or is surveyor a touch unstable? When using it if I zoom in or out or move around too fast it tends to freeze up on me, or stops responding alltogether.
My specs are; 64 bit AMD Athlon IIx2 processor
Nvidia Geforce 8800GT video
3 GB RAM
Also I find the frame rates fluctuate wildly sometimes, dropping to as low as 4 or 5 and up to 18 to 20 at most. I'm wondering because I also have Railworks 2, and the frames are reasonably steady and 15 - 18 and up to as high as 35-40, and their 'surveyor' tool is steady and fast. All the start-up programs on the computer are turned off.
I'm wondering if more RAM would help?
Thanks.
Are you sure you're just not seeing the auto-save occur and attributing a correlation that isn't there?
If you're certain it's not the auto-save, then I'd still look towards the hard disk as the primary culprit. Many installations get done without AHCI drivers, and the 'compatibility mode' on modern SATA chipsets can be horrifically slow in comparision, it's not unusual to see the system stall when dealing with HDD access in such an installation.
If that IS the cause, then sadly enabling AHCI mode is a pretty daunting task - in 99.999% of cases it will require a complete reinstall of the operating system.
Another cause can be using the MS AHCI drivers rather than one by the chipset manufacturer (which could be AMD or nVidia, for example). In particular, the nForce chipsets have HORRIBLE performance using the microsoft drivers, and in fact won't even play audio CDs due to a bug microsoft included. Again, a benchmark would show this up.
It should be possible to determine whether the HDD is running in the right mode with any of a number of free/trialware utilities such as HDtune.
Once you've determined if it's running in AHCI mode, you might want to see if the read/write speeds are looking 'ok' - it's hard to give absolute numbers on how fast the speeds should be not knowing how old the drive is, and what kind of drive, but 20MB/s or lower would be signs that something might be misconfigured. Also watch for OS responsiveness while running the benchmark, i.e. does the HDD activity completely freeze out any other actions?
While the framerates are low - enough that I might question how old your drivers are, and where they came from (remember, you want nVidia's drivers, not the ones MS pushes via windows update), they are, sadly, about what I was seeing with my 8800GT (4-5 fps is extreme, but it was what I would hit at bad patches (eg, exiting gasworks tunnel) on the ECML route).
Of course, try switching to DirectX or OpenGL whichever you're not using, and see if that makes a difference.
Personally, I'll say that I've never seen surveyor outright freeze, other than when it's running an auto-save, not with 2006, 2010 or 12.
