Extreme lagginess in Surveyor on 106618 ...

[horacefithers]

I noticed when looking at the dependencies for my BC&SJ route that a number of assets had newer versions available. Many of these were PBR TextureEnv assets.

So being foolhardy and adventurous I loaded up the new asset versions, fired up Surveyor, and clicked Edit Route.

Not the best idea I'd ever had. Performa was extremely laggy to the point of unusability!
Subjectively, it felt like about 2 or 3 frames per second or lower with massive jerking when ever I tried to move the camera around. Strangely, the Trainz Profiler showed about 28fps!
A disaster for sure.

I shut down Trainz, rebooted the computer and restarted Trainz and Surveyor. Same thing!

In desperation I hit ctrl-F2 to switched to driver mode.

Now camera movements behaved smoothly! Huh?

I hit ctrl-F1 and it still behaved smoothly...

I exited and restarted Trainz with Edit Route and was back to Electric Laggy Land (with apologies to Jimi Hendrix...)

I saved the route as a new version in preparation for some drastic experiments and exited.

Upon restart and Edit Route (of the newly saved version of the route), now Surveyor worked smoothly when I moved the camera around.

So like wow! What caused that? I was guessing that one of the assets I'd version updated was somehow causing the problem.

Some time (several days or maybe a week?) went by and I noticed more PBR TextureEnv assets had new versions available on the DLS. I threw caution to the winds and downloaded the new versions from the DLS.

Note: I believe that the new versions of the TextureEnv assets I'd previously uploaded were displaying MUCH better far distant LOD color rendering - previously some textures that were a joy to behold up close and personal had grossly different color when viewed from extreme distance resulting in some really ugly scenery - N3V assured me there was nothing they could (or would) do about this issue and that it was up to the texture creators to fix the issues - I really wanted the better distant LOD behavior so I went ahead and updated the textures. I can't be sure of this, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it...

Upon Edit Route I found myself back in Electric Laggy Land again.

Holding my breath, I saved as a new version of the route, exited, restarted Trainz, restarted Surveyor with Edit Route, and the lagginess was once again gone.

There's something in those new PBR textures and my route and 106618 that apparently need some behavioral counseling before they'll all "just get along".

I was amazed that the FPS shown in Profiler seemed reasonable while the apparent frame rate couldn't have been more the 2 or 3 frames per second.
This indicates that either I'm hallucinating about the frame rates or the problem isn't in the rendering code, but in the figuring-out-what-should-be-rendered code.

Iirc, the PBR textures that I version updated the second time had upload timestamps of May 5th. In any event, to see them, go to Content Manger, set the filter to "PBR", then sort by date with newest dates first. The first five PBR textures shown are the ones that I updated (unless more PBR textures have been updated since then).

I looked at the config.txt files for the before and after version of a couple of textures and checked the stats in the asset preview but didn't see any obvious differences between them.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother N3V gives sometimes have interesting properties (with apologies to the Jefferson Airplane "White Rabbit")

I'm just happy that resaving the route appears to solve the problem.

Has anyone else noticed this happiness with build 106618?

Horace Fithers

And now for something completely different, a man with three buttocks! Excuse me sir, is that chair (er... texture!) comfortable?

 

[JCitron]

There are a couple of things that can cause this that I am aware of. One Trainz-related and the other system-related.

Trainz-related stuff:

I've seen it poor performance myself, but the program was caching stuff at the time. If you installed a lot of new assets, that's usually when that occurs.

At the Launcher, click on Developer on the menu bar.
Click on Show logs.

You'll see stuff streaming by with validating messages.

In-game, meaning Surveyor and Driver, you'll see a caching message and maybe compiling scripts.

Once this storm has passed, things go back to normal.

System-related:

Do you have Windows 10 Game-mode enabled?

Disable it. A bug was found in the latest release that has caused p-poor performance. I noticed the difference as well when I disabled it.

NVidia drivers, ensure you are up to the latest including any hotfix for the drivers that are available. Their last one was a beast that causes all kinds of performance issues.

