Performance Issues with Potteries Loop Line, etc.

gp792

Butner Lines Railroad Co.
OK, I might have mentioned this before, so forgive if I already have. But, I am experiencing a bit of stuttering on Potteries Loop Line.

Here are my specs:

Alienware 17
GeForce GTX 860M
Intel Core i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.5GHz
8GB RAM (7.93 usable)
1920 x 1080, 60Hz
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium

Should there be any stuttering with these specs? The 'other' train sim, which I play, runs ultra-smooth on what is basically considered 'maxed-out' settings. Other games that I play run very smooth as well; and I find it unusual for TS12 to still have some stuttering. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Trainz is very reliant on high speed storage to handle the constant loading of assets into view. You have not listed your storage drive that Trainz is installed to. If it's a HDD then that could be a reason for the stuttering since the rest of your notebook is quite powerful. However if you're already using an SSD then the problem may be software related I suppose.

Jack
 
Trainz is very reliant on high speed storage to handle the constant loading of assets into view. You have not listed your storage drive that Trainz is installed to. If it's a HDD then that could be a reason for the stuttering since the rest of your notebook is quite powerful. However if you're already using an SSD then the problem may be software related I suppose.

Jack

I checked and it's on a HDD, not SSD.
 
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I checked and it's on a HDD, not SSD.

What is the RPM speed on this hard drive? My hunch it's only 5400 RPM or slower because it's in a laptop. This is an issue with many portable machines and is done to conserve power and keep the machine cool.

John
 
What is the RPM speed on this hard drive? My hunch it's only 5400 RPM or slower because it's in a laptop. This is an issue with many portable machines and is done to conserve power and keep the machine cool.

John

John, I looked it up on the internet and it is 5400 RPM. Is that going to be a problem for T:ANE as well, or should it be fine?
 
John, I looked it up on the internet and it is 5400 RPM. Is that going to be a problem for T:ANE as well, or should it be fine?

7200rpm is recommended in this day and age for storage-intensive applications and sometimes that isn't even sufficient.
Since you're using an alienware machine, it may be best for you to give it your all and upgrade directly to an SSD when possible.
 
Trainz doesn't use the hard disk much once its loaded, you can check this with perfmon so the hard drive isn't critical. Disk speed well I have two one is 10,000 rpm and the other is 7,200 rpm but the 7,200 rpm is much faster, I'll let you work that one out. The rotation speed is not the only consideration with hard drives.

Laptops are not designed for performance but to prolong battery life. Potteries loop line comes in two versions, one is trimmed down to run on normal machines the other is more demanding. If you have a liquid nitrogen cooled machine it can take full advantage of it, if you haven't then adjust the performance sliders, draw distance would be where I'd start.

cf the other product, the content used in Trainz has a wider range of people with different skill sets making it and often if it runs on my liquid nitrogen cooled machine that's fine, performance isn't the first consideration and rarely are they running on a lap top. What it gives you is very rich content at low cost, although sometimes you have to be careful what you run and how you run it.

Cheerio John
 
I have two fast SataII hard drives. 7200rpm & 8mb cashe Trainz runs on a separate disc to the operating system. It still glitches in PLL a little though not as much as the S&C. No doubt because the line is designed lite! I think I will invest in an SSD just for trainz & see how much it helps. The other option is to increase RAM I could go from 8 to 16meg but unsure if that will be enough? It's rather a shame that such facts have to be obtained off the forum and that there is no interest in fixing 12. Had I paid more than a fiver for it I would be upset! But this is why I've been away. Quietly playing TC3 because it worked. Until a HD failure wiped it off my system & I couldn't find what I needed on the dls to fix it properly.

Edit. Trainz 12 is 32bit so can't use 8 meg of ram anyway. Only a faster hard drive will help. Or it's upgrade to Windows 8..... Noooooooooo
 
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I have two fast SataII hard drives. 7200rpm & 8mb cashe Trainz runs on a separate disc to the operating system. It still glitches in PLL a little though not as much as the S&C. No doubt because the line is designed lite! I think I will invest in an SSD just for trainz & see how much it helps. The other option is to increase RAM I could go from 8 to 16meg but unsure if that will be enough? It's rather a shame that such facts have to be obtained off the forum and that there is no interest in fixing 12. Had I paid more than a fiver for it I would be upset! But this is why I've been away. Quietly playing TC3 because it worked. Until a HD failure wiped it off my system & I couldn't find what I needed on the dls to fix it properly.

