Railworks America

Thought I'd post a followup to some frame rate charts I posted in another thread last month, from figures recorded while playing TS2012 on my Core i5-2500K with 8GB RAM, Radeon 6850 and WD Green HD. The test setup for all tests below was as described in my original post, except beginning with test 2, I enabled 8x AF in the launch window to make the playing of entire scenarios a little nicer, and tests 3 and 4 were performed after Catalyst was updated to 11.10 and motherboard BIOS & drivers were updated.

Test 1: Northeast Corridor 'The Keystone'


Test 2: Northeast Corridor 'Early Clocker'


Test 3: Horseshoe Curve 'The Champion'


Test 4: Horseshoe Curve 'The Champion' - 30FPS Lock enabled


Battlefield Bad Company 2, online multiplayer session (various maps)
This was to show my system's performance in a well-known, resource-intensive game that's popular for benchmarking.


Bus & Cable Car Simulator: San Francisco demo
This was to show my system's performance in another recently-released, large open-world vehicle simulator.


On my todo list is to retest The Keystone to see how much reproducibility there is in the results, retest The Champion with FRAPS 3.4.7 to see if changes in that program since 3.4.6 affect the results, retest after getting an SSD to see if some of the game's performance issues are related to hard disk reads.

In the meantime it'd be great if other people would load FRAPS before playing and post the results CSV so I can make identically-formatted charts for comparing various systems.

Awesome work, it is great to have hard data when talking about any aspect of the sim.

I still see where RW lags reading from the hard drive. Your charts point this out in detail. HSC seems like the HD reads are less frequent than NEC, but they are totally obvious. Not sure what RSC can do, or we are just beating a sick (not quite dead yet) horse.

How to record your frame rate

1. Download and install FRAPS.

2. Start FRAPS, click the 99 FPS tab. Under Benchmark Settings, make sure FPS and Frametimes are checked.

3. Start TS2012. There should be a frame rate counter visible in a corner of the screen.

4. After loading a scenario, hit the F11 key. FPS benchmarking will begin and the frame rate counter will be hidden.

5. After you're done playing, hit the F11 key again to end FPS benchmarking, just before you exit the scenario.

6. The frame rate and frametimes logs are each written as a CSV file, and by default these are placed in C:\Fraps\Benchmarks. Upload these CSV files to this thread as an attachment or host it elsewhere and post the download link.

Once I have your CSVs, I will create a chart in the same format as those above so direct comparisons can be made. Please be sure to make a note of your launch window and in-game graphics settings. Logs for gaming sessions that are 15-60 minutes long would be ideal. If you'd like to record your frame rate in a game other than TS2012 to give an more general idea of your system's performance, that'd be great as well.

I posted a few numbers on this issue a while back over at my site. The SSD is not a fix all issue. It makes asset loading at the tile boundry a bit smoother but doesn't improve frame rates, at least not in my case. The drive a a Corsair Force 3 120GB SATA III (6Gbs transfer speed). Everything else, from Windows starts to shutdowns and everything in between are amazingly fast with an SSD. Now when I got to work on a family computer witha regular platter drive, I find myself tapping my feet with impatience waiting for things to load.

Hi !

I'm just new on this forum !

@SMMDigital : as asked here are my report of FPS

PC computer : i7 965 @ 3,2 Ghz stock (turbo mode @ 3,4 Ghz)... in the picture the CPU is in idle mode !



My GC is GTX 580 @ 1,5 Go memory.
RAM 12 Go (6x2 Go) triple channel Corsair Dominator PC 12800 @ 1600 Mhz
HDD : 1 WD 300 Go Velociraptor 10000 RPM (first generation 16 Mo cache) with OS W7 Pro 64 Bit and some program on + 1 WD 300 Go Velociraptor 10000 RPM (16 Mo cache) with only my games on + 1 WD 150 Go Velociraptor 10000 RPM (16 Mo cache) with the swap file and some videos Fraps on.
Display Samsung Synxmaster 223 BW: 1680 X 1050 native res.

Here are my setup for RW3 before testing bench Fraps FPS :

Nvidia control Panel :





RW3 Setup :





Report FPS : I drive only in cab view all the way ...No external view used !







Two additional report for scenario who kill the fps :



The two picks of 50 FPS are done when I look on the 2D map to switching the path !



I don't know how to join the csv files...! If you tell me how to, I will upload them !

Best regards
Gerard

Gerard, thanks for your excellent contribution!

I'm not sure what you mean by joining the CSV files - do you mean how to put them together in a ZIP file? Your graphs seem to be showing a similar pattern to mine, and I would love to get my hands on CSVs to do a more direct comparison.

@ snowstorm : Hi ! Yes I want to join my ZIP csv files but I don't know how to join it !

Best regards
Gerard

PS : Oh sorry I believe I have find how to ! Here are the csv files :

Here are your results in my chart format. Obviously your use of the higher detail setting and SSAA are pushing down the maximum frame rates despite your faster GPU, so I don't read much into mine peaking higher.

The interesting part of the graphs is what's happening below the 20 FPS line. At first, flicking between the NEC The Keystone charts, it looked as though you were getting less severe slowdowns than me. But the NEC Early Clocker and HC The Champion benchmarks told a different story - in those, the slowdowns look similarly severe overall, despite you running the program off the fastest mechanical drive available, though perhaps some of this could be explained by your higher detail settings.

There's a resemblance in the shape of the graphs, indicating similar effects on frame rate at given sections of each route. Including the notorious pause in Early Clocker around the 13-minute mark

Thank you snowstorm for your reworking chart !

This is incredible to run in average of 10 FPS on the Horseshoe "Danger at rose tower" scenario !

for me I'm waiting on an improvement of TSX engine in a general maner !

The AA SSAA x 2 is killing the FPS but if I lower the AA to Multi sampling 8 X (MLAA+MSAA 8 X) the quality of images is bad (horrible ) !

Hope that RSC can improve the TSX engine in the futur !

Best regards
Gerard

EDIT: Dur. I see the SSD idea was already covered.

Thanks snowstorm for the link to download fraps. Nothing like hard data for
comparison!

Whats the best setting for FRAPS to make videos with in RW3?

@ BNSF650 : Hi !

Best settings for me : Full screen at 30 FPS. I recorde also the windows sound .

When recording the FPS slow down to 15/20 (sometime less) but the vidéo is correct.
After that you can rework the vidéo with i.e. Windows live Movie Maker and send it in the appropriate format to i.e. Youtube (I use allways the recommended format for Youtube and publish it !) !

Best regards
Gerard

Just wanted to make a request this weekend for a few more people load FRAPS and post their frame rate CSV file. It's pretty easy to help out, but so far we only have data from two systems (mine and Gerard's).

FRAPS is a lightweight utility which won't mess up your computer, and there's no need to run the scenario solely in-cab like me and Gerard unless you'd like to help with more controlled comparisons. Results from your normal style of play would fine and give a helpful perspective on performance on different systems