Minimum Spec or Better, but only 10-15fps

[tomurban]

A buffer count around 100 or less is good. Your FPS in surveyor is way to low. I am getting 20-30 FPS in most routes in surveyor on a 6 year old computer that is considered marginal by todays standards (P4 @ 3.0GHz, 2Gb Ram). Splines, (Roads,Track, Fences) are the worst offenders. I have a downloaded Route that would barely run a single engine let alone a full train. In surveyor I found one asset with a buffer count over 1400. Turned out to be the track being used. It was beautiful track, prototypical in every way with moving switch points, guide rails, etc. I changed the track to MP wood and the buffer count dropped to 120 and the route runs much smoother with more trains installed. This is just one example so you can try by experimenting. It is a bit time consuming but does not require the expenditure of any funds.

tomurban

 

[ulmer94]

.....In surveyor I found one asset with a buffer count over 1400. Turned out to be the track being used. ....

I did have some pretty high poly track on that layout. I'll see about switching it out. Thanks!

However, that's not the case on all the routes giving me problems, often it's just a lot of low-buffer-count assets which added up = a high buffer count.

 

[RRSignal]

While this likely doesn't apply I'll throw this out there in light of the spirit of the thread. Check to see if your HDD is running in PIO mode rather than UDMA. It's under Device Manager (Start->Control Panel->Performance and Maintenance->System->Hardware-Device Manager, not totally sure of how it's laid out in Vista or Win7 offhand). Look at your IDE/ATAPI devices They should all say Use DMA is Possible and the Current Mode selector should be Ultra DMA Mode X. If any are set to Programmed I/O (PIO) mode, you've got a problem. Uninstall the driver from the same panel for that instance of the device (it's under the Driver tab) and let the machine reboot - it probably will want to reboot again after Windows automatically reinstalls the driver. That should clear that error.

Unfortunately, drops into PIO mode indicate a hardware problem. If you're lucky, it might just be a bad or loose drive cable, but it often means a failing drive. Windows falls back to PIO due to repeated errors cropping up during DMA transfers. However, this problem manifests itself in many ways, including obscenely slow performance.

 

[malikrthr]

I don't think it is just the amount of ghz you have. I also think it depends mainly on how much memory the graphics card contains, hard drive space, operating system.

 

[ulmer94]

Much of that went over my head, RRSignal... I don't know how good the hard drive is, but I do know that it's pretty full, that could be a problem. Got plenty of graphics memory. OS is Vista Home Premium, that is most likely a problem.

All this is telling me is that I can't fix it unless I delete a lot of stuff, which I don't want to do, or upgrade or get a new machine, which I would do but don't have funds for. :'( Did I mention that all my pennies are thin on one side?? :hehe: And I'm afraid that a rail sim is low on my list of priorities right now as far as budget goes. Oh, well.

Thanks for your help anyway, guys! I guess I'll have to wait though...

 

[malikrthr]

I just gave the free version of game booster a go. You should try it too. I am seeing better results that makes me pleased to say, that it could help a bit if you want to run a medium-high detailed route. There is not as much lag for me, and the fps have increased by atleas 10-15. But for a laptop, gamebooster creates a new battery plan called gaming power plan I believe, whenever you are playing a game with gamebooster. It sure sucks the life out of your battery.

 

[sparky15]

On my five year old Core Duo 2.16 laptop, running XP with 2 GB RAM and x1600 256 MB card:

I updated to TS2009 SP4.
Set XP to performance.
Turned off shadows.
Turned off aliasing.
Run in windowed mode.
Draw distance 3000
All sliders, except train detail (that is on high), to normal.

Before then I was getting 12-15 FPS on built in routes. Now, I average 45 and up to 70 FPS in some areas. I even get 40 FPS on EK3.

I don't know anything about Vista, I'm a Mac head, but you could try some of these. As far as what screen resolution to run in, you have to experiment to find which runs best. I use bootcamp with the Mac and my Windows partition never sees the internet. That means I have zero anti virus installed, firewalls, automatic updates, all that shut off.

Your mileage may vary.

Dave.......