Good bye to Trainz Railroad Simulator

[djt]

I just ran into the EUROCOM Panther that loads two GeForce GTX 480M GPUs. Of course it runs ~$5000USD.

Also keep in mind that the GTX 480M is a seriously cut down version of the desktop part as all high end mobile GPU’s are -

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3803/avadirect-clevo-w880cu-fermi-gtx-480m

 

[Ottomum]

Thank you for correcting the RAID 1 error DJT, I would not want someone configuring a RAID incorrectly based on inaccurate information on a forum.

The capacity for transfer of higher resolution textures and more detailed track meshes is what is GAINED by having a fatter pipe over the bus. The storage capacity on the card also contributing to less texture/model swap.

All this happens REGARDLESS of the coding on the Trainz.

I have suggested this approach to certain commercial simulation developers who have used it to GREAT effect in their products. Of course they have a better ability to SPECIFY hardware, unlike an entertainment product such as the Trainz. I am already making myself known to the gentlemen at Microsoft who will no doubt be after some GOOD advice on train simulation, especially as they SEEM to be revitalizing their simulation team.

 

[djt]

The capacity for transfer of higher resolution textures and more detailed track meshes is what is GAINED by having a fatter pipe over the bus. The storage capacity on the card also contributing to less texture/model swap.

The “pipe” (bus bandwidth) with any PCIe video card is more than the Trainz game engine can ever dream of using and if the “storage capacity” (on-board memory) on the video card isn’t properly being utilized by the game what good is it?

All this happens REGARDLESS of the coding on the Trainz.

Really?



So your saying that if the system resources are abundant it doesn’t matter whether or not the software was written to take advantage of it or not?

I suggest at this point you do some research and get back to us on that one.

If you want to learn about what it takes for a game engine to properly take advantage of system hardware here’s a great site, there has even been some talk about using this game engine for rail equipment simulation –

http://outerra.com/

http://outerra.com/forum/

 

[Ottomum]

Although the Trainz may not take full advantage of the bus and memory bandwidth, with the SLI configuration I have suggested it no longer becomes a bottleneck. The large memory capacity of the CARD also allows larger textures - especially useful for rendering HIGH resolution track.

Similarly the IO benefits from a RAID 0 SSD arrangement (3 SSD = 660 mb/s) reduces bottlenecks for data arriving from the fixed storage.

We have not even TOUCHED upon the role of a high end sound processor...

However the Trainz does not appear to be a multi-core optimized program and would THEREFORE seem to be limited by its CPU. Since most recent CPU developments involve multi-core processors, the benefits to the Trainz is minimal.

One of the hazards of developing on an engine that grew on one core.

 

[djt]

Although the Trainz may not take full advantage of the bus and memory bandwidth, with the SLI configuration I have suggested it no longer becomes a bottleneck.

With Trainz there isn’t any “bottleneck” currently with one GPU so what would two or more do to help?

Similarly the IO benefits from a RAID 0 SSD arrangement (3 SSD = 660 mb/s) reduces bottlenecks for data arriving from the fixed storage.

So are you expecting “huge” gains in performance with Trainz with SSD’s in RAID 0?

Are we talking SSD’s set up in RAID 0 on the motherboard SATA ports (software RAID) or are we talking about a dedicated RAID card with its own processor and RAM?

 

[Ottomum]

The "bottleneck" of the transfer of data to the GPU is a non-issue with regards to the CONFIGURATION I have suggested. The bandwidth across the bus is sufficient to handle anything the Trainz is capable of presenting it with. A side benefit is the ROOM for high resolution textures on the card, thus allowing a fine track DETAILED model.

As to the RAID 0 configuration I would recommend to you, young DJT, that a hardware solution is preferable. Software RAID is a good second option - cheaper too, of course.

As to the Trainz taking advantage of multi-core CPUs. My son, who is high up in IBM, is speaking to me about a multi-core OPTIMISATION compiler that would allow the running of non-multi-threaded code on a multi-core machine and being able to fully take advantage of the PARALLEL processing power. Imagine, the Trainz running on a dual 8-core processor PC!

 

[djt]

The bandwidth across the bus is sufficient to handle anything the Trainz is capable of presenting it with. A side benefit is the ROOM for high resolution textures on the card, thus allowing a fine track DETAILED model.

Any high end “single” GPU already provides more than enough ROOM for high resolution textures as far as Trainz is concerned.

Software RAID is a good second option - cheaper too, of course.

Unlike a true hardware RAID solution software RAID will further burden the CPU which with a CPU dependent game like Trainz is obviously not a good thing.

Imagine, the Trainz running on a dual 8-core processor PC!

Imagine Trainz with just taking advantage of 4 cores let alone 8.

You can already sample what true multi-core support will do for a train sim by taking a look at how smooth OpenRails performs. All of the scenery boundary stutter that is present in MSTS is gone when running OpenRails on a Quad core.