Poor performance with AMD Radeon R9 290 Video Card

[JakeTrainz]

*Reposted under this section for more help

I just purchased a new ASUS branded AMD R9 290 graphics card with 4GB vram and the performance with Trainz is the same or even worse than my previous card (EVGA GTX 650ti BOOST with 2GB Vram). I have tried DirectX and OpenGL and the game still runs slower than expected. I was hoping to max out the settings on Trainz and still enjoy smooth game play. Older routes seem to work fine, but newer TS12 routes do not perform so well. I have the latest drives from AMD installed and have all the latest drivers for my motherboard. I have Trainz install on a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB solid state drive and am running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I have the power options set to "High Performance" as well, so I am not sure what the problem is. I reinstalled Windows 7 after installing the new card to avoid NVidia/AMD driver conflicts. I have all the updates and latest drivers for everything so I am not sure what the problem is. Any help is appreciated.

Specs:
ASUS P8Z77-V PRO Motherboard
Intel Core i5-3570k Quad Core CPU @ 3.40Ghz
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x 4GB) 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM
ASUS AMD Radeon R9 290 Video Card w/4GB GDDR5
Samsung 840 EVO Solid State Drive 250GB
Seagate Barracuda 1TB Hard Drive
Corsair CX750M Power Supply
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (fresh install w/updates, drivers, etc.)
ASUS VS247 1920x1080 Monitor

Again any help is appreciated. This video card was not cheap and I do not want to have to buy a new one.

 

[drchoi21]

I also have same problem on my GTX 980. any solutions?

 

[LNERlover5]

Is there anything known regarding the way Trainz address large quantities of VRAM? Both the GTX 980 and the R9 290 have 4GBs of VRAM, and it has been seen in alternative games that weren't well optimised that larger quantities would infact reduce performance compared to a card with a lower quantity due to the way the software address the VRAM. Just a thought.

Jack.

 

[JCitron]

I posted in the other thread that this could possibly be due to having remnants of GForce drivers left over after the change. Having read the stuff here, I don't think it's related to that. Perhaps this has to do with TS12 being a 32-bit application and unable to make full use of the RAM and the video drivers which are optimized for a 64-bit environment.

John

 

[d0g]

Hmm... I have a system with specs similar to the OP...

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Radeon R9 270X video card (this is a 2 GB card, compared to the 290x which is 4)
AMD FX-8320 8-core processor
8 GB RAM
1 TB Western Digital HDD
320 GB SSD
750w psu
Asus M5A99X motherboard

I have Trainz 12 installed on my WD HDD, and have never had any issues with it. I can view multiple freight trains at once on Marias Pass without much stutter. I also run MSTS, TS 2015, and Ship Simulator Extremes, and they all run almost flawlessly... so with you having a similar video card to mine... I'm not sure what is giving you issues.

 

[JCitron]

Hmm... I have a system with specs similar to the OP...

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Radeon R9 270X video card (this is a 2 GB card, compared to the 290x which is 4)
AMD FX-8320 8-core processor
8 GB RAM
1 TB Western Digital HDD
320 GB SSD
750w psu
Asus M5A99X motherboard

I have Trainz 12 installed on my WD HDD, and have never had any issues with it. I can view multiple freight trains at once on Marias Pass without much stutter. I also run MSTS, TS 2015, and Ship Simulator Extremes, and they all run almost flawlessly... so with you having a similar video card to mine... I'm not sure what is giving you issues.

There are two factors here:

First the OP has an I5 which is a middle of the road processor compared to the I7. Your AMD processor is more closely akin to the I7 which has more internal cache and cores than the I5s.

Second, What kind of PCI-e bus do you have compared to the OPs motherboard. These newer video cards are rated for PCI-e 3.0, and may be plugged into an older PCI-e 2.0 bus and work fine. The problem then lies with the bus throughput being unable to handle the large amount of data which causes the video card to under perform rather than work at its full potential.

John

 

[pdkoester]

I have no problems with GTX 980, use driver sweeper or other utility to remove any old video drivers, and perform a clean install of new driver.

 

[LNERlover5]

First the OP has an I5 which is a middle of the road processor compared to the I7. Your AMD processor is more closely akin to the I7 which has more internal cache and cores than the I5s.

Second, What kind of PCI-e bus do you have compared to the OPs motherboard. These newer video cards are rated for PCI-e 3.0, and may be plugged into an older PCI-e 2.0 bus and work fine. The problem then lies with the bus throughput being unable to handle the large amount of data which causes the video card to under perform rather than work at its full potential.

John

Due to architectural differences, the 8000 series Bulldozer and Piledriver based FX CPUs perform closer to core I5s in typical low thread situations. When software is properly optimised for multi-core then you can expect closer performance to a socket 1150-1155 core I7, however the socket 2011-v3 I7s are a step above in terms of single and multi-core performance.

Also, modern GPU's still don't saturate the bandwidth available via PCI-E 16X 2.0. This TomsHardware article provides a deeper look.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/23.html

Jack.

 

[JCitron]

Due to architectural differences, the 8000 series Bulldozer and Piledriver based FX CPUs perform closer to core I5s in typical low thread situations. When software is properly optimised for multi-core then you can expect closer performance to a socket 1150-1155 core I7, however the socket 2011-v3 I7s are a step above in terms of single and multi-core performance.

Also, modern GPU's still don't saturate the bandwidth available via PCI-E 16X 2.0. This TomsHardware article provides a deeper look.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/23.html

Jack.

