Absolutely Staggering

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Lacker

Border Reiver
I having a reasonably high power PC,built by yours truly,which has performed well over the past year or so. No problems running TRS06 even with very long,and in places,highly detailed routes.
However in the past month or so I have come across a couple of routes,that cause a severe case of the 'staggers'.Namely Harcourt's superb Irish route and TC3.I am sure a PC with the specs listed below should be able to run these routes tolerably well. So I have come to the conclusion I need to think of the settings,unless you experts think any of the components are not up to the job.

The Specs are:-
Abit AB9 Mo-bo.
Intel core 2 duo 6600 2.64 Ghz.
650w PSU.
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS SLi Graphics.
3Gb DDR2 5300 633 memory.
2 X Barracuda 500Gb Sata HDDs.
Creative Fatal1ty Champion sound card.
resourcememory in Trainzoptions is set to 2048.

Final bit of info,to help in your deliberations.06 & TC3 are on separate partitions which both have over a 100Gbs free.I have de-fragged them.

Any thoughts and guidance would be much appreciated.:confused:

Regards Bruce
 
Computer performance

You might want to add 1GB main memory.

What is memory on your graphics card? Don't forget that graphics cards memory also reserves main memory.

Try reduce Trainz cache to 1024MB
 
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the response.
Funnily enough I was contemplating purchasing a 4Gb matched pack of DDR2 800,which I can get quite cheaply.However being a bit parsimonious,I thought someone might come up with a free fix,if I asked.
The card has 320Mb of memory,and I did try the 1024mb setting in trainzoptions,without any discernible difference.

Regards Bruce
 
I didn't think the trainz setting would make much difference but I saw the report on 2GB vs 4GB main memory performance improvement when I was looking at upgrading my memory (not yet done). Games with 5fps went up to 32fps and of course you are not swapping out with the pagefile which is probably the main cause of stuttering.
 
Upgrading main memory would be of no use. Assuming XP, Trainz cannot address more than 2GB of memory.

Might want to check your power levels from the PSU. Computers that receive less power than they want tend to throttle themselves, causing lag and stuttering.

Cheerio,
John
 
Just a thought.......

I think Trainz only uses 1 core (CPU) so according to Trainz you only have a 2.64 Ghz computer. I hazard a guess this is your bottleneck. However I might be wrong. I have been known to be occasionally :D ;)

Regards
 
Vista 64-bit only.
Both XP 32-bit and Vista 32-bit will only support 3.5GB (You can have 4GB installed, but it will not show the last 512MB).

back on the subject:
Trainz is not multi-threaded for CPU's or GPU's. So Trainz is not taking advantage of the dual-core, nor is it taking advantage of the SLI.
On the other hand there have been reports that Trainz does use the SLI memory combination, but it still does not support the multiple GPU. As for the CPU, you can switch tasks around so Trainz has most of a core to itself, but raw clock speeds are still a problem.

I also agree with Zapper, you may want to look at your PSU. While it may not be a problem 650W is a bit small for your particular setup. The older 8800 GTS did suck up a but more power, and SLI won't help the usage. I would personally consider an upgrade just for safety reasons, if for no other reason.
 
Thanks for all the input guys, trouble is I am now thoroughly confused. The only things not mentioned as possible causes are the HDDs,Mo-bo,and Sound Card.:confused:

I did lie however, not intentionally you understand. Looked at the box the PSU came in, it is an 800W unit. Don't know what made me think it was 650W.Sorry!! :o

I think I might go ahead with the memory purchase,it is second hand and therefore cheap.Can't see it will do any harm,belongs to a friend of mine and I know it works.

I am amazed Trainz needs more power than the FSX flight simulator,which I can run no problem.Also why has it only started happening over the last month or so? I can build computers but I certainly don't understand them.

PS. I should add,the frame rates on both these routes are not too bad,high 20s to low 30s,it's only now and again I get the staggers (half a pint of shandy is not good for me),but they are violent,and can happen out in the sticks as well as the built up areas.

Best regards to all Bruce
 
Last edited:
ZapperJet said:
Upgrading main memory would be of no use. Assuming XP, Trainz cannot address more than 2GB of memory.

