Railworks America

I'm happy to say that I am now running RW3 at quite satisfactory FPS rates, meaning no more hes-s-s-sita-a-a-tions-s-s-, no more having to run with TSX turned off, no more juggling graphics settings for each route and, in some cases, each scenario within the same route.

Of course, this came at a price. Let's start with the free upgrade to RW3 from RailSim, for which I am grateful, especially when I compare this gift to the constant, pocket-mining gouging practiced by "that other" railroad simulator. So that's $00.00 so far.

However, the computer and graphics card that had handled RS, RW1, and RW2 quite comfortably just could not stand up to RW3--not even at very low settings. Examples? Gladly: Horseshoe Curve scenarios staggered, stuttered and crept even with TSX off; moreover, editing scenarios wasn't possible except at the lowest settings, at which, of course, I could not see simple things like switch stands, much less lights. Rich Garber's expanded Ohio Steel ran--no, crawled along even at very low settings and, naturally, no TSX in sight.

So, first I bought a new computer with a multi-core Intel processor and Windows 7 64-bit (my old machine ran 7 at 32-bit), but even after I moved in the graphics card from my old computer, the improvement was only slightly noticable and certainly not a satisfactory experience. After putting up with that for a few weeks, I paid for a new graphics card--the purchase that finally brought satisfaction. I chose a GeForce GTX550 Ti with 2 Gb of memory, which I bought from Amazon because I knew that they would take it back if I found it unsatisfactory.

Halleluia! I'm now running all routes and writing scenarios for Horseshoe Curve with TSX turned on and High settings everywhere. By the way, regardless of what has been written elsewhere, I find that checking the Multi-Core box makes everything better.

So, ultimately, I'm having a wonderful time with RW3 and I'm grateful for the work that went in to creating it; I'm looking forward to Donner Pass's enormous length and complexity instead of dreading it. On the other hand, a "free" upgrade has led--I might almost say required--me to spend nearly $800. To be honest, I was "due" for a new computer for a number of reasons, but I certainly did not need a new graphics card for anything except RW3. I'm very much enjoying RW3, finally, but some folks are going to be left out of my Christmas spending.

Tom Pallen

Good stuff.Sounds like Christmas came early for you. A decent system & hardware can make a big difference.
Now get busy driving some trains.

That's ex-actly what I'm doin', Don! Unfortunately, I'm due to visit relatives for the next couple of days (some distraction involving turkey, I think) and can't see taking my rig along...

Tom Pallen

I too had a great deal of trouble with the "free" upgrade - while appreciative, as they say "nothing in life is free" Couldn't get fps into double figures with TSX turned on and what ever is going on within the program, it affected the legacy version and that was the same, so I upgraded the GPU to a GTX560TI and to be honest, not a great deal fo difference. After considerable tweaking, the consensus was that an upgrade was required - have gone with an i7 2600 3.4ghz, 8G Ram Win 7 64 and the 560Ti GPU. Pick it up this afternoon (with any luck) - if that doesnt give a useable enjoyable experience, I am out of ideas. So, teh "free" upgrade has cost me in excess of $1500. (I only use the PC for Photoshop work and RW)

The things we do for our hobby...

I'm running a brand new HP my parent's bought, no problems here. And I didn't pay a cent!

Wait for the sales. Never buy at retail and you have your savings.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Buzz

I'm new to train simming, but not new to trains. When I think of how much I've spent on the couple of HO layouts I've built over the years...

Every single car or loco and piece of scenery was a separate price, and not cheap! Have you priced a nice Bachmann Spectrum loco? And when I was done, I had one area of scenery, and one RR line. Now, those layouts lasted a while, and others enjoyed them with me, but usually it was just me, and I spent a lot more time building than operating.

Now, I have lots of scenery areas and lots of different lines and lots of ways to operate, and I can actually operate them from inside the engines.

It's not apples to apples of course, and lots of sims don't work like this. But lots of sims do! The only other two sims (or computer games of any sort) I have are Rise of Flight and FSX. I've bought pretty much all the addon planes for RoF. I don't even want to add up how much I've spent for addon scenery (Orbx) or addon planes for FSX!

In other words, seems like a reasonable model. This is a niche sim. It's not going to sell millions and millions of copies, like a Batman sim, or most of these things on Steam. If we want something like this sim, this seems to be the way it has to be. There's a reason FSX and MSTS folded.

I'm sure others have pointed all this out before. Bottom line, you can buy the sim and play it without ever buying another thing if you want. And I have a half dozen amazing freeware routes and great freeware cars and other content. If you don't want to buy more, don't. If you do, pay what they ask or wait for the sales.