AMD has similar issues as well with a set of their drivers. They manage to kill a lot of things like this as if to force people into thinking their hardware is old.

Outside of that, try setting back some of the graphics details in-game. I find that enabling full-bore on any route, especially some with a lot of details, causes a drop in performance. Even with my GTX1080TI, I don't run 15km draw distance, high-detail graphics, super-high detail textures, and so on and back them back to a more reasonable level. This not only improves performance, but it also saves the hardware as well since it's not working as hard.

My settings:
Shadow quality: High
Main shadow resolution: 4096
Shader quality: Ultra
Texture detail: Normal
Post Processing: High
Water Quality: High
Detail scenery: Clutter + TurfFX
Antialiasing: 8x
Detail update rate: Ultra

Important here:
Uncheck PhysX simulation. <------ This has a bug that causes truly awful performance.

Check Process objects behind camera.

Now since you killed the program while doing stuff, you most likely corrupted your database. This will in turn lead to further performance issues as well as repeated DBR requests. I recommend running an EDR or extended Database Repair. Press CTRL-key while clicking on Rebuild database at the launcher.

 

[horacefithers]

John,

The drivers are up to date.

The jerkiness is really extreme. As though the effective frame rate was 2 per second or lower. Even though the profiler claimed it was 28 fps.

Game mode was on - it's off now, but I have no way to replicate the problem for now.

Anyway, the key to the issue appears to be that the route was configured for version n of a number of TextureEnv assets such as PBR Crushed Stone 11 Ballast <kuid2:473136:104820:1> (user 473136 has updated a LOT of textures since March!) while the database was on version n+1

I suspect (but obviously this is complete guess work)

1. There may be some sore of caching problem that was causing Surveyor to reload the new version of the TextureEnv files for every step.
2. When building the next scene for rendering, the caching is drastically slowing things down (even with the database being in a Samsung EVO 970 m.2 pcie gen3/x4 SSD)
3. Frame rendering however is happily re-rendering the last list of scene objects and thus the profiler reporting a good frame rate
4. Which suggests there is a bug in Surveyor so that texture information read into a cache is improperly tagged so that for the next scene it's not found resulting in another reload.
5. When the route is saved to a new file (or maybe even to the same file - I didn't want to risk corrupting what I had so I saved to a new one) the kuids of the new assets are saved which somehow lets the scene building code recognize that these TextureEnv (or other assets) have been properly cached so the problem goes away.

As I said, this is complete guess work on my part, but something like it could explain what I was seeing.

FWIW

Horace

 

[JCitron]

It could be the new textures doing this, meaning they're a bit heavier in some fashion. The thing is once you've upgraded assets, meaning the textures in this case, the new version will obsolete the old ones automatically. This means even if you saved your old route, then it wouldn't make a difference. If saving the route makes it work better going forward, then it's most likely the caching or some other heavy processing was taking place, and with you saving it causes the process to stop for that time. You can see this with task manager running. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to bring up task manager. Doing so won't interrupt the screen and allow it to run side-by-side rather than kill the graphics with the CTRL+ALT+DEL sequence.

The profiler does have a bit of a delay, but not much. I noticed that sometime ago with my own setup and did some checking by running PrecisionX FPS counter and the profiler. Both showed the same FPS and both lagged a bit between what was feeling and what was showing.

Then there maybe other things going on as well because stutters and slowness are also caused by other things besides graphics. I've seen this due to a bad scripted asset. Do you still have a lot of Interlocking Towers? A lot of ITs can cause a performance drop. I noticed that myself recently.

Was anything else updated recently on your route in addition to the textures? Have you added more trains anywhere? This too can cause stutters if the yards are really full. Far too many trees can do this too, not that your route is really forested. I have seen this on my own routes because I've tried modeling New England as it should be. I swear my CPU nearly melted at the time because my fans were screaming away.

Just too many things I suppose to find out exactly.

Is this route still the same one as on the DLS?

I can check it and see what's up.

 

[JCitron]

I sent you an email.

The issue isn't the route its self and the problem is with the session, therefore there's too much of something, or a bad scripting object causing the problems. There's more details in the email.