Railworks America

I've had my eye on a Geforce GTX 560 TI for a few days, but I want to make sure it will run Railworks. I currently have a Radeon HD 6670, I'm thinking of upgrading... Will the 560 TI run Railworks?
Dexter

I just upgraded to a MSI N570GTX Ti Twin Frozr III.
Railworks runs pretty well on it, all settings on high. RW should work very good with a 560 as well.
If you can, buy the MSI Twin Frozr version of the card. It has two fans which perfectly cool the card.

I can't say for the 560 TI, but I have two 550 TI's in SLI. According to the web review I read, two 550 TI's are equivelent to a 560 Ti performance-wise. If that is the case, then you need something stronger, because two 550's running RW with everything set to high leaves much to be desired.

Try to get as good a graphics card as your wallet will allow because this game is almost entirely dependent on the GPU.

SMMDigital wrote:two 550's running RW with everything set to high leaves much to be desired.

Can you be a little more specific? What kind of framerates are you seeing?

Thanks
Don

http://www.smmdigital.net/rw3vshardware.html

WARNING: It's not a kind review, so you may just want to read the part about the frame rates.

With the 570Ti I get framerates of 30 or higher nearly all the time with everything set to "highest" and a resolution of 1920x1080.

SMMDigital wrote:http://www.smmdigital.net/rw3vshardware.html

WARNING: It's not a kind review, so you may just want to read the part about the frame rates.

SMM, I am seeing a different story with my old rig. I was able to get 10+ fps by just overclocking my CPU from 3.0 to 3.6 (Intel E8400) with SSAA 1x2 and FFAX with almost everything set to highest (EVGA 460 GTX FTW). Also when editing a route, it eats more than 4 gig just for breakfast.

I am not saying your tests are invalid!

There seems to be a lot of chatter around the different forums about what changes really has improved performance and it appears to be a crap shoot.

I OC'd my old proc, the q6600, from 2.4 to 3.01 and it made no difference in the frame rates. I didnt extensively test that rig before dismantling it, but the game never utilized over 46% of my proc on the medium-low settings I used.

You are correct in saying it is a crap shoot because there are so many varied hardware setups. But the crap i'm seeing on my computer tells me that the hardware is ready and willing but RW3 forgot the Viagra.

There is one more variable I did not test but I had a brief encounter with it - Operating System. All of my tests were done using Windows 7 64- bit on a clean install. A couple months back, I switched over to Windows Vista 32-bit to do some beta testing for a fellow route builder and was astonished to find better frame rates than when running 7 ( this was my old computer ). Could it be RW3 doesn't like 64-bit OS's? The OS is one thing i'm not seeing a lot of people talking about when they talk about game performance.

Odd... I am getting near 80% CPU utilization. I am also running Win 7 x64 (8gig ram).

Understand that I know processors dont work this way, but if you add all the proc cores together speed-wise and do some imaginary math on them...

If im not mistaken, the E series is dual core? If you take the numbers and do some convoluted math you would roughly be using 5.9Ghz (spread across two cores, meaning multiple threads are being used) to run RW3 at 80% utilization of your OC speed. On mine, with four cores, at maximum utilization of around 46%, that would equal about 6.0Ghz , spread across four cores, to run RW3.

Seems that as the processor scales up, there is still only so much that RW3 will take from it.

SMMDigital wrote:Understand that I know processors dont work this way, but if you add all the proc cores together speed-wise and do some imaginary math on them...

If im not mistaken, the E series is dual core? If you take the numbers and do some convoluted math you would roughly be using 5.9Ghz (spread across two cores, meaning multiple threads are being used) to run RW3 at 80% utilization of your OC speed. On mine, with four cores, at maximum utilization of around 46%, that would equal about 6.0Ghz , spread across four cores, to run RW3.

Seems that as the processor scales up, there is still only so much that RW3 will take from it.

Yes the E8xxx is dual core (one of the best series for the LGA 775 line IMHO).

No, a core is a core. If one is running at 3.0 then any process running on that core is 3.0. Now if you are talking about an application that is optimized to be used across multiple cores, or CPUs then yes, it would appear to work the way you are describing.

Another interesting thing is that RW was utilizing @80% at when running at 3.0 _and_ 3.6, same work load, just happening faster

Like the OP, I too hope the 560TI card will be satisfactory for RW3.
After a deal of trouble in getting my installation updated to RW3 I was glad I didn't buy HSC at the same time as I had planned, as it turned out I am getting a eye watering 3 fps with TSX turned on. Its more like a PowerPoint presentation than game animation. With it turned off, an acceptable 20fps or so. PC specs are not great now - Core 2 Quad on Vista Home Premium with 8600GT card and 4G ram.
Went to my local hardware vendor and was quoted $380 installed for an Asus 560TI card (the last time I installed a graphics card, it cost me a whole pc as I damaged the MB) Not the greatest card, but I am just not going to update the entire pc, which is what is probably needed just for this.

Will post again in a week or so once it has been done with some performance results if interested...

I am also looking at a GTX560 Ti. I'd be interested to hear what its users get performance wise. Obviously results will be different from system to system as RAM and processors vary.

My proposed system processor and RAM:
4X 3.2GHz
8GB DDR3 1333MHz (4GB X 2)

Wonder how one would perform with that. I really want my money's worth and seeing some people say a GTX560 Ti isn't enough is really disappointing. I will only get NVIDIA cards (trust me, you will not win me round to ATI) and the next one up is the 570, which costs considerably more.

Ya know, It's kind of hard for me to make up my mind... Now I'm looking at a GTX 460 Any thoughts on that?
Dexter

Dex, the 400 series is last gen stuff, and as far as I know, anyone that you buy is used. My GTX470 Super Clocked struggles at times with TSX on. That being said, I don't know first hand about the 500 series except what has been said here.