Ongoing Investigation: SP6 Route Performance & Redraw Issues

[Sanek17]

Yes, I have a feeling that they don’t turn it on at all, their game

 

[paulper]

I don’t claim to be an expert with this topic, but why if my route uses under 16GB of my 32GB of memory, and a lesser proportion of available GPU memory, are there memory issues or a need to restrict memory use?

 

[AV3]

Okay, I have to ask. Is it the memory in the RAM sticks that's being limited or is it the GPU VRAM that's being limited?

 

[constar261]

Okay, I have to ask. Is it the memory in the RAM sticks that's being limited or is it the GPU VRAM that's being limited?

This right here is the question thats been on my mind as well.

 

[whywon]

Just did a quick test on the Pennsylvania and Berwind 2.0 with SP6 hotfix. I have the settings mostly on low with a 10,000m draw distance. When the camera is moving in driver, I get 17-22 FPS with over 95% CPU load, about 40% GPU load, and 6GB of RAM being used. My specs are in my signature below.

 

[jaur1]

After extensive research, i can confirm that in my case, sp6 hf1 has fixed minor rendering issues that i had in sp6, but the average frame rate is a disheartening 30-40 % lower than sp4.
The route i am working in is really dense with hundreds of self made sketchup bulidings (no lods), and thousands of speed trees. But it works flawlessly in sp4, where i get with my rig ( 64gb ram nvidia 5080) an average of 50-90 fps even in the most heavy areas.
Another failed update....

 

[pdkoester]

I don't know if it matters but I went ahead and turned up all settings in the launcher and the in-game settings to the highest levels (some labeled Ultra) and the performance seems the same, so I am not losing anything.
The GTX 1080 in my system boasts 8GB of VRAM, but is only using under 5 (4.7 to be exact) with it all cranked up.

 

[JCitron]

This right here is the question thats been on my mind as well.

From what I gather it's neither. This memory limitation has to do with the in-game memory budget. Every program, and in particular graphics intensive games, has a memory allocation budget used by the various tasks, threads, and information. In the olden days, programs were compiled to work within a very tiny memory space, i.e. 8K or 16K. Back then, total system memory was a precious commodity and the programmers had to ensure that their programs were able to fit and operate within some very tight limits. In earlier times, even 8K was too generous when the total system RAM was only 8K and the compiler created executables that operated in a much smaller space!

This is still done today, but with much larger numbers. With Trainz, the various processes, assets, scripts, multiple threads, and everything else going on need to fit within the budget allocated for the processing. With SP6, the goal was to make the program more efficient and use less memory, however, the programmers made the pool too small causing the issues we saw.

In the end, we can have 128GB and still run into the same issue as you saw and so did many others including myself with a system that has 64GB of RAM installed.