Edit. Trainz 12 is 32bit so can't use 8 meg of ram anyway. Only a faster hard drive will help. Or it's upgrade to Windows 8..... Noooooooooo

Even with TS12 being a 32bit application, you'll still benefit with the additional RAM as this will give the operating system room to move out of the way and give all 4GB allocated to the 32-bit application.

Let me explain....

In the old days the 64-bit operating systems, such as NT4.0 64-bit, or Windows XP 64-bit meant that 32-bit applications performed poorly, or did not run at all due to there being no 32-bit code emulation. In the "modern" operating systems such as Windows 7 64-bit and up, this is done differently. Instead of there being a hard-wired 32-bit code requirement versus as 64-bit code requirement, the operating systems can now run both side-by-side with little or no performance differences. This is due to how the applications are allocated in the system. When the code is 64-bit, the full memory address is allocated to the application. If the application is a 32-bit application, then the 4GB limit is imposed and the 32-bit code is emulated. Keeping this in mind, the remaining memory isn't going to waste. Instead it's being used by the operating system for other functions, and divided up amongst other 32-bit applications as needed. This allows for smoother operation overall due to less swap file paging when operating.

Windows 8 isn't that bad; Windows 10, however, is the bee knees. I've been testing it with TS12 and TANE CE, as well as a ton of other applications, and so far it's really smooth even for a beta.

John
 
Even with TS12 being a 32bit application, you'll still benefit with the additional RAM as this will give the operating system room to move out of the way and give all 4GB allocated to the 32-bit application.

Let me explain....

In the old days the 64-bit operating systems, such as NT4.0 64-bit, or Windows XP 64-bit meant that 32-bit applications performed poorly, or did not run at all due to there being no 32-bit code emulation. In the "modern" operating systems such as Windows 7 64-bit and up, this is done differently. Instead of there being a hard-wired 32-bit code requirement versus as 64-bit code requirement, the operating systems can now run both side-by-side with little or no performance differences. This is due to how the applications are allocated in the system. When the code is 64-bit, the full memory address is allocated to the application. If the application is a 32-bit application, then the 4GB limit is imposed and the 32-bit code is emulated. Keeping this in mind, the remaining memory isn't going to waste. Instead it's being used by the operating system for other functions, and divided up amongst other 32-bit applications as needed. This allows for smoother operation overall due to less swap file paging when operating.

Windows 8 isn't that bad; Windows 10, however, is the bee knees. I've been testing it with TS12 and TANE CE, as well as a ton of other applications, and so far it's really smooth even for a beta.

John

Now my understanding is a little different. If I go back in time say around 40 years ago what happened was the operating system would load the program into memory and add the base address to all the program address locations. Loading two programs meant that the first loaded program could actually address any memory location above its base ie those of the second program as well. Later operating systems verified that any location the program was trying to access was within its limits.

In the X86 architecture the base instructions are sort of 32 bits, well it started off as the 8 bit instruction set of the 8080 which got extended to the 16 bit instruction set of the 8086, which in turn got extended to 32 bit instruction set of the 80386 and of course that got extended to the 64 bit instruction set of the AMD Optreon CPU which was also later adopted by Intel. The 8 bit instructions have been dropped but all the old 16 bit and 32 bit hardware instructions are still available in the CPU and my understanding is 16 bit and 32 bit instruction programs will run without the need for emulation. Different CPUs have slightly different instruction sets available, for example the floating point instructions vary.

Win 7, 8 and 10 are better operating systems than 64 bit NT or XP and the drivers which have so much to do with how your programs run are substantially better. They interface to 32 bit programs in a way that 32 bit programs prefer but I really wouldn't say they emulate anything.

What running with more than 4 gigs of memory on a 64 bit operating system will give you is 4 gigs given to TS12 and the operating system will use the rest of the memory for itself and to cache the hard drives etc however although 16 gigs will run very slightly faster than 8 you are into diminishing returns.

Cheerio John
 
Now my understanding is a little different. If I go back in time say around 40 years ago what happened was the operating system would load the program into memory and add the base address to all the program address locations. Loading two programs meant that the first loaded program could actually address any memory location above its base ie those of the second program as well. Later operating systems verified that any location the program was trying to access was within its limits.