Sure the card has more than the capabilities, and so does the bus to handle the data, but the rest of the system may not. In some cases, just like having too big a cache or paging file the system runs out of data causing a data under run. In the old printing technology for the imagesetters, or even when burning a DVD, a data under run is detrimental and causes the print or disk burn to fail. With graphics you'll have pauses and stutters as the cache is filled up and emptied, which is the same issue with systems that haven't been optimized for performance due to an over-sized cache.

There's more to this than just the video card, which I'm trying to say.

Thank you anyway for the info on the AMD chips. I haven't followed them too much since I deal mostly with Intel.



John

 

[JakeTrainz]

My motherboard has PCI express 3.0. Should I bother upgrading to a 3770K (LGA 1155) or just save some money and buy an i7 with an LGA 1150 motherboard? Or is my board/CPU fine? Trainz only seems to use less than 50% of my CPU, but what's interesting is it heavily uses a single core instead of all 4. Is this just the way Trainz is designed.?

Also, will T:ANE improve performance because it's 64-bit?

 

[JCitron]

My motherboard has PCI express 3.0. Should I bother upgrading to a 3770K (LGA 1155) or just save some money and buy an i7 with an LGA 1150 motherboard? Or is my board/CPU fine? Trainz only seems to use less than 50% of my CPU, but what's interesting is it heavily uses a single core instead of all 4. Is this just the way Trainz is designed.?

Also, will T:ANE improve performance because it's 64-bit?

If your motherboard can handle an I7, go for it. It's a worthy upgrade that will give you a few more years out of your system and then some.

TS12 will only use 1 core and it's really not that CPU intensive. Most of the performance is with I/O to and from the bottlenecks in the system such as hard drives.

 

[JakeTrainz]

My system is not even two years old (built March/April 2013) and I never max my CPU except when video editing, and I rarely do that. I don't feel I need to upgrade my CPU just yet. Is my i5 "bottle-necking" the R9 290? Other games run silk smooth and are more graphically intense than Trainz is.

 

[JakeTrainz]

Should I just hold off until I'm able to get Trainz: A New Era? It says it's 64-bit so will that help?

 

[mukblade]

Some pretty good figures there. maybe the I5 3.4Ghz may let the system down a little, probably I would uninstall Trainz from the SSD and then re-install Trainz on 'D' drive assuming that your SSD is 'C' drive, and the Seagate is 'D' drive - I only use my 'C' drive 240GB SSD for Windows ONLY and install all my games everything else on 'D' drive a 3TB HDD (Windows 8.1 Premium) Heard a whisper years ago that SSD may have an issue running 2 programs at once, with Windows 7 running in the background, might be causing an issue running Trainz. Other than that try a decrease in your maxed out settings and screen resolution can slow games down also

 

[JakeTrainz]

I actually have two SSDs, one Samsung 840 EVO 250GB and one Samsung 840 120GB. I made the mistake of writing too much to the 840 drive and it's performance became slower, so I bought the 840 evo on Black Friday and installed my OS on that. After transferring everything over, I formatted and use the other ssd as a secondary drive. In Addition to these two drives, I have a Seagate Barrcuda 1TB as a mentioned in previous posts. Trainz is the only program I keep on my C drive in addition to windows. Everything else goes on either the 120gb ssd, or the 1tb hard drive. The only exception is programs that don't give the option to install under separate drives such as chrome or firefox. I will try moving to the 1tb drive to see if it makes a difference.

 

[JakeTrainz]

I tried both drives and the game still runs slow. I honestly feel no difference from my GTX 650ti BOOST and this R9 290. Is there anything I can do? Or is Trainz just very picky about hardware?

 

[JCitron]

I tried both drives and the game still runs slow. I honestly feel no difference from my GTX 650ti BOOST and this R9 290. Is there anything I can do? Or is Trainz just very picky about hardware?

It's not so much picky about hardware, but more about the drivers. Ensure that your system is clean as having leftover junk from a previous video card, especially an AMD on a now GForce system can cause awful performance.

John

 

[JakeTrainz]

I did a clean install of Windows 7 to avoid that issue and then installed all the latest drivers and updates from ASUS and AMD. I only had my boot drive plugged in when installing to avoid files ending up or being deleted from other drives.

 

[clam1952]

Looking at reviews, some good some not so good, it appears that some Asus R9 290's have a bios switch on the card, Silent which reduces it's performance or Performance.
Other Asus R9 290's have a poor quality cooler which isn't up to the job and causes the card to throttle under load, think that was from Toms Hardware. I'd suggest having a look there actually as there are quite a few people having problems with R9 290's
Suggest putting ASUS R9 290 Problems into Google may find it's something easily sorted out.

 

[JakeTrainz]

Thanks for the reply. I looked that term up on Google and found people that have serveral issues with R9 290 and 290X cards from all manufactures. I have not had those specific issues (screen flickering, screen going black, bsods, etc.), but it is very interesting. I have tried the drivers from the ASUS disc that was included with the card and the drivers directly from AMD. When I turn down the setting in Trainz it helps, but the frames are like a roller coaster, very high one second, lagging the next. I also get random freezes that last anywhere from a second to 30 seconds. The game also sometimes crashes, but not very often. I am considering going back to my Nvidia card and selling this card on eBay to pay for a better Nvidia one, but I'm still not sure. Any suggestions, thoughts, etc.