LAG AND LAG ANNOYING!!

NYCboy

gettin bored of trainz
ok i am starting to get mad at trainz 2006 and TC>it always lags when i put like 2 tracks and some trains it runs at 25 FPS.but when i put extra long tracks it lags to 3-5 fames per second.and when i out a 10 long NYC train it lags agien i lowerd the graphics but it lags to 8-9 FPS.WHAT DO I DO!!?

im using

dell optiplex 320
intel celeron D
1 GB DDR2 ram
PCI-E 256MB ati X1550
3.7GHz

is there a way i can higher the graphics.im afraid to buy at PCI-E 512MB because it will lower the ram.but if i buy the video card will trainz 2006 be smother?

does any body know a Nvidia video card wth a fan and 512 MB?
 
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is there a way i can higher the graphics.im afraid to buy at PCI-E 512MB because it will lower the ram.but if i buy the video card will trainz 2006 be smother?

does any body know a Nvidia video card wth a fan and 512 MB?

The CPU would be your first bet at looking at, but I don't think Trainz is too fussy with CPUs, unless it is heavily scripted stuff it needs to process.

The nVidia card won't lower the amount of ram in your machine, unless it is a turbocache card (or ATIs equivelant, hypermemory I think), which will lower the amount of usable ram in your system, as the card "nicks" some of the system ram for its own uses.

2GB would be a good idea at some point, but then again, it only relates to draw distances, or so I have been told. The larger the amount of ram, the greater the amount you can store in the memory, in theory.


  • Anyway, at the current set up, there are at least 3 things I can think of, firstly, defragging your disk. It depends if the computer is stuttering to load an object or not (and defragging, along with faster disks, can help greatly here!).
  • Closing down unneeded processes, do you really need MSN, skype, IRC, etc open? Think about what you have open and close it before running trainz.
  • Avoid multitasking where possible.
  • Avoid running Trainz in a window where possible.
  • Try getting the latest drivers for your card, but don't try overclocking your card, that can sometimes have an adverse effect.
  • Increase the amount of free space on your C: drive. (Particulary useful if you have very little space left.
  • Finally, I left this until last (it should be fairily obvious really), have you played with the performance settings in Trainz?
If you are wondering, I mainly do my work on a single core machine, not quite as bad as yours, its a laptop though and the specs are:
1.6ghz Pentimun M (2mb Cache) processor
2GB DDR-333 RAM
100GB 4200rpm Toshiba drive
ATI Radeon 9700 128mb vid card
Vista Home Premium (URK!)
Trainz isn't particulary smooth, but it is smooth enough for the majority of not soo scened layouts, in a heavily scened one, it does really suffer.

HTHs
 
Try upgrading the system memory to 2 GB. Contact Dell and ask them about upgrading the system memory on your computer to 2 GB. If too many objects are in one area of a layout such as the city in "City and Country" layout, you'll get lagging anyway.
 
Try upgrading the system memory to 2 GB. Contact Dell and ask them about upgrading the system memory on your computer to 2 GB. If too many objects are in one area of a layout such as the city in "City and Country" layout, you'll get lagging anyway.
my system use to have 512MB ram but i upgraded it my self to 1GB
 
The CPU would be your first bet at looking at, but I don't think Trainz is too fussy with CPUs, unless it is heavily scripted stuff it needs to process.

The nVidia card won't lower the amount of ram in your machine, unless it is a turbocache card (or ATIs equivelant, hypermemory I think), which will lower the amount of usable ram in your system, as the card "nicks" some of the system ram for its own uses.

2GB would be a good idea at some point, but then again, it only relates to draw distances, or so I have been told. The larger the amount of ram, the greater the amount you can store in the memory, in theory.


