Best Frame Rate

[surfcandy]

What would be the "best" frame rate to properly run Trainz 2019? Not where it "runs" and "looks good" but that the trains and other moving objects are properly demonstrated in real time not lag time so as to produce a complete realistic immersive simulation experience.

With flight sims sometime people including myself thought we were experiencing fps in a realistic real time movement experience but were not until the proper adjustments and hardware changes were made.

 

[surfcandy]

I guess no one likes talking about frame rates.

 

[clam1952]

30 FPS is usually sufficient, TRS19 will run smoothly on less though. To be honest I don't bother monitoring Frame Rates unless there is an obvious problem, one less thing running that could affect performance.

Last time I checked I was getting around 60, that's with a GTX1080TI Other than setting the GPU for maximum performance I haven't bothered with changing anything else.

 

[CitMusJoe]

There is no "best" frame rate nailed down onto any board. IMHO there are too many different facts that will influence the frame rate. Let me list some of them here:

o Used Hardware like prcessor family and generation, RAM size and chip speed, bus-speed, graphics-card with one ore more cores/processors, graphic RAM size, GRAM dedicated or not and many many others.

o Besides the HW also your SW setup like operating system configuration may fairly influence the experience, in our case with TRS19. E.g. How many tasks are running beside Trainz, how is the OS configured in general, how is your graphics card, processor etc. configured. Is a virus scanner active scanning and many others here too.

o Trainz SW-configuration itself. If you set all the sliders to max it will perhaps result in stuttering, lags etc. Even when using the latest HW.
If you set all the sliders to min it will result in unsatisfying graphics representation.

As a conclusion: No one can give you the numbers e.g. 30FPS as you may have expected. It's too different all in all. But you can find it out by yourself for _your_ environment by testing.

I performed following steps:

1) Upgraded HW (you can skip this item of course)
2) Configured HW if necessary at all (without overclocking CPU or GPU).
3) Monitoring tools for CPU and GPU, parallel running with TRS19 (until you have finished your setup).
4) Reboot PC before starting TRS19
5) Disable any other not absolutely necessary applications/processes automatically started with your OS, in my case Windows 10.

These are only the most common devils that may negatively influence your framerate or let's better say Trainz experience.
Before I changed anything in Trainz's settings I took some reference screenshots directly after the installation and first run to be able to 'reset' to 'factory default' setting.
BTW, these settings are in most cases already quite good settings and obviously different, depending on your used HW. My default settings may be not the same as yours.

So for me it worked best to change only _one_ single item/slider per attempt and looked if it has improved the experience. I know, you have to investigate some hours but get be satisfied with the performance at the end.

Sometimes it's also the setup of your harddisk or SSD. The database of TRS19 contains/reads a bunch of very small files from your media. So it should be formatted with a smaller blocksize than normally usual. You may consider to install onto a independent HD/SSD/partition with a smaller block size.

You see it's not only the 'best frame rate' that is influencing your experience with Trainz.

_______
Josef

 

[mdvee]

Hi, is there a framerate "tool" built in to TRS2019 as there is in some other programs, or just use the video card tools? Not having issues other than track draw distance (addressed that in another thread), but now I'm curious LOL

Thanks!

Mike

Dell XPS 8700, Win 7 Pro, Core i7 / 4770 3.4 GHz- 16 gig ram, EVGA 1070Ti, two - 2 TB hard drives

 

[johnwhelan]

You have to take into account there is a lot of user created content. So run Middleton for laptops and that will give you 20 plus frames per second on an i5 Intel with series 4000 Integrated graphics on a 1600 by 900 screen. There is no jerkiness, it runs smoothly. Run it on practically anything with a separate GPU and you'll see30 fps.

Add in speedtrees, and other scenery items and you need more hardware. Select a different steam loco or worse a variety of steam locos and the frame rates will drop. Canal routes that use invisible track will give good frame rates. The track used can impact frame rates in a major way.

I think anything over 21 frames per second is acceptable but that is a personal view. Cinema film is 24 frames per second and that has been accepted as reasonable for years.

Does that come near answering your question?

Thanks John

 

[SailorDan]

What would be the "best" frame rate to properly run Trainz 2019? Not where it "runs" and "looks good" but that the trains and other moving objects are properly demonstrated in real time not lag time so as to produce a complete realistic immersive simulation experience.

Frame rate and lagging are different things. Frame rate is how frequently the display is refreshed. Lagging is related to delays in updating the scene. A frame rate of 30fps is generally regarded as the point at which the eye no longer perceives flickering: it is similar to what you see with movies and TV. For scene updating there is no 'best': it should be as fast as possible, and that pretty much depends on what hardware you can afford. But whether or not there is lagging for your particular hardware configuration depends on what that scene contains - if it is extremely complex then updating will lag, no matter how good the hardware.

