Planning a new PC build - Does Trainz prefer Intel/Nvidia over AMD?

[epa]

My current PC is a Frankenstein build that, quite frankly, has been on life support for a few years now. Currently using a Ryzen 5 5600X and a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of VRAM. Other specs include a pretty minuscule (by modern standards) 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, with Trainz installed on a 1 TB NVMe SSD and all my content on a 4 TB 5400 RPM HDD. Thermals in it aren't great and it does get quite warm and throttle often. I wanted to upgrade my GPU when I replaced my Intel i7-7700K with the Ryzen, but this was during the peak of GPU shortages and insane price markups, so I held back. I bought my current motherboard and CPU just to get Windows 11 compliant, and was never particularly happy with my choices, particularly the motherboard lacking built-in WiFi and Bluetooth.

I recently got my car paid off, and one of the things I really wanted to do after getting that debt out of the picture was to build a new PC. With new Trainz content becoming quite demanding (and a new Marias Pass coming next year that I personally am very excited for), and other games starting to push this build to its absolute limit, I think it's time. Other games I play on this system include American Truck Simulator, Beam.NG Drive, Planet Coaster, and Cities Skylines. I also run tons of console emulators.

But I am out of practice. I've always preferred and Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU, but I'm reading of issues with the i7-14700K while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is currently a far better bang for the buck, and sips power in comparison. On the GPU side, I thought I wanted an RTX 4070, but I'm hearing that the AMD RX 7800XT is offering more VRAM (16 GB vs 12 GB) at a similar price point. I'm shooting for a smooth frame rate in TRS22 with max settings at 1440p resolution.

Does Trainz prefer one brand of CPU and GPU over another, or is it all mostly irrelevant?

 

[johnwhelan]

The latest Intel CPUs apparently have an undocumented feature, series 13 / 14 and I don't think the brand of CPU is important.

Intel says it has found the issue causing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs to crash

The patch that could fix it is still weeks away.

www.theverge.com

GPU nVidia allows a couple of features that currently AMD does not support but that may change.

Nvidia recently announced 16 gig versions of some of its GPUs. I'm not sure how important 16 gigs in over 12 gigs. The memory bandwidth also comes into play. I have 8 gigs of memory and task manager shows only about 2 gigs are in use running trainz. Your figure may well be higher.

Compare different GPUs here

PassMark Video Card (GPU) Benchmark Charts - Model List

Video Card Benchmarks - Over 200,000 Video Cards and 900 Models Benchmarked and compared in graph form - This page is an alphabetical listing of video card models we have obtained benchmark information for.

www.videocardbenchmark.net

RX 7800XT comes in below the RTX 4070.

A GTX 1070 comes in a a quite respectable 13,510. I'm not sure how much difference you'll see.

Performance will depend on the assets you run.

Cheerio John

 

[ricomon35]

@epa - Your questions have been asked and answered numerous times, in many different threads, on this forum. Several threads like this have been started with good suggestions in just this year alone. Maybe use the search function before starting yet another computer build topic.


Rico

 

[johnwhelan]

@epa - Your questions have been asked and answered numerous times, in many different threads, on this forum. Several threads like this have been started with good suggestions in just this year alone. Maybe use the search function before starting yet another computer build topic.


Rico

Yes but the intel problems are fairly new and may not be reflected in earlier threads.

Cheerio John