How can you boost performance for Train Simulator 2013?

[XDriver]

For anyone else that's been following this. Pulling the vid card out of the slot and re inserting sometimes does the trick. Plus that cup of coffee.

[beech1972]

I assumed with it working, it was in correctly, but i assume it wasn't or may have been the install.

I feel a bit stupid now, I should have started with the coffee rather than all the technical stuff!!!

Thanks again everybody for your help.

Looking froward to actually playing the game now.

Graham

[beech1972]

Oh well back to the coffee, its doing it again.

This time the sound now goes once it done it.

It's now making the MB fan go mad during it, has anyone got any more ideas, i'm out now.

[arizonachris]

My gaming PC was doing something similar with the video going out, sound in a repeating loop, and all the fans screaming like no control. It would do it randomly, a reset would usually fix it for another 20 minutes or so. I finally just set the PC on it's side, opened it up and reinserted every single power plug, switch wire and card. Also blew the dust out of all the fans with that canned air, and put some new heat sink compound on the CPU fan/ heat sink. Since then, the PC has been running 24/7.

If you know your way around in the board's BIOS settings, make sure "Cool and Quiet" is off, let the CPU fan run full speed. You can use "Core Temp" to watch the CPU temp. If the CPU gets to a certain temp, BIOS will "throttle" the CPU's speed to cool it off, and could be causing part of your problems. Not sure what else to suggest now. Try one step at a time to see what helps and what doesn't.

[beech1972]

Well i am lost now, i tried that, and still doing it.

I been looking into the issue with the GTX 550, and think there is a problem with it from a recent update to do with the "kernal" error, which seems quite common, so ai am wondering if it's this, people saying its causing their PC's to crash go black screen during the game.

So i may try buy a new card and send this back, has anybody got any suggestions for a similar or better Graphics card?

[arizonachris]

I will only buy EVGA cards, first off. I have a GTX550Ti, and a GTX560Ti, both work fine, but the 550Ti is in a friend's PC as a PhysX card, so it doesn't take the kind of load your card is taking on.
GTX560 is a step up from the 550Ti, but not by much. You can get an EVGA GTX650Ti from New Egg for $144, that's a nice step up. The GTX7xx series cards are $260 and up. Way up! (heck, my 2 year old GTX670 2Gb is still $400! Wow!)

All of these cards have two 6 pin power connectors, but your new power supply should be more than capable.

[beech1972]

OK thanks Chris,

I wonder if the card isn't enough then for what i am using it for, from what i read i thought it was, maybe that's the problem, i am getting smooth 40FPS etc on it, then suddenly it just goes to pause menu.

I will have a look at one of the better cards then, see if that is the issue, mine too says Physx card, have i somehow installed it wrong?

Thanks again.

[arizonachris]

all Nvidia cards can and do run PhysX, but you would have to have two video cards installed for your GTX550Ti to be just a PhysX card. So I don't think it's installed wrong. In fact, RW shuffles the PhysX load to the CPU, it doesn't run on the video card, even a second dedicated PhysX card. I think the 550Ti "should" be OK with RW, but without TSX, and other settings not on high.

Have you tried to reinstall RW? Or do you have a lot of third party "stuff" that you will lose?

[beech1972]

OK, maybe that's where i am going wrong then, i am using it with TSX on with Medium settings, although before i have tried it with TSX off and it still did it, although again not since i took everything out and started again.

Seems a shame on such a good game to miss out on the extra graphics with TSX on, do you run yours with TSX on?

I will go try it now with it off, what sort of card do you think i would need to run it with TSX On?

[beech1972]

Just tried TSX OFF, same problem

[buzz456]

FYI, I have the GTX650Ti and it runs the game smooth as silk.

[beech1972]

OK thanks, will look at the 650.

I would have thought the 550 would have enough, especially without TSX on.

I have attached my PC spec, i would have thought i have enough to run it

[buzz456]

I ran the 550 for several months with pretty good results and TSX on all the time. I had to back off some of the settings and once in a while got a little stuttering but it did a pretty good job.

[JWStilwell]

It is a little card you put in your computer which makes images on your screen, but that's not important right now.

"Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit smoking"

[XDriver]

What has me scratching my head is, going to the pause menu. If it's a vid card problem, it would just kick you to the desktop with a send don't send bla bla bla message. We have to think on this one. I'm leaning towards that it is unrelated to the vid card.