O.K., riddle me this. I've been running Trainz on a six year old Mac book pro. I've been through all of the versions listed in my time line including TRS2004 which I never registered. TRS2006 and TC, smooth as glass, no burps or hesitations running full screen all sliders set to max. Along comes TRS2009, TS12 and the Mac version. Have to run windowed, draw distances set low and if it wasn't for Otto's Speedtree waving fix, I would get a slide show. I thought all this new fangled content was supposed to run better. That is what everyone here always says.*
Same hardware, consistent performance fall off using only the supposed best and rehabbed content out there with each release of the program. Sorry, I'm back to TRS2004 and Windows as much as I hate the reboot thing. Please don't play the "buy a new computer to get better performance thing". I thought all these changes in content were for that. Nothing like you'll get better performance now if you just buy better equipment. I don't buy into it. I had full screen, 5000 meter draw distance well before these new releases came out. Now, it's buy more computer to get what you had back when buy more computer to get more out of what you had.*
I'll stay with TC and below and enjoy the Trainz experience. At least it was full screen with no burps, hesitations or lock ups. I couldn't care less about the DLS, new content or anything else. I have a DVD of some great content backed up on several discs and a hard drive. All this talk is pretty useless if you're milking performance out of new hardware and content just to be where you were several years ago.
I run trains in a plausible environment. Even the old CP/CN Geeps are a hoot. Never once thought how bad they look sitting at a red signal as another tooled by. Shame, all my JointedRail stuff is sitting on a disc. As sweet as those payware and freeware locos are, just not worth the hassle of trying to get them to run in game. No fault of JointedRail, all in the Jet engine N3V continues to try and milk. At some point you have to say, "I'm getting off this ride".*
As far as Railworks, I jumped off that ride when Steam was dumped on us. RailSimulator looked great. Not great enough to play the Steam game, though.*
I guess I'm not buying into the rehashed commercialism from ALL of these programs anymore. I didn't like Spiderman 1, I'm not paying to see Spiderman 3, TRS2006 runs like a dream, I'm not dumping cash into TRS??????? and the computer to run it anymore. Especially over those cheesy spline switches past ugly SpeedTrees I guess were introduced to make me forget about them. Same rehabbed game. The new signaling is great, the 5M grid would be cool if it didn't trash performance so much. The rest isn't worth squat.