In the X86 architecture the base instructions are sort of 32 bits, well it started off as the 8 bit instruction set of the 8080 which got extended to the 16 bit instruction set of the 8086, which in turn got extended to 32 bit instruction set of the 80386 and of course that got extended to the 64 bit instruction set of the AMD Optreon CPU which was also later adopted by Intel. The 8 bit instructions have been dropped but all the old 16 bit and 32 bit hardware instructions are still available in the CPU and my understanding is 16 bit and 32 bit instruction programs will run without the need for emulation. Different CPUs have slightly different instruction sets available, for example the floating point instructions vary.

Win 7, 8 and 10 are better operating systems than 64 bit NT or XP and the drivers which have so much to do with how your programs run are substantially better. They interface to 32 bit programs in a way that 32 bit programs prefer but I really wouldn't say they emulate anything.

What running with more than 4 gigs of memory on a 64 bit operating system will give you is 4 gigs given to TS12 and the operating system will use the rest of the memory for itself and to cache the hard drives etc however although 16 gigs will run very slightly faster than 8 you are into diminishing returns.

Cheerio John

The way you say it is how it used to be, and how I remember things being. I even wrote some 8080, z80, and 8086 assembly language programs for various computer science classes. I never did anything with this other than the classes, but this is what we were taught in the same timeframe you mentioned. Now the operating systems use a bit of virtualization in there as well, which sets up the memory spaces for the 32-bit applications along with multiple threading and intelligent branching, which is also supported in the CPUs.

Using the older memory allocation, you will see diminished returns because applications begin competing for I/O resources. With the virtualization, this isn't so much of a problem, but there is still a limit to how much data can be pushed through the system buss, memory, and other system components.
 
This is a fun thread, have to put in 2 cents worth.

John (johnwhelan) linked to http://passingtrains.wordpress.com/2...ip-pause-glip/
in his post above, which defines the "glip" we've all come to know and hate.

John (JCitron) and I have had a previous conversation in this forum
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?111100-RAMDisk
regarding use of ramdisk as a way to eliminate the glip - and it does.

Practical solution? Not really, unless you're willing to maintain your
Trainz stuff on SSD or HDD and copy (via .cdp) to a skinny Trainz install on ramdisk,
to drive one (large) route at a time. Sounds worse than it is, and the results are
worth it, at least to me.

Now running under Win 8.1 from a fast Samsung EVO SATA III SSD for route/session building and
testing, then send over to the ramdisk for a great driving/AI experience.

Last thought - John is so right about Win 10!

Sorry, guys, this 2 cents inflated to $20,
Kind regards! Ken
 
Thanks for the information. Slowly learning.... I already have 8gb of ram running at 1600mhz so I doubt I will gain alot with another 8. A SSD for Trainz alone will not be too ruinous. The prices are dropping all the time. It doesn't need to be huge. 64mb drive would be under £40. Really I should replace the operating system drive to speed up the PC overall. But it's pretty quick except for trainz.... Will have a look after Christmas. Prices may drop a bit more by then.
 
Thanks for the information. Slowly learning.... I already have 8gb of ram running at 1600mhz so I doubt I will gain alot with another 8. A SSD for Trainz alone will not be too ruinous. The prices are dropping all the time. It doesn't need to be huge. 64mb drive would be under £40. Really I should replace the operating system drive to speed up the PC overall. But it's pretty quick except for trainz.... Will have a look after Christmas. Prices may drop a bit more by then.

I would suggest the Crucial MX100. I myself have a 120GB variant in my office PC as well as friends in their personal machines, fantastic drives. Currently the 256GB variant is £80, so expect further reductions and capacity increases in time. Personally I'm waiting for the 512GB models to go below £100, won't be too long I imagine.

Jack.
 
Hi

I have two installs of TS12 SP1 HF4, one on a SATA III 7200rpm HDD and the other on a SATA III 240Gb Samsung 830 SSD. Running my own AI session on the ECML on each of the installs shows very little difference in performance between them on my system. I may see slightly less stuttering on the SSD install but it is difficult to be sure.

Where the SSD scores big time though is the time saved in installation, loading the game, EDRs etc.

Regards

Brian
 
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