Best Performance

[conrail6373]

Hi. I'm having a slight problem with 2006. The thing is with two CN s3's and 20 cars, the train moves at a very choppy pace. I have a fairly good system. I have a 512 MB video card and 1.5 GB of RAM memory. Can someone tell me what to change in the settings or somewhere in the game the game that will make it work better?

 

[meatloaf747]

Change some of your display options...

Gidday,
Click on your TRS2006 desktop icon. When the blue Trainz 2006 menu comes up, click on Options. That will take you through to Configure Trainz options.
Make sure OpenGL is ticked & not DirectX.
Click on Display Options if you want to lower the games screen resolution. 800 X 600 is the lowest. The lower the resolution, the better the game will run, but the trade off is the game won't look as good in the lower resolution.
Try it and see how it looks, and whether it solves your problem. (You can always increase it back up to a higher resolution).
If that doesn't work by itself, click on Tuning Settings if you want to lower the details in; Ground, Scenery, Detail & Effects. By shifting the sliders further to the left you will improve the games performance/frame rate, at the expense of the game not looking as good & as detailed. (Leave Good Fog slider over on the far right hand side). Then click on SAVE, & exit back to the start menu.
(By doing these, you will clearly improve performance/frame rate).
Experiment. Try just moving some sliders to the left a bit and see how that goes. If you are still getting the jerking in the game, move the sliders some more to the left.....
Also make sure "Shadows" is unticked.
Defrag c:\ drive and also the hard drive that has the Trainz directory on and turn off anything that's running in the background that doesn't need to be running while your running Trainz's. eg; Anti-virus, spyware programs & firewall, etc, etc. The less things running in the background, the more memory that's available to Trainz's.
To checkout what's loading up when you startup your computer, in XP, click on Run, type in; msconfig then click on OK, then go to Startup on the top menu. Click on Startup and that will show you what's loading up when your computer starts up..... "Untick" anything that's unnecessary.
This will turn off anything that doesn't need to be running in the background after you re-boot your system.
To be on the safe side do a 'System Restore Backup' first. That way if anything goes wrong, you can always restore your settings back to where they where before you started.
Hope this helps.
Cheers, Mac.

 

[johnwhelan]

Hi. I'm having a slight problem with 2006. The thing is with two CN s3's and 20 cars, the train moves at a very choppy pace. I have a fairly good system. I have a 512 MB video card and 1.5 GB of RAM memory. Can someone tell me what to change in the settings or somewhere in the game the game that will make it work better?

Depends a bit on your video card some work better in directx some in opengl. What is your card? operating system? cpu?

The version of Trainz also makes a difference some tuning settings are automated in TC.

Look for threads about trainzoptions.txt, if possible take the main memory upto 2.5 gigs or more, 2.5 gigs is the most that Trainz / XP can make use of and if you're up there then it seems disabling background programs will probably slow the system down not speed it up. Vista needs more memory than 1.5 gigs by the way.

Do you have tho latest drivers for motherboard, and video card? This can make a big difference.

Shadows some machines run faster with them off others it makes not much difference.

Cheerio John

 

[meatloaf747]

Depends a bit on your video card some work better in directx some in opengl. What is your card? operating system? cpu?
Look for threads about trainzoptions.txt, if possible take the main memory upto 2.5 gigs or more, 2.5 gigs is the most that Trainz / XP can make use of and if you're up there then it seems disabling background programs will probably slow the system down not speed it up. Vista needs more memory than 1.5 gigs by the way.
Do you have tho latest drivers for motherboard, and video card? This can make a big difference.
Shadows some machines run faster with them off others it makes not much difference.
Cheerio John

John, gidday mate....
I agree, updating to the latest drivers for his M/B, video card, sound card/chipset, etc, could/should help. If he is going to do that he might as well see if there is a BOIS update for his motherboard. (Also he could go onto the Microsoft updates site and download & install XP SP3).
If he let's Microsoft updates check his system for possible updates, he might find there's several hardware/firmware drivers/software updates that he can also download & install off the Microsoft site.

John, in the 17 years that I have been repairing PC's, I haven't come across one unnecessary program that's loading up at startup/running in the background that has slowed the PC down if it doesn't load at startup/running in the background. NOT ONE..
The key word here is; "UNNECESSARILY" loading up at startup. some eg's; MSN, Adobe, Office10\aso.exe, nero, logitech\quickcam10, etc, etc. (70 - 85% of it doesn't need to be loading up at "startup"). (THEY ALL TAKE UP MEMORY).....
Some you have too/should leave loading at startup; eg; NvCpl, ctfmon, your A/V, FIREWALL, anti-spyware, etc.
Anyone with alittle bit of advance knowledge can also go into 'SERVICES' and untick several things in there to stop them starting up/running in the background.

