Performance questions

[guinea_elites92]

I've been thinking: I have a semi-decent laptop that runs TRS22 fine on good routes with billboard trees. Yet every time I try to make a route with speed trees and grass(in large amounts) my game lags like a modern AAA shooter. So I wonder; how performance intensive are Speed trees and grass? are there any good alternatives other than billboard trees? Or am I forever cursed to use decade old assets that look terrible in most forms of lighting?

 

[pdkoester]

What are the specs of the semi-decent laptop? Provide processor, GPU, hard drive type, RAM amount and type. That may help figure out what may be something to look at.

 

[pware]

The majority of billboard trees do not present any performance issues due to the small sizes of their meshes and low quality textures. However where they do present problems, particularly when used in large numbers, is in their lack of LODs and their "unrealistic" appearances. The lack of LODs can be an issue if a route has a large number of them in the far distance - each one has to be rendered in full and then reduced to a few pixels in size (a problem common to all assets that do not have LOD data). The worst offenders by far are billboard tree splines - worst assets ever created in my opinion. Billboard trees used wisely should not present any issues.

I cannot recall ever having any performance issues using SpeedTrees. But, like anything, it can depend on your system and performance settings. If you max everything out on a high detail route you can run into problems even on a high performance machine.

SpeedTrees have been a highly successful replacement for billboard trees and bushes for some time now but they have started to show their age and you must buy a license to be able to create them. Thankfully, last year N3V started using a free replacement for SpeedTrees in PlantFactory trees and bushes. These use LOD data and a new feature (new for Trainz but not for other games) called "Imposters" which render distant 3D trees as 2D surfaces that always face the camera. There is a growing number of PlantFactory assets on the DLS and I have replaced most of my SpeedTrees with PlantFactory equivalents.

One route that I encountered a few months ago, <kuid2:214658:101010:1> Aylesbury to London Marylebone (Updated), was a mass of billboard trees and tree splines used everywhere in great numbers. Surprisingly it still ran reasonably well in TRS22 SP6 HF1 but there were rendering issues for distant objects - mostly billboard trees and tree splines. I did some major surgery on the route and deleted all the tree splines and replaced all the billboard trees and bushes with PlantFactory alternatives. There was a significant improvement in performance and the rendering issues disappeared.

But that was my experience. Others may have had different results on different systems.

 

[guinea_elites92]

What are the specs of the semi-decent laptop? Provide processor, GPU, hard drive type, RAM amount and type. That may help figure out what may be something to look at.

Here you go man

 

[pdkoester]

Is the Graphics Card a dedicated unit or is it the one on the CPU? Dedicated ones work better. Is the Storage an NVme M.2 SSD or a spinning platter?

 

[guinea_elites92]

Is the Graphics Card a dedicated unit or is it the one on the CPU? Dedicated ones work better. Is the Storage an NVme M.2 SSD or a spinning platter?

IIRC It's one of those hybrid CPU-GPU thingies. I've heard that they're not that great but I haven't had any problems with them yet I don't know if my Storage is an SSD Or a classic disc but I'm gonna throw a guess and say that it's the latter rather than the former.

 

[johnwhelan]

IIRC It's one of those hybrid CPU-GPU thingies. I've heard that they're not that great but I haven't had any problems with them yet I don't know if my Storage is an SSD Or a classic disc but I'm gonna throw a guess and say that it's the latter rather than the former.

When building Middleton for Laptops to run on an i5 series I noted that speedtrees had a major impack on frame rates with a 3D score of 350. Your CPU/GPU scores 4461 so you're on the lower end of the spectrum. I suspect speedtrees will run but only with a careful mixture of assets. Take a look at Middleton for laptops and middleton for canal, under developer there is a show profiler so experiment a little to get a better idea of what your system will run. If it helps I have a RTX 3080 3d score 25,000 https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php and on some layouts I get still 5 frames per second.

Cheerio John

 

[Paul_Bert]

SpeedTrees have been a highly successful replacement for billboard trees and bushes for some time now but they have started to show their age and you must buy a license to be able to create them. Thankfully, last year N3V started using a free replacement for SpeedTrees in PlantFactory trees and bushes. These use LOD data and a new feature (new for Trainz but not for other games) called "Imposters" which render distant 3D trees as 2D surfaces that always face the camera. There is a growing number of PlantFactory assets on the DLS and I have replaced most of my SpeedTrees with PlantFactory equivalents.


What is the best way to find PlantFactory assets on the DLS?

 

[MichelLmbrt]

What is the best way to find PlantFactory assets on the DLS?

I think their names end with PF, sometimes followed by a number. I'm not entirely sure.

 

[johnwhelan]

Select scenery, Sort on build number they seem to be 5.6 build. To me the poly count seems fairly high but on the other hand they don't have the overhead of the speedtree engine rendering them.

Cheerio John

 

[MichelLmbrt]

Select scenery, Sort on build number they seem to be 5.6 build. To me the poly count seems fairly high but on the other hand they don't have the overhead of the speedtree engine rendering them.

Cheerio John

There are also Plant Factory assets that have the category "flora" not only "scenery".

 

[Paul_Bert]

There are also Plant Factory assets that have the category "flora" not only "scenery".

It appears there is no easy way to identify them. N3V initially released a large batch, which I downloaded. I have been looking for additional ones since then, but they seem to be few and far between.

 

[pware]

The PlantFactory software is free for non commercial use but there would be a learning curve. That may be a reason for the delay.