Trainsimulator 2012

[Hawk]

Looks like they need to put DirectX 10/11 in to get normal AA back. I hope they do this in the future and it would probably help perfomance.

...except for those that are still running XP (I know, the derelict few ), in which case they can only run DirectX 9.

[g_nash]

Looks like they need to put DirectX 10/11 in to get normal AA back. I hope they do this in the future and it would probably help perfomance.

AA in Deferred would need DX10.1 minimum , if things were going to change it would be best to go straight to DX11 .. thing is there's going to be suffering no matter what happens , lots of unhappy campers posting on forums as things stand right now , can't get much worse.

[Toripony]

thing is there's going to be suffering no matter what happens , lots of unhappy campers posting on forums as things stand right now , can't get much worse.

I sympathize and have tried to help out where possible; it's the cost of progress. We all complained that the RW engine was too limited; to upgrade software means we have to upgrade hardware.

[Kali]

MS have stopped supporting XP, am I right? it's a bit of a different story with Vista. I don't think I'd take that gamble right now. Besides would the engine even be able to use anything DX11 specific?

[arizonachris]

Can someone with I guess an Nvidia card try overclocking just the shader clock? I've pushed my cards core/mem clocks up a bit

Kali, what card do you have, clock speeds and what tool do you use? I'm running an EVGA GTX470SC 625 core, 1250 shader, 1700 memory. It's a factory O/C'd card. I don't O/C my stuff, I have a bad habit of burning it up. But I guess I can try to boost the shaders. I'm running the EVGA Precision Tool.

[Hawk]

MS have stopped supporting XP, am I right?

No! MS will support XP until August, 2014.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/ ... gb&C2=1173

If RS.com wants to update to support DX 10 or 11, that would probably be best for them and everyone (that isn't restricted to XP due to financial constraints). They're going to have to eventually anyway.

[MontanaRails]

Montana, if you are getting 18fps on the Tennessee River at Chickamauga Dam, then you must have the Death Star reactor core running your rig!

John Lippai did a super job on the Ten Bridge, and it really shows in the TSX engine.

That area is always hard on framerates, but, according to TS2012, its bouncing between 18-19 going through there. The other (obviously) areas it hits it hard is in populated yards. But, for example, a couple miles before the bridge (approaching it from either direction) framerates are pretty steady in the 25-30 range. This is looking at it from the external views. When I hop in the cab it goes down to 15 (however if I turn the loco lights off, it goes back up to 17). All at the "High" graphics presets. Maybe TS2012 cant run at great framerates with my computer, but it seems to like something about its setup, since it shouldnt be giving such good results...at least that seems to be common consensus.

Also, it seems like the higher you set the graphics, the more stable the framerate.

[jamiee]

Can someone with I guess an Nvidia card try overclocking just the shader clock? I've pushed my cards core/mem clocks up a bit ( well, a lot in the case of the memory, it's +240Mhz ) and had quite a startling increase in fps despite a pretty low GPU load; with the extra clockspeed I've a GPU load of 50%, less than earlier, but more fps.

Kali,
With Nvidia cards the shader clock is tied to the core clock.
When you overclock the core you also overclock the shader.
This would explain why you are seeing a larger jump in performance than what you expected to see

[g_nash]

We all complained that the RW engine was too limited; to upgrade software means we have to upgrade hardware.

True to a point ,though I'm not quite sure how I can upgrade any further , like styckx I already got a i7 2600k cpu and 8gig ram and a great gpu .. not much I can see to buy till next year . Fact is that what hardware more than a few have is crippled , as I see it , by what's best described as "hybrid" game code, think about , a switch to go from a "new" engine to an old one .. makes no sense at all to me . Deferred Rendering performance should be far better than we currently and I'm sure that , like me others have no problem in other titles ... I got a deferred engine that's no probs to work with.

Did give some thought to a quick install on my WS to see if this would run with Xeons and Quadros ... common sense prevailed though

see ya

[plethaus]

Wow, the performance with TSX mode enabled is just unbelievably bad sometimes.

Playing the HSC scenario where the Rose tower is on fire, I'm seeing like 9fps (yes, single digits). Changing the settings around really doesn't change it much unless shadows are completely off and everything else is turned down to medium or lower.

If I turn TSX off, my framerate is 30-40+ in the same scenario, with 8xS antialiasing and 16x anisotropic and all the graphics options at max...

Mind you I have a decent system:

Intel Core i7 950 @ 4.0ghz
6gb DDR3
Nvidia GTX 470

Not to mention, as many people have already mentioned the antialiasing is not up to snuff, and because the TSX engine is a deferred renderring engine, it can't be forced via control panel utilities like the Nvidia control panel.

I'd say RSC has some tweaking to do before they expect the main stream to switch over to TSX mode completely.

[styckx]

True to a point ,though I'm not quite sure how I can upgrade any further , like styckx I already got a i7 2600k cpu and 8gig ram and a great gpu .. not much I can see to buy till next year . Fact is that what hardware more than a few have is crippled , as I see it , by what's best described as "hybrid" game code, think about , a switch to go from a "new" engine to an old one .. makes no sense at all to me . Deferred Rendering performance should be far better than we currently and I'm sure that , like me others have no problem in other titles ... I got a deferred engine that's no probs to work with.