Well, theoretically XP can use/utilize up to 4 gigs of RAM in XP 32 bit, although only 3.2 gigs (approx) will show up in System Properties. XP 64 bit theoretically can use/utilize up to 8 gigs. (depending on the version of Vista, Vista will recognise 8 gigs/all the RAM you have installed).
Any increase in RAM will help.... (so if he can afford to increase his total RAM up to 3 to 4 gigs, then that's what I would recommend.
That way he can decrease the size of his paging file, so his system will utilize more of his actual RAM, rather than having to go to the paging file on his HDD. .
Sousing from actual RAM is quicker than sousing from a paging file on the HDD..... (Put in simplistic terms).

I also agree with you, that if you have a high spec machine and your running a small to medium size route, that's not to detailed, having "shadows on" doesn't seem to make much of a difference. (in performance).
I have a high end PC and if I'm running a very large detailed route with lots of trains, having "shadows on" makes a surprising difference..... (degrades performance).

I personally don't know of anyone running TRAINZ with a 512 meg video card that's running Trainz in DirectX (in XP). I'm sure there's probably some out there. Who knows, maybe a lot !!!!!
Over the last 6-9 months I've experimented with several different video cards (running TRAINZ in XP) and I've personally found OpenGL seems to work best with all of them..... Particularly the latest video cards that have 512 mgs to 1 gig of DDR3 RAM on the card. (In alot of cases, the main features of those cards are that they support DIRECT 10, Shader Model 4.0 & OpenGL 2.1). Future proofing yourself a bit better !!! (I've settled on Gigabytes Geforce 9800 GX2).
I'm sure there's a lot in the community that are still running older 128 - 256 meg cards, & that in some cases, maybe in a lot of cases, working as good or better in DirectX.
Cheers mate, Mac.

 

[johnwhelan]

John, gidday mate....
I agree, updating to the latest drivers for his M/B, video card, sound card/chipset, etc, could/should help. If he is going to do that he might as well see if there is a BOIS update for his motherboard. (Also he could go onto the Microsoft updates site and download & install XP SP3).
If he let's Microsoft updates check his system for possible updates, he might find there's several hardware/firmware drivers/software updates that he can also download & install off the Microsoft site.

John, in the 17 years that I have been repairing PC's, I haven't come across one unnecessary program that's loading up at startup/running in the background that has slowed the PC down if it doesn't load at startup/running in the background. NOT ONE..
The key word here is; "UNNECESSARILY" loading up at startup. some eg's; MSN, Adobe, Office10\aso.exe, nero, logitech\quickcam10, etc, etc. (70 - 85% of it doesn't need to be loading up at "startup"). (THEY ALL TAKE UP MEMORY).....
Some you have too/should leave loading at startup; eg; NvCpl, ctfmon, your A/V, FIREWALL, anti-spyware, etc.
Anyone with alittle bit of advance knowledge can also go into 'SERVICES' and untick several things in there to stop them starting up/running in the background.

Well, theoretically XP can use/utilize up to 4 gigs of RAM in XP 32 bit, although only 3.2 gigs (approx) will show up in System Properties. XP 64 bit theoretically can use/utilize up to 8 gigs. (depending on the version of Vista, Vista will recognise 8 gigs/all the RAM you have installed).
Any increase in RAM will help.... (so if he can afford to increase his total RAM up to 3 to 4 gigs, then that's what I would recommend.
That way he can decrease the size of his paging file, so his system will utilize more of his actual RAM, rather than having to go to the paging file on his HDD. .
Sousing from actual RAM is quicker than sousing from a paging file on the HDD..... (Put in simplistic terms).

I also agree with you, that if you have a high spec machine and your running a small to medium size route, that's not to detailed, having "shadows on" doesn't seem to make much of a difference. (in performance).
I have a high end PC and if I'm running a very large detailed route with lots of trains, having "shadows on" makes a surprising difference..... (degrades performance).

I personally don't know of anyone running TRAINZ with a 512 meg video card that's running Trainz in DirectX (in XP). I'm sure there's probably some out there. Who knows, maybe a lot !!!!!
Over the last 6-9 months I've experimented with several different video cards (running TRAINZ in XP) and I've personally found OpenGL seems to work best with all of them..... Particularly the latest video cards that have 512 mgs to 1 gig of DDR3 RAM on the card. (In alot of cases, the main features of those cards are that they support DIRECT 10, Shader Model 4.0 & OpenGL 2.1). Future proofing yourself a bit better !!! (I've settled on Gigabytes Geforce 9800 GX2).
I'm sure there's a lot in the community that are still running older 128 - 256 meg cards, & that in some cases, maybe in a lot of cases, working as good or better in DirectX.
Cheers mate, Mac.

I run an At 3850 512 Mb of memory in Directx, works fine.

