John: Would you like to adopt a 62 year old man? :hehe: Sorry, but my money tree died a LONG time ago. I am on a fixed income, and newest, state-of-the-art computers just to play games are a pipe dream for me. My Pent 4 runs pretty much every game and sim I own just fine. With the exception of TS12. And in TS12 it's mainly the SpeedTrees that slow it up. When I use the Port Ogden and Northern route with no SpeedTrees, it runs smooth as silk.
And I based my purchase on what N3V gave out as minimum specs. Obviously THAT was a big mistake. Even though my Pent 4 is a dual core processor, it's pretty obvious to anyone who owns TS12 that it was designed for something MUCH more powerful than that. And I can tell you right now slider adjustments really don't do squat to improve performance. Even if you have the hottest processor made today, drive past a railyard full of rolling stock and locos and watch what happens to your framerates. It has been that way since TRS2004. Actually, I don't really think TS12 was actually
designed for a high power/high end computer. I think that because of what they did to it with SpeedTrees, along with their failure to actually fix the problems that have been inherent in it since it's inception, the need for a high end/high power computer to run it is just the end result.
BTW...I take that old 1970 Dodge pickup with a 440 magnum engine and outcarry ANY new pickup with a gas-powered engine
Dep
The old Dodge vehicles were great, and still are. My dad had a Dart Swinger that lasted 16 years or until the body fell off. I agree the new vehicles of any make, are wimps including the horns that go with them. It seems like most anything we get these days. There are all these whiz-bang features, buttons, whistles, and overly complicated operations, but when it comes time to doing a real job, well they rot.
Adopting another 62 year-old. That would be tough! I have my parents right now and that's plenty for me to deal with. LOL. (long story... PM me if you want to hear it...).
There's no question that your P4 is a great machine. I had one of those too up to a few years ago. It served as my main machine for running 3d-Studio Max, World Builder, and a few other graphics applications. The dual processors were able to crunch right through World Builder animations. Without the two processors, the animation would take 12-20 minutes per frame! The good thing was the program could run child machines and send the rendering frames out on the local network, and render the job over there. Later the individual tiff images were then combined to make a single animation. This was a long arduous process that requires many revisions before the final animation is correct. The dual processors were able to crunch through the animation in about 1/4 the time. I don't understand the math and reasons why the speed difference was this high; only that it worked and I was ecstatic about it.
Now getting back to Trainz. I agree the inherent flaws have never been completely addressed. (We'll get a slap here from someone for saying this here). The code has gotten better in TS12, but those same issues are there in much of the older content and the underlying game engine. Then of course they add on the Speed Trees. These additional graphics features, plus the overly-done animation really can bog a machine down particularly if you have an older video card. I have found that turning off the animation really does help with this.
Now the thing is they are a nice change in some ways because they are rendered in the graphics hardware, which on a modern system will have less of a problem with them, and this unfortunately is probably where your machine is the weakest.
Using the graphics chips and GPU to do the graphics work, gives the CPU and other computer components time to work on what they do best, like keeping track of scripts, and multiple threads that are happening within the program and other programs running on the system.
The problem is the PCI-slot video cards are a lot slower than today's PCI-Express cards, and don't have the bus bandwidth to handle the amount of data being shoved at them. This causes traffic bottlenecks, which cause the system to stutter and perform poorly overall.
A video card built around the PCI standard could have some of the fastest video chips and circuits on it, but the overall speed would be limited by the bus speed that it's connected to. Your fastest video card will then be slower than the same card built around the PCI-Express bus.
You see there's an inherent speed-limit built into the design of the PCI bus. This has nothing to do with thinking that a certain speed was fast enough when the design came out, but due to the layout of the bus and placement of ground pins, and other things that forced the board designers into a corner. They tried for a faster PCI bus, but that never could happen because of a noisy bus, and this bus noise limited the frequency (speed) that the devices can operate.
So my solution is win the lottery and buy a machine, or even better buy a 1970 Dodge pick-up with the Magnum engine in it.
John
400,000+ miles on that baby when I drove her to the junkyard in '86. Currently putting around in a 98 Dodge Neon, and I got a heart condition, place your bets which one of us will die first. :hehe: