faster then DirectX. It was really desinged to run on consoles at 60FPS, so apart from driver issues on the PC, I am not surprised with your results.

FSX or ArmA 2 provide a closer match to the type of world we have. The size of the area plus the graphical bells and whistles provide many of the same features as TS2012. Even an MMO like Vanguard SOH might be good. Any of those used while moving fast through the virtual world is closer. My guess, but I could be wrong. :)

Information is still useful and thanks for the post.

[styckx]

Well. There is this, mind you it is at 5760x1080 also annnnd on my old 5870 crossfire rig and not the newer 6990 rig

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g37/s ... bench1.jpg

[styckx]

More big open world gaming and what normal games do. Stats in corner. Both at the highest possible settings and AA etc you can

Click

[Toripony]

I'm trying out the NEC stuff. Has anyone lost keyboard input lately? Happened to me tonight after about 10-15 mins of driving. Btw, the only thing I can drive on this route is the AEM. My first experiences with the NEC are not like the good ones I had with the HSC route. Even with TSX off and graphic options set to High, the Acela is just too much for this laptop. I don't think I can stand to drive it on Low graphics options; that would just be sad. Am still experimenting but I can see that this route and the PC requirements to edit in TS'12 is going to make my 1 year old top-of-the-line gaming laptop obsolete. My attempts to edit anything using TS'12 leads to thermal shutdowns. Guess I'll have to switch to a desktop and sit at a desk all day.

[styckx]

Anyone want to see if they can repeat these findings of mine?

http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 5#p1476397