Best Graphics Card ?

[boleyd]

All the other stuff. The CPU chip under the big fan is a logical source. Plus the fans themselves.

 

[johnwhelan]

Thanks John
My son knows how to swop cards around etc so he can fit it for me.
To sum up then I should just get a Radeon HD6850 card and this will slot in/replace the current card and should give me a better performance. Is this right ?
Cheers
PJ

No!!

On your machine you must upgrade the power supply as well.

Your power supply needs to supply roughly 110 watts for the motherboard, the disk drives take more power, the 300 watts is split over different voltages and has probably been optimistically measured. The power supply for the cpu has probably been calculated at 5% utilization, Trainz will run it closer to 100% drawing more power.

If you just drop in the new graphics card then you'll overload the power supply which can mean a new motherboard etc is required.

Before doing anything else try the performance sliders, especially the distance one. TRS2006 was set to 1 km, I think the TS12 default is 5 km. Setting it back to 1 km may well give you the performance you are looking for without opening up the case.

In driver, main menu, options, video settings. There are a couple of other sliders there you can adjust to increase performance.

If you have an unlimited budget then the latest idea is 240 gig SSD with a video card from the top of the list on tomshardware and probably a High end Intel cpu. I'm making a guess that the budget isn't unlimited and I'm trying to guide you into a reasonable point on the price performance curve. Pick your son's brains and see if he agrees roughly with what I'm saying. He knows you better than I and will have a better idea of what is acceptable.

Remember with Trainz I can build a layout with tatty content that will bring any computer to its knees. Selecting the right content plays a part in this.

Cheerio John

 

[pcas1986]

No!!

...

If you have an unlimited budget then the latest idea is 240 gig SDD

..

Cheerio John

Did you mean SSD (solid state drive)? :wave:

I have an SSD (OCZ brand) for my boot disk and the boot time is exceptional compared to the previous drive. But its only 120GB and I've used up about half of that. SSDs are expensive compared to regular hard disks.
My Trainz installations are on my D: drive (WD 2TB Black Caviar) that is reasonably quick. Load time for routes is still quite slow and I'm not sure why. Currently, I'm mostly doing content development so loading times are an issue for me.

Paul

 

[clam1952]

My Trainz installations are on my D: drive (WD 2TB Black Caviar) that is reasonably quick. Load time for routes is still quite slow and I'm not sure why. Currently, I'm mostly doing content development so loading times are an issue for me.

Paul

Load times are pretty good here, also using WD Black Caviars, however 500GB ones for Trainz, load times seem to me to be slower on larger drives.

Might suggest a defrag could improve things a bit, I'm doing a lot of content creation and have noticed that the "Trainz" drive gets fragmented fairly quickly.

 

[boleyd]

I believe that a good strategy is to put Trainz on the SSD. As Sniper pointed out Trainz is constantly accessing the disk as the VIEWPOINT moves. The same thing happens in a flight simulator. Once a program is loaded the heavily used code is kept in memory so that disk accessing is almost always the result of the movement of the vewpoint that needs another chunk of graphics.

The same thing applies to Windows. the majority of often used code is in memory. Only occasionally does it hit the disk. Obviously if you have other things running they each may access the disk.

If I had the money I would put both Trainz and Windows on an SSD. Both would load faster and all disk accesses are much faster.

 

[johnwhelan]

I believe that a good strategy is to put Trainz on the SSD. As Sniper pointed out Trainz is constantly accessing the disk as the VIEWPOINT moves. The same thing happens in a flight simulator. Once a program is loaded the heavily used code is kept in memory so that disk accessing is almost always the result of the movement of the vewpoint that needs another chunk of graphics.

The same thing applies to Windows. the majority of often used code is in memory. Only occasionally does it hit the disk. Obviously if you have other things running they each may access the disk.

If I had the money I would put both Trainz and Windows on an SSD. Both would load faster and all disk accesses are much faster.

The most difficult bit with Trainz hardware is not building a computer that can run Trainz but modifying an existing machine or building something that is cost effective. Where do you get the best bang for the buck?

The person who asked the question here is in the UK. So since electricity cost around 18 cents per kwh efficiency is also important. Local sales tax or VAT is 20% so costs are higher.

The video card and power supply upgrade need to be done whether or not you go SSD, if you get reasonable performance at that point could you justify spending an additional $500 on a 256 gig SSD? and what improvement could you expect? When I ran some tests I got roughly a one frame per second improvement. Yes its faster and things display a bit quicker but is it worth $500, remember the computer we are upgrading sells for roughly $650.

Having 6-8 gigs of memory would reduce disk accesses, 4 gigs of memory would be the minimum I would think worthwhile.

Cheerio John