 

[KingConrail76]

I see many misconceptions of "frame rate" here, and, as was mentioned, it can be complex, but it is also very simple...

The issue we have in Trainz is not one of 30 FPS vs. 60 FPS vs. 120 FPS, but instead is one of CONSISTENT frame rates, which is what I think the OP is trying to ask/get at...
As was also stated above, Film, eg Movies/Television/Cinema, is generally only 24-30 FPS, but looks very nice to the eye, because it is a very consistent Frame Rate.

With Trainz, or any other computer/video game, the Frame Rate VARIES greatly, dependent on the load of the assets that need to be rendered in each frame. Jumping from 20 to 37 to 60 to 18 to 54 to 30 to 45 FPS is "noticable" to the eye, and is what makes gaming tech companies very wealthy, selling the latest greatest bestestest GPUs...

The best "look" is going to take editing of your Routes to "even-out" the scenes...Drive through the desert at 120 FPS, but as soon as you enter a yard or a town, drop to 20 FPS can not ever be fixed with consumer-level computer hardware, as the hardware is not the CAUSE of the issue.

 

[JCitron]

Hi, is there a framerate "tool" built in to TRS2019 as there is in some other programs, or just use the video card tools? Not having issues other than track draw distance (addressed that in another thread), but now I'm curious LOL

Thanks!

Mike

Dell XPS 8700, Win 7 Pro, Core i7 / 4770 3.4 GHz- 16 gig ram, EVGA 1070Ti, two - 2 TB hard drives

Hi Mike,

There is a tool called the Profiler.

You find this under the Developer menu item on the Launcher.

Pick Clear Profiler first then click on profiler.

This will open up a window that will show a bunch of thread operations, numbers, etc. The most important thing that concerns us in all that here is the FPS, which is found at the very top of the screen.

If you run TRS19 windowed, or even full screen but in windowed mode, you can run the profiler at the same time by clicking on it while running and having on the screen at the same time. This allows you to watch where the worst bumps are in the scene.

It is best to run this and not other GPU tools, which can impact the performance. That has been documented on various tech sites with some of the hardware monitoring tools from ASUS, GIGABYTE, and others being culprits in framerate drops when monitoring speed, and temperatures for the GPUs. If you think about it, it makes sense because it's one more thing running in the background on an already busy system.

 

[JCitron]

There are so many things which can impact framerates and lag. On my relatively busy Gloucester Terminal Electric route, for example, I get decent frame rates out in the country, but get a bit of lag in the busier sections. The framerates, however, are still mostly in the 20s-60 fps (I run without the vsync cap). After gleaning out a bunch of assets, replacing some really, old ones with poor LOD, and thinning out my Speed Trees, I've improved the performance in these areas tremendously.

One of the things I noticed, mostly in driver, was facing in some directions things were worse than others. I did some sleuthing around and using a bit of triangulation, because the error occurred while looking at that direction from other directions as well, I narrowed down the culprit to a building. The bulding was a Sketch-up import, although it fit the scene perfectly, it was a poly-sink and sucked up the bandwidth. I replaced the building with something else, and the problem went away for that section. I did this repeatedly throughout the route, and now I have decent performance.

Overall in Trainz, there's a statement which has been said before, "There can be too much of a good thing". What this means is we can have the most detailed scenery ever created that will look absolutely gorgeous in Surveyor, but when we get into Driver, we end up with a slide show. Sure Surveyor loads up everything fine, but the Driver requires constant feeding of the data plus there are additional tasks going on at the same time. Each and every signal, crossing, locomotive, interactive station/industry, and anything else that's scripted is being monitored in the background. Having a lot of scenery items, on top of everything else going on at the same time, will kill a route cold.

There are ways around this kerflufle by limiting details to those areas which warrant attention such as nearest the station or other places where they will be seen from the driver. For those areas outside the station, for example, there's no need to place the high-polygon static vehicles, people, and other small details.

Speaking of vehicles, it pays to check these assets when downloaded carefully. In Content Manager you can do this by using the asset preview. Rick-click then click on Open... then asset preview. What this does is bring up an active window which shows the actual asset as it would appear if placed in-game. You can see the LOD and other details including the number of polygons. Some people, unknowingly, uploaded some automobiles that have 125K polygons or more with zero LOD!

With lots of assets like this, although they look nice, they compete for resources that can be better used by the consists themselves.