looottts of speedtreez and performance

[justinroth]

I have been working on a fictional route for a bit now (9 months), which is a combo of a few merged routes and alot of my own creation. I have learned as I have gone along and find myself going back to redo alot of things and have come to a point where flatboard trees don't cut it. Most of the route is relatively flat but I am doing some more hilly Pennsylvania type scenery and speed trees look so much better. I don't see much of a difference with performance stats on screen, but basically I have entire hills covered almost to the point of not being able to see ground, which to me looks authentic ....my concern is continuing in this method for a couple miles to find that my gpu can't handle it

 

[Davie_UCF]

If you can manage a board like that you may be okay.. Remember trainz doesn't display everything on your route at the same time therefore the GPU won't be stressed. What may be stressed is the CPU/harddrives storing and loading all the assets as you move along.. Which is not going to be an issue I think! If you're mostly using the same speed trees it might not cause many problems. If anything you may have to turn down the draw distance so there's no so much on display at the same time.

Only one way to find out right?

 

[KenRuof]

I am basically doing the same thing, a Pennsylvania/Ohio (PRR) route with mountain, hills, flats and many trees. I recently removed the speed trees and I am replacing them with Pofigs+. I would susggest you buy a SSD hard drive to put the game on, the performance is MUCH better because in most systems your performance index is always held back by the HDD. You can tell if you will be able to handle it by switching to a nother moving train in a different area as your session is running and see how long it take for the computer to redraw the new area.

PS: There are still some redraw issues with speedtrees

 

[justinroth]

thanks! will just go ahead with my plan. A SSD would be great, not sure how I could transfer my installation over, I assume copy/paste of the Auran folder would be to simple to work.

 

[Davie_UCF]

thanks! will just go ahead with my plan. A SSD would be great, not sure how I could transfer my installation over, I assume copy/paste of the Auran folder would be to simple to work.

To be extra safe, you could install Trainz on the SSD, then just paste over your original installation from the other drive. Works for me . Makes sure your file associations still work , such as the download links on the DLS opening CM . Make sure both instalations are patched to the same version though.

 

[Robert3a0]

Also, try running Trainz in Open GL rather than Direct X (if your graphics card can support Open GL). I found it made a huge difference in rendering heavy scenery, whether caused by trees or buildings. I am currently constructing a Pennsylvania style route with heavy vegitation using ultra trees and it runs really well in Open GL. Also, the advice on the selection of hard drives is spot on. My current hard drive is the slowest component (only rates 5.9 on Windows whereas all the other components are rating 7.9) on my computer - I am awaiting arrival of a my new ThinkServer 2TB 7.2K 3.5inch Enterprise 6Gbps SATA Hard Drive which should smarten things up for me. SSD is the way to go for instant action but they are a bit expensive at present.

 

[JCitron]

You'll find that overall Speed Trees will have less of a burden on the system because they are rendered by your GPU with little intervention by the CPU and memory. This is the total opposite of how the old flipboard trees worked. In the old days the old flipboards would be calculated by the CPU, loaded into memory, then transferred to the video card for output. This long process, plus the calculations needed for the rendering and building took time and caused performance issues. The Speed-trees go directly from the hard drive to memory and all the calculations are done in the much faster video card. This speeds up the process substantially.

Now having said this. There is still the caveat of having too much of a good thing. Remember they still have to be read from a hard drive, and if there's lots of them then the hard drive has to continuously be read. A traditional hard drive, especially one that's highly fragmented, will cause performance issues. The way to go ideally is with the newer SSDs, but their cost is relatively high due to their smaller sizes and are not good for everyone due to this reason. My Trainz install, which is almost 10 years old now, is about 340 GB with the program files. That is a huge install, and the SSDs that I'd need for that install are way too expensive at the moment.

John

 

[KenRuof]

thanks! will just go ahead with my plan. A SSD would be great, not sure how I could transfer my installation over, I assume copy/paste of the Auran folder would be to simple to work.

Copy paste work with no problems you do have to change your short cuts to point to the new location.

 

[justinroth]

Copy paste work with no problems you do have to change your short cuts to point to the new location.

thank you very much!