We actually have a benchmark for Trainz that produces consistent results. It's floating around somewhere. That's the one that I ran with normal background programs running then again with a number of background tasks disabled. It runs more slowly with background tasks disabled. This is not what I was expecting, it is repeatable and this result has been confirmed by some one else using 3 gigs of memory. If you have a gig of memory then I agree you get an increase in performance by not running the background programs. I suspect the increase in available memory is responsible but once you get to 2 gigs available for Trainz and 512mb for XP you don't get this gain.

32 bit XP has to communicate with the video card, hard drive(s), keyboards etc. It does this through memory addresses in the 3.2-4 gig range this means that these memory addresses are not available to the cpu hence 32 bit XP cannot address 4 gigs of memory. A 32 bit cpu can address 4 gigs of memory but a large chunk of that is given over to hardware memory addresses.

The shadows comment goes back a long long time when some one took their machine into Auran so that Auran could demonstrate how to improve the frames per second by modifying the settings in Trainz options.txt etc.

One of the changes they made was to turn on shadows and on that particular machine apparently it ran faster with shadows on. Unfortunately the details were lost when the old forum went down.

My understanding of Vista 64 bit based on a technical briefing from Microsoft is it will support far more than 8 gigs of memory. The 8 gig limit is more to do with available motherboards at the moment.

My background, if it helps, is I'm recently retired after working with computers for forty years in a number of technical roles for a fairly large government organisation. My basic specialisation was analysis of hardware and software, or being more technical than the technical person the sales people would bring in.


Cheerio John

 

[meatloaf747]

Surprizes me...

I don't disbelieve what your saying John, but your benchmark results surprise me.
A couple of Tech mates & I benchmarked Trainz (and several other games) a while back (in XP) with & without a whole pile of crap loading up/loaded up in the background and every time the benchmarks results where higher when the crap was turned off… Every time...........
By crap, I'm talking about anything & everything that was unnecessarily running in the background.
(we were also benchmarking some of the latest 8600/8800 series video cards at the same time).
Note; these tests where all done with PC’s that had NVIDIA video cards in them. I see you’re running one of ATI latest cards. Although where running two different manufactures cards, different specked PC's, and possibly/probably using two different benchmark procedures, the conclusions drawn should be reasonably similar... Got me stumped a little mate...
I guest there's so many variables that one needs to take into consideration when trying to compare benchmarks results. Particularly the amount of RAM.
I do agree with you that the lower the amount of RAM, the bigger the impact that unnecessary programs running in the background have. Even with 2 gigs of RAM our benchmarks results where higher, without the crap loaded in the background.... (Keep in mind John, this chap has only 1.5 gigs of RAM). I'm assuming it's either DDR2 667 or 800.
Here’s just one simple example of unnecessary stuff running in the background when playing Trainz/any game that doesn’t need an internet connection while playing.
As any tecko knows, running pre Oct/Nov 2007 versions of Norton's NIS, NSW, NAV, N360 V1 bloat ware on a low spec machine definitely use up a lot of resources & slowed the machine down.
That's why Norton’s rewrote their software range late 07 early 08 to trim it back from using up to 45 megs (approx) of memory while running in the background to 19 megs (approx) now. This is a dramatic improvement for low spec machines. I've now gone back to running Norton's 360 V2 on one of my admin machines.
Hears and interesting article that the boys from Redmond wrote that is worth a read. It talks about MS games, but it applies to games in general...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815069
Method 1: Restart the computer by using a clean start-up.
When you start Microsoft Windows, typically there are several programs that start automatically and run in the background that may interfere with the game. These programs may include anti-virus and system utility programs. When you perform a clean start-up, you prevent these programs from starting automatically. You must be logged on as an administrator....
Go to the above link for the full article.

http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/N101451.asp

Here’s another reasonable article about turning off unnecessary “SERVICES”.
(note; the article's about 3 years old but it still has some good content).
http://www.jasonn.com/turning_off_unnecessary_services_on_windows_xp

There’s 100's of good articles on the internet re;Improving Windows XP Performance
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=32

It's great that we can have this nice friendly discussion to try and help this lad sort out his train jerking problem. (No one else seems to have put up there hand)..
My advice still is, if he's got a lot of unnecessary stuff loading up in the background now, try turning the unnecessary stuff off, and see if that makes any difference. If it doesn't, then he can always turn it all back on again if he wishes.
John, we’ve probably gone a bit off topic for this poor chap. All he just wants to know is how to stop his long trains/consists from jerking in the game. (Between us, we’ve almost written him a book). lol.....
It's also great that we agree to slightly disagree. Rather than debate benchmark results in the forum, you are more than welcome to PM me if you wish.
Thanks John, cheers mate.
[FONT=&quot]Mac[/FONT]