jeffmorris
Active member
I thought that Trainz prefers Nvidia GPUs to ATI GPUs. Which video card is best for TRS2004 and TRS2010?
ATI or Nvidia GPUs?
- Thread starter jeffmorris
- Start date
meatloaf747
Spotter...
If you are looking for a top end card for any version of Trainz's, these are the current top end ATI & Nvidia video cards.
ATI's Radeon HD 5950
It boasts 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a 512MB bus, allowing it to render even the most demanding games in full HD.
Supporting the popular application programming interfaces DirectX 11.0 and OpenGL 3.2, the card also features ATI Eyefinity, meaning it can be hooked up to as many as three display devices simultaneously for an enhanced gaming environment.
Nvidia Geforce GTX 295
The GTX 295 is made up of 2 GTX 260 GPUs running in SLI on a single card, except that these chips have 240 stream processors each rather than 216, and they're made with a smaller 55 nm process. Nvidia has used the 2 PCB approach instead of trying to put 2 GPUs on one board the way ATI does. While the GTX 295 offers impressive performance for a single card, they don't come cheap.
Note; I've just cut & pasted the two above statements from Top PC Video Graphics for Games site... - Also note; - Nvidia are launching there new range of cards on the 26th of this month (in US) that will be DirectX 11 and will probably replace there series 2xx cards.
Cheers, Mac...
ATI's Radeon HD 5950
It boasts 2GB of GDDR5 memory and a 512MB bus, allowing it to render even the most demanding games in full HD.
Supporting the popular application programming interfaces DirectX 11.0 and OpenGL 3.2, the card also features ATI Eyefinity, meaning it can be hooked up to as many as three display devices simultaneously for an enhanced gaming environment.
Nvidia Geforce GTX 295
The GTX 295 is made up of 2 GTX 260 GPUs running in SLI on a single card, except that these chips have 240 stream processors each rather than 216, and they're made with a smaller 55 nm process. Nvidia has used the 2 PCB approach instead of trying to put 2 GPUs on one board the way ATI does. While the GTX 295 offers impressive performance for a single card, they don't come cheap.
Note; I've just cut & pasted the two above statements from Top PC Video Graphics for Games site... - Also note; - Nvidia are launching there new range of cards on the 26th of this month (in US) that will be DirectX 11 and will probably replace there series 2xx cards.
Cheers, Mac...
Last edited:
The “top end card” from AMD/ATI is the 5970 not the 5950. Both the 5970 and the Nvidia GTX 295 are dual GPU video cards which do nothing for CPU dependent games like TRS2010.
The single GPU top end cards from Nvidia and ATI are the GTX 285 and the 5870. The 5970 is actaully two lower clocked 5870 GPU's (because of thermal issues) on one PCB.
meatloaf747
Spotter...
The 5950, which is supposed to be two 5850 GPU's on one PCB has not even been released to my knowledge and might not be released period.
The driver issues you mentioned are because of the lack of Cross Fire profiles in the driver. Without these profiles games that can utilize the GPU cannot even use both GPU's on 5970. If the 5950 was available it would have the same lack of Cross Fire profiles that the 5970 suffers from right now.
Not that I would recommend using the 196.75's if you don't know what you are doing but I've been using them with a GTX 285 since they were released with out any problem on Windows 7 64 and XP/SP2 64-bit.
The problem seems to be linked to the “Power Options” and letting the system go in and out of “sleep” mode. One of the first things I do on a fresh Windows install is set it up for performance which includes turning off any power conservation features under “Power Options”. In addition I also use a program from EVGA called “Precision” that allows manual fan control.
TRS2010 might use slightly more of the GPU's resources then what you've seen from past Trainz versions (I don't see where it does), but it is still a very dated game engine and is no way even remotely close to properly using the GPU's resources like some of the latest game engines do.
TRS2010 is really just another “rehash” of what we've seen from the past five years.
johnwhelan
Well-known member
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=53960
So wait until March 26th and have a look at the new nVidia card.
Cheerio John
johnwhelan
Well-known member
In real life TS2010 is not so dependent on the cpu as TRS2004 was. It can use more than one core and does make better use of the GPU. This allows higher frame rates and bigger textures and more polys.
Trainz has a wide variety of existing content and doesn't use professional graphics artists with poly count target numbers per screen which some sims or games do. Having said that it gets the job done very nicely.
Because its a real time system the main cpu core is run at 100% all the time. This may show up as 50% on a hyperthreading system.
To get a better idea of how different resources are used on the computer you can always use perfmon if you are interested in that level of detail. I note that various people have posted details of performance improvements on some layouts by the use of multiple gpus under SLI etc. These are real world frame rates improvements based on real layouts.
Cheerio John
As I said before the game engine that TS2010 uses hasn’t seen any dramatic changes and is essentially the same from 5-6 years ago.
Compared to up to date game engines (using DirectX 10 and 11) that we see with some main stream titles, TS2010 is archaic and uses very little of the GPU’s resources.
johnwhelan
Well-known member
Auran is mainstream and intended to run on a wide variety of computers. They developed their own game engine Jet years ago and today Trainz runs on an evolved Jet game engine. They accept programming assistance from nVidia. Many users prefer to run Trainz in OpenGL with nVidia's extensions as the game is basically optimised for this. Directx support only really came when Auran saw how many ATI cards are out there.
Very few game or sim companies have moved to Directx 10, nVidia don't even have a directx 11 solution today so I don't think you can expect Auran to be there this week.
What Trainz has is content, lots of it for free, and a wealth of experience in building a Train SIM. TS2010 does make better use of modern hardware than the older versions. Whether or not a better Train SIM could be rewritten from scratch is a mater for the market to decide. Microsoft decided there wasn't enough money in it and withdrew. Railworks suffers from lack of content. There are some free ones out there on different game engines but they lack many features and don't have the resources to add them in fast enough or have the wealth of content there is here.
Cheerio John
John I have been involved in the development of a professional railroad training simulator that used an off the shelf game engine so I know something about game engines. I’ve also had every version of Trainz since day one and have also been a beta tester so I’m very aware of the capabilities of Auran’s “Jet” engine.
Here is just one example of an efficient game engine that doesn’t take a lot of hardware thrown at it to perform well –
http://outerra.com/
http://www.outerra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=23
Nvidia’s DirectX 11 capable GTX 480 is scheduled to be released later this month but I wouldn’t expect Trainz get a game engine re-write to take advantage of DirectX 11 any time soon, if at all.
TS2010 might make “better use of modern hardware than the older versions”, but with seeing past versions that's not saying much.
Yes and that’s the reason why we haven’t seen any consumer train game/sim yet that uses an up to date game engine, it’s a very small market that can’t justify the cost of an up to date game engine.
Whoopee, I've got an HD 5870! Do I win this game?
oh, perhaps not then! It's like graphics card bingo when you're playing Trainz. :hehe:
Paul
I don't know we'll have to wait for the new GTX 480 to find that out.