Might want to check your power levels from the PSU. Computers that receive less power than they want tend to throttle themselves, causing lag and stuttering.

Cheerio,
John
Click to expand...
John, that is incorrect. XP can access about 3.5 but that is all. My XP has 4 gigs but only sees 3.25 of it.

Yes, Vista I believe can access 8 gigs. Although I have been wrong before, I know it can access a lot more then XP can.

And, don't forget to increase your paging file. Virtual memory is just as important to have plenty of.

Rick
 
I was under the impression that a single program could access no more than 2GB of RAM under a 32-bit operating system.

Cheerio,
John
 
Originally Posted by ZapperJet
Upgrading main memory would be of no use. Assuming XP, Trainz cannot address more than 2GB of memory.

steamdrivre said:
John, that is incorrect. XP can access about 3.5 but that is all. My XP has 4 gigs but only sees 3.25 of it.

Yes, Vista I believe can access 8 gigs. Although I have been wrong before, I know it can access a lot more then XP can.

And, don't forget to increase your paging file. Virtual memory is just as important to have plenty of.

Rick
Click to expand...

All the 32 bit Windows operating systems limit the amount of memory available to a particular program to 2 gigs.

PCs use some hardware addresses to allow the cpu to address things like hard drives and video, this limits the amount of memory that can be directly addressed to about 3.5 gigs but it does wary according to the motherboard etc.

32 bit Vista has higher memory requirements than XP so less memory is available to run programs. 32 bit Vista cannot access more than 3.5 gigs of memory as previously stated. 64 bit Vista is not limited to 8 gigs.

The objective when running Trainz is not to page so the size of the virtual memory is irrelevant. If you do not have sufficient memory then setting the virtual memory to a fixed amount reduces some overhead when running.

If you have been wrong before I suggest verifying your statements before making them to avoid supplying incorrect information.

Cheerio John
 
Windows memory limits are listed at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

For 32-bit, the consumer OSes support 4GB or less (depending on version), and the various server OSes support between 2GB and 128GB.

For 64-bit, XP supports 128GB, and Vista supports from 8GB to 128GB, depending on the version. Server OSes support between 16GB and 2TB, depending on the version.

I'm pretty sure you'll loose most of the memory between 3 and 4 GB no matter what OS you use.

This is also limted by motherboard support - the OS may support more memory than the board does.

Back to the original question; what video resolution are you running at, and what draw distance? I could see occassional stuttering as you near built-up areas as TRS tries to load all the new objects at once - this would be part of the route design instead of your system configuration.
 
I've been having a play around with various items,PC related,this PM. Have to report a modicum of success.

First I gently tweaked the CPU to give me 3Ghz.I then removed background programs one at a time and found that uGuru,was taking a fair bit of 'oomph' out of the system.So I disabled it.Ironic really as it's Abit's tweaking tool designed to make your PC run better.These two items alone improved things dramatically. The final move was to swap over to directX. Made things even better still. Hesitation is now within tolerable limits,but not perfect.

I have taken the plunge and am purchasing the 4x1GB DDR2 6400 800 memory modules,as I am not sure if my current set up of 2x1Gb plus 2x512mb are really matched. They are all DDR2 PC5300 bu that is about as far as it goes.

Once again,thanks to all for your suggestions,if nothing else they have given me a couple of hours entertainment,trying them out.

Regards Bruce
 
johnwhelan said:
If you have been wrong before I suggest verifying your statements before making them to avoid supplying incorrect information.

Cheerio John
Click to expand...
I was being very general but it does seem that I was correct after all. It has been awhile sense I've needed to research this information, though and I was simply trying to recall the information instead of researching it again.

Thanks,
Rick
 
Last edited:
steamdrivre said:
Yes, Vista I believe can access 8 gigs. Although I have been wrong before, I know it can access a lot more then XP can.

I was being very general but it does seem that I was correct after all. It has been awhile sense I've needed to research this information, though and I was simply trying to recall the information instead of researching it again.

Thanks,
Rick
Click to expand...

32 bit Vista can access 8 gigs of memory? Amazing, your sources of information are quite different to mine. I usually use information from Microsoft.

Cheerio John
 
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