Did give some thought to a quick install on my WS to see if this would run with Xeons and Quadros ... common sense prevailed though

see ya

This. As much as Paul Jackson says this is new technology, it is not. Dynamic lights and shadows have been around in video games many years. They tacked a new rendering engine on top of a old badly optimized game engine. As high as framerates were on RW2 "silky smooth" gameplay it wasn't at times. WCML highlighted this. There was still stutter and hiccups but there was enough overhead to not make it a make or break situation. Now with a new rendering engine it is like towing a yacht with a 4 cynlinder sedan. Even pre-rendering frames doesn't kill off the microstutter. I've people with gtx 580's, one with a 590, two with 6990's claim the game just doesn't run as it should all maxed out. Yes high framerates are possible, on empty mainline. I ran the One Hundred scenario last night and the meet at the curve sent my framerates down to 9fps. That's pathetic with dual 5870s and an i7 2600k at 4ghz. 3 trains and some trees cripple a high end rig??

I have a 6990 on the way, so I will find out first hand. I didn't buy it just for Railworks but to get rid of the 5870s because they are awful at tessellation and I want more room. Railworks 2012 just gave me that nudge to pull the trigger. I've got a slew of new titles I'm buying. If a 6990 can't handle the TSX engine maxed out and in all situations correctly then I take a vacation.

[Shortliner]

What irritates me is that on my machine, RW2 ran like a dream, I wasn't getting any lagging or stuttering as the machine loaded up the next tile with no problem. During the run up to RW3, I did voice some concerns about my machine being able to run TS2012, and I was assured that everything will be fine, apparently not. What I don't get is, that this machine has NO problem running FSX with the graphics cranked out, and yet it can't handle TS2012? I have no AA, and Bi linear texture filtering. Everything on TS2012 is set up on high, except for shadow and water. Shadow is on medium and so is the water. My machine SHOULD be able to handle that, and yet I'm still getting lag.

I'm really starting to wonder if it's my machine or if the RSC team need to rework the TSX engine. Maybe they need to ditch the legacy mode and just have TSX as the sole rendering engine, and get rid of the rendering engine that came with RS/RW.

[spec5sx]

I sympathize and have tried to help out where possible; it's the cost of progress. We all complained that the RW engine was too limited; to upgrade software means we have to upgrade hardware.

My system is brand new. Just put it together last month. AMD Quad Core Black @ 3.2 GHz. 8GB DDR 3, NVIDIA GTX 550, Gigabyte Motherboard 990XUDA3 with AMD 990 Chipset. Railworks runs like I have an old Pentium 2.

I have turned off the TSX game engine and I think I'm going to leave it that way until they have it working properly.

[jamiee]

This. As much as Paul Jackson says this is new technology, it is not. Dynamic lights and shadows have been around in video games many years. They tacked a new rendering engine on top of a old badly optimized game engine. As high as framerates were on RW2 "silky smooth" gameplay it wasn't at times. WCML highlighted this. There was still stutter and hiccups but there was enough overhead to not make it a make or break situation. Now with a new rendering engine it is like towing a yacht with a 4 cynlinder sedan. Even pre-rendering frames doesn't kill off the microstutter. I've people with gtx 580's, one with a 590, two with 6990's claim the game just doesn't run as it should all maxed out. Yes high framerates are possible, on empty mainline. I ran the One Hundred scenario last night and the meet at the curve sent my framerates down to 9fps. That's pathetic with dual 5870s and an i7 2600k at 4ghz. 3 trains and some trees cripple a high end rig??

I have a 6990 on the way, so I will find out first hand. I didn't buy it just for Railworks but to get rid of the 5870s because they are awful at tessellation and I want more room. Railworks 2012 just gave me that nudge to pull the trigger. I've got a slew of new titles I'm buying. If a 6990 can't handle the TSX engine maxed out and in all situations correctly then I take a vacation.

Unfortunately, I can tell you right now that a 6990 "Will NOT" give you what your after in terms of performance in TS2012.

Just for kick's (albeit a very expensive one...) I have ordered two ASUS GTX580 Matrix Platinum cards (to be run in SLI) .
I'm curious to see how well they well they will handle TS2012.
In theory my current configuration of HD6990 + HD6970 GPU's should be faster (and in most games this is true - heck it's a faster combination than getting the fastest videocard in the world right now, the ASUS MARS II).
That said, I kind of welcome the GTX580's as they will run much cooler and a lot more quiet.

[Kali]

Kali,
With Nvidia cards the shader clock is tied to the core clock.
When you overclock the core you also overclock the shader.
This would explain why you are seeing a larger jump in performance than what you expected to see

I'm an ATi user, I gave up on Nvidia after I kept burning them out :p I was told there was a seperate shader clock, I wanted to see if there was a bottleneck in shader processing given both Bill and I have seen different fps with the same resource usage, and my fps caps out with both cpu cycles spare on one core and the card semi-idling also. Given my framerate went up with the clockspeed and overall GPU usage went *down*, I thought that was a reasonable assumption. Admittedly I OC'd the memory also, I guess I should put that back to default & test again.

RW3 is smoother than RW2 for me now; FPS is a bit lower and well, the AA is horrible so I'm learning to live without, but it is a much smoother experience. I'm not happy enough to update my working install yet, though.