  • Anyway, at the current set up, there are at least 3 things I can think of, firstly, defragging your disk. It depends if the computer is stuttering to load an object or not (and defragging, along with faster disks, can help greatly here!).
  • Closing down unneeded processes, do you really need MSN, skype, IRC, etc open? Think about what you have open and close it before running trainz.
  • Avoid multitasking where possible.
  • Avoid running Trainz in a window where possible.
  • Try getting the latest drivers for your card, but don't try overclocking your card, that can sometimes have an adverse effect.
  • Increase the amount of free space on your C: drive. (Particulary useful if you have very little space left.
  • Finally, I left this until last (it should be fairily obvious really), have you played with the performance settings in Trainz?
If you are wondering, I mainly do my work on a single core machine, not quite as bad as yours, its a laptop though and the specs are:
1.6ghz Pentimun M (2mb Cache) processor
2GB DDR-333 RAM
100GB 4200rpm Toshiba drive
ATI Radeon 9700 128mb vid card
Vista Home Premium (URK!)
Trainz isn't particulary smooth, but it is smooth enough for the majority of not soo scened layouts, in a heavily scened one, it does really suffer.

HTHs
well when you said "Increase the amount of free space on your C: drive"my hard drive has only about 1.64 GB left.anyways is there a good video that i can buy thats nvidia and 512MB with a fan and its PCI-E for a low price? US$$
 
I am not familiar with the ATI line but I suspect your CPU is a bottle neck so a better card might not help. Are you using Vista?
Maybe a new card would help if your current card has a driver or setting problem. If you do I sugest you stay with ATI. that is because some have said changing from ATI to Nvidea or visa versa can be tricky. Something about leftover parts of the driver causing incompatibility problems.
 
I would also take a guess at the CPU being the bottle neck, I have a Celeron CPU in another system and it is not real good running anything heavy, even gMax hurts it.

You have 1.6GB free space left?

Seriously its a wonder anything is running, windows does not like getting that low on free space.
 
NYCboy,

Hold everything . . . I just went through the same thing and fixed it !!

I see that you have 1GB RAM . . . that is the bottleneck.

About 8 months ago abought my desktop Dell XPS 410 from a friend at work who ordered it and just as it arrived, the company bought him a new laptop . . . lucky @#$%^& . Anyway HE TOLD ME IT HAD 2GB RAM . . . Until recently I was doing Trainz on my laptop, but decided to switch over to the desktop because Trainz was behving erraticly on my lap top.

TRS2006 runs fine except LAG LAG LAG. So I checked everything BUT I only had 1GB RAM.

There was a lot of disk accessing going on.
Out of 1GB RAM . . . the XP eats up about half of that.
When you LOAD in TRS, it will put as much of the "current area" in RAM. When it runs out of RAM it starts to use the HD a "virtual memory" . . . only problem is HD is really slow compared to RAM . . . THEREFORE THE LAG.

I went out and bought 2GB of RAM at $28 US per 1GB stick (XP 32bit can only address a max of 3GB RAM). INSTALLED IT . . . AND VOI LA !! That fixed it . . . back to normal.

I have a huge route with chuck full of frame rate eating stuff. But still, disk access has now become negligible.

GO GET SOME RAM !!

I hope this helps.


 
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I have 1GB RAM in my other system that runs TRS2006 and it runs well, but that system also has a 2.8GHz Intel HT CPU, not a Celeron.

Depends on how many processes there are running in the background at the same time.
 
The Celeron is a dog, I'd doubt whether you'll get the performance you are looking for on highly detailed routes.

Paul
 
You say "my hard drive has only about 1.64 GB left".

While all the other suggestions are valid and will help your performance, I suspect that this is where your main problem lies. Any demanding program such as Trainz uses a substantial amount of hard disk space for caching objects frequently used. If you have inadequate space to do this effectively, then every time you want to use a fairly large object it has to load it afresh rather than calling it from its cache.

If you have programs or data files on your hard disk that are only occasionally used, try deleting them to make more space. (You can always back them up onto a CD etc first.) If this does the trick, you know that a larger hard disk will overcome the problem.

Always make sure you back up the contents of your HD before making such changes. (Says he, speaking from bitter experience!!)

Hope this helps.

Peter
 
You say "my hard drive has only about 1.64 GB left".

While all the other suggestions are valid and will help your performance, I suspect that this is where your main problem lies. Any demanding program such as Trainz uses a substantial amount of hard disk space for caching objects frequently used. If you have inadequate space to do this effectively, then every time you want to use a fairly large object it has to load it afresh rather than calling it from its cache.

