Railworks America

Hey guys just a technical question on cpu's and gpu's. I would like to upgrade my AMD athalon x2 4200+ 7.5 ddr2 gb memory, a nvidia gt 220 gpu, to a new processor and It looks like the AMD phenom ll x4 980x 3.7ghz Black edition is the one I'm interested in. Does anybody have a similar processor? If so whats your framerates on TS2012 overall, what settings in RW u use, and how much memory do you have and whats your graphics card. Thanks for your help as I planning on making this purchase today or tomorrow. I need something that will boost me to 30-40 fps. right now I think im at about 15-20. in a rural area.

thanks for your input guys.

It depends first off if your board will support that CPU. It's a 125 watt, some boards are only good for 95 watts. Check on the maker's website for a list of compatible CPU's. That GPU is the bottle neck.

I have the Phenom II 940 Black, 4Gb RAM, and a GTX470, Win 7 64 bit. I get anywhere from 40 to 14 frames. Depends a lot on the route. HSC seems the most optimized for RW3.

(don't be surprised if this gets moved to the Geek section )

arizonachris wrote:It depends first off if your board will support that CPU. It's a 125 watt, some boards are only good for 95 watts. Check on the maker's website for a list of compatible CPU's. That GPU is the bottle neck.

I have the Phenom II 940 Black, 4Gb RAM, and a GTX470, Win 7 64 bit. I get anywhere from 40 to 14 frames. Depends a lot on the route. HSC seems the most optimized for RW3.

I guess my thoughts are also that the GPU might be the bottleneck. You can download the tool GPU-Z which shows you the level of utilization of the GPU, and you can watch the normal task manager to see what the CPU utilization is, and from this try and deduce which is the limiting factor.

I have a Dell T5400 with two dual-core Xeon chips (2GHz), 4GB memory, a GTX 460, and Win7 64-bit. For me the HSC seems to be a bit more demanding than other routes - probably because there is more scenery. My frame rates are similar, but in my case the CPU is the more likely bottleneck.

ok so i got a gtx 550 ti and a new power supply. so we'll see if it will work better for me. if not then at least i have a better card for the next cpu
upgrade

eyein12 wrote:ok so i got a gtx 550 ti and a new power supply. so we'll see if it will work better for me. if not then at least i have a better card for the next cpu
upgrade

The specs I have seen suggest that your new card is relatively close in terms of performance to the 460 that I have...

arizonachris wrote:(don't be surprised if this gets moved to the Geek section )

Well, it is more about RW3 than just general computing, so I guess right here is a good place for it.

toonces so then theoretically I should see improvement in fps then with the new card vs my old one.

I bought a GTX 550 TI a week ago, and there was a noticeable improvement in frame rates from the get-go. Will you be able to run with everything maxed with TSX on? No. But, you can acheive acceptable frame rates (high 20's-low 30's) and still have shadows and good anti-aliasing.

I might also venture to add that your framerates are also going to depend on your "overhead" - your processes running in the background and even the operating system you're running. I nearly dropped a brick when I booted into 32-bit Windows Vista and the HSC ran better with TSX in full screen mode than in Windows 7-64 in 1600x900 windowed mode with low fx settings. And Vista only utilizes 3GB of RAM!

SMMDigital wrote:I nearly dropped a brick when I booted into 32-bit Windows Vista and the HSC ran better with TSX in full screen mode than in Windows 7-64 in 1600x900 windowed mode with low fx settings. And Vista only utilizes 3GB of RAM!

speaking of things in TS2012 that make no sense ...

this just makes my head hurt thinking how that is even possible

-barnez

I know what you mean. From the day RW3 was released, it seems there have been more problems with rigs that are the latest an greatest than with older systems, at least from the posts i've read. Why in the world woul my four year old rig run TSX better than someone with an i7 and DDR3 RAM? It makes no sense. It seems you need to downgrade to run the upgrade!

eyein12 wrote:toonces so then theoretically I should see improvement in fps then with the new card vs my old one.

That's my guess, but my advice is worth only what you paid for it .

thanks guys. well right now I am on win 7 64 bit with 7.5gb mem. actually at night the game runs at a tolerable low 20 on mostly high settings no AA though, day time well things slow down a bit more. I dont even see the difference when AA is on anyway other than slower performance for me. Im def keeping my dual core for now. Jerry I look forward to my new card. glad to here you got a good boost from yours. Im only looking to run the game on med settings with shadows anyway. I think the shadows really make the game for me. I can care less about terrain being on high or distance set to very high. so far everything in game still loads at the same speed as I had before just alot more studdering than I want when I run a scenario. I always reboot when a day lapses between Rw startups. I also keep all background programs from running including AVG

SMMDigital wrote:It seems you need to downgrade to run the upgrade!

I think I've got an old Athlon 64 single core around here somewhere & a GeForce 6 card - think RW3 will SCREAM with those?



-barnez