If you have programs or data files on your hard disk that are only occasionally used, try deleting them to make more space. (You can always back them up onto a CD etc first.) If this does the trick, you know that a larger hard disk will overcome the problem.

Always make sure you back up the contents of your HD before making such changes. (Says he, speaking from bitter experience!!)

Hope this helps.

Peter


Worthless, how I totally agree, the general rule is that the amount of free space has to be around IIRC, 2 1/2 times the RAM size (it might be 1 1/2, but even then, the more free space, the better).

Whatever you have, its time to clean some crap out, the trouble is, the more you clean out, the more that Windows helpfully sticks back in. The biggest culprit, has to be the recovery information that just simply isn't needed, most of that can go, temp files are a good source, your temporary internet files are a really good one to be careful of, especially with some surfing habits.

Spyware, adware, programs you didn't install, but-how-did-they-get-there-anyway? kinda thing, all mounts up.

The best way to clean all this crap out, is uninstall all the programs you don't need and use, delete the files you no longer need or use and will never need. (obviously, empty the trash out!) and to get to the crap MS expects you to keep, do this:
  • double click on my computer (guess you knew that already!)
  • click on "Local disk (C:)" or however it is named, then right click on it and click properties
  • Then under the general tab, click "disk cleanup"
  • Let windows look at how much crap you have, then see how much you can clear, click the tick boxes to start deleting stuff, but you may want to be careful, particulary with the recycle bin, incase you have anythign precious in there. Then click "ok".
Done, feels like an idiots guide this. :) (Sorry, I am not insulting your intelligence, sometimes, its necessary.)

As paulhobbs suggest, ditch the celeron, it is not a very good processor, the pentimuns are better. The celery sticks were meant for the budget market and have various other nice things removed or detached, like cache ram (some of it removed, to lower costs.). I said this earlier, but I wanted it to be confirmed.
 
ok i am starting to get mad at trainz 2006 and TC>it always lags when i put like 2 tracks and some trains it runs at 25 FPS.but when i put extra long tracks it lags to 3-5 fames per second.and when i out a 10 long NYC train it lags agien i lowerd the graphics but it lags to 8-9 FPS.WHAT DO I DO!!?

im using

dell optiplex 320
intel celeron D
1 GB DDR2 ram
PCI-E 256MB ati X1550
3.7GHz

is there a way i can higher the graphics.im afraid to buy at PCI-E 512MB because it will lower the ram.but if i buy the video card will trainz 2006 be smother?

does any body know a Nvidia video card wth a fan and 512 MB?

So to recap, your cpu doesn't have the L2 caches etc that Trainz likes, changing it to a better one would help, at 1 gig of memory it's a bit light as well, 2 gigs is better, your hard drive should have at least 20% free space on it otherwise hard disk performance falls through the floor, and although no one has really mentioned it at ATI 1550 is a little on the light side. Be very careful if you switch to nVidia video cards by the way to clean out the old video card drivers, bits tend to linger on and cause problems.

If you upgrade anything other than the memory your power supply may need upgrading.

Welcome to Trainz, you could simply run a single diesel and be selective on the track, some track is much more demanding than others.

Cheerio John
 
ok i am starting to get mad at trainz 2006 and TC>it always lags when i put like 2 tracks and some trains it runs at 25 FPS.but when i put extra long tracks it lags to 3-5 fames per second.and when i out a 10 long NYC train it lags agien i lowerd the graphics but it lags to 8-9 FPS.WHAT DO I DO!!?

im using

dell optiplex 320
intel celeron D
1 GB DDR2 ram
PCI-E 256MB ati X1550
3.7GHz

is there a way i can higher the graphics.im afraid to buy at PCI-E 512MB because it will lower the ram.but if i buy the video card will trainz 2006 be smother?

does any body know a Nvidia video card wth a fan and 512 MB?

Another thing to look at are those "extra long tracks" you mention. If you mean a single length of track without any spline points for a very long distance, this can also slow down your response as the video card has to internally draw the entire spline as it renders. If this is the case try adding spline points (at least one or two per board) and see if that helps.

--Lamont
 
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