Poor performance with AMD Radeon R9 290 Video Card

[happyj]

I have an almost identical computer to yours with one exception. I have Windows 8.1 instead of Windows 7, and get good performance running TS12. I also had inferior sluggish performance running on another computer with Windows 7. Don"t know whether the O/S could make a difference but can only comment on my own experiences. Cheers

 

[JakeTrainz]

Weird. Maybe the drivers are better for windows 8. I have another HP Pavillion desktop I got for free from a friend that has Windows 8.1 on it. It uses and AMD A8-5600K APU with the Radeon 7560D integrated graphics. My younger brother play Trainz 12 at 1280x1024 with the setting turned down a little and it runs pretty decent. Would windows 10 beta be worth trying? I've already tried it in VirtualBox and I do like it so far. I can also install Windows 8.1 on another drive using a temp product key that will give me 30 days of use until I must activate (That's what I did on the HP computer and used a program to find the key in the bios after installation), however I would NEVER pirate software. Anyway, would trying 8.1 or 10 be worth it?

 

[ATSF854]

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

the answer to this is very simple. Put it this way, I'm running dual GTX 970s and the game still runs poorly on densely populated routes. Reason? trainz is mostly utilizing a single core of your CPU. Sure the GPU does some work, but in all reality it seems like the CPU is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, with what seems to be only one core. I'm doubting that this is a driver issue to be honest.

This should help answer most of the stuff in this thread. Unless somebody can prove me wrong. I mean I barely saw a performance difference in trainz when I upgraded from a low end mobile GPU.

 

[Enzo1]

the answer to this is very simple. Put it this way, I'm running dual GTX 970s and the game still runs poorly on densely populated routes. Reason? trainz is mostly utilizing a single core of your CPU. Sure the GPU does some work, but in all reality it seems like the CPU is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, with what seems to be only one core. I'm doubting that this is a driver issue to be honest.

This should help answer most of the stuff in this thread. Unless somebody can prove me wrong. I mean I barely saw a performance difference in trainz when I upgraded from a low end mobile GPU.

I do believe that train utilizes 2 cores, but is not taking full advantage of 4 cores of processing. Also, since trainz right now is only a 32-bit program, it only can only at the most utilize 4GB of RAM, meaning that even if you have 32GB of RAM on your machine, it is not improving Trainz performance one bit. Also, the current graphic engine of Trainz does not utilize most of the fancy features of that graphics card, meaning that really, you aren't getting any more performance improvment. You would be surprised how much background processes actually slow the game down, since they consume RAM. I often close out all unneeded processes in order to improve Trainz performance. Trainz appears to be very heavy on RAM, and not hard on graphics side of it for some reason, that of which I cannot figure out.

 

[ATSF854]

I do believe that train utilizes 2 cores, but is not taking full advantage of 4 cores of processing. Also, since trainz right now is only a 32-bit program, it only can only at the most utilize 4GB of RAM, meaning that even if you have 32GB of RAM on your machine, it is not improving Trainz performance one bit. Also, the current graphic engine of Trainz does not utilize most of the fancy features of that graphics card, meaning that really, you aren't getting any more performance improvment. You would be surprised how much background processes actually slow the game down, since they consume RAM. I often close out all unneeded processes in order to improve Trainz performance. Trainz appears to be very heavy on RAM, and not hard on graphics side of it for some reason, that of which I cannot figure out.

at most I've never seen more than 8gb of ram being used when playing trainz with loads of background processes, and have never seen more than 30% of my CPU used as well when playing trainz. mind you, it's a 4 core processor.

to cut this even shorter, the game just isnt optimized for more modern hardware so there will always be issues.

 

[malikrthr]

Hopefully when the new simulator is released, it will be optimized for modern hardware. I have two different 5th generation NVIDIA GTX cards in my computer, 16GB of RAM in dual channel and a quad core AMD Phenom Processor. Every now and again, I'll notice stutter in Trainz 2010. My hard drive is not an SSD. Would SSD's fully solve the stuttering problem? For now, I just defragment the hard drive every couple of months.

 

[Zeldaboy14]

Maybe the cards have some code in them for Windows 10, and some code conflicts with Windows 7, thus these issues arose.

 

[JCitron]

at most I've never seen more than 8gb of ram being used when playing trainz with loads of background processes, and have never seen more than 30% of my CPU used as well when playing trainz. mind you, it's a 4 core processor.

to cut this even shorter, the game just isnt optimized for more modern hardware so there will always be issues.

This is similar to what I have observed. This is much older code, being the old Auran Jet Engine which is about 14 years old now.

TANE is a 64-bit application as well as multithreaded meaning it will use as much of the resources that can be thrown at it once it has been optimized.

John

 

[Enzo1]

at most I've never seen more than 8gb of ram being used when playing trainz with loads of background processes, and have never seen more than 30% of my CPU used as well when playing trainz. mind you, it's a 4 core processor.

to cut this even shorter, the game just isnt optimized for more modern hardware so there will always be issues.

Going to contend you on that, I've noted that between Trainz and Win 8 that almost all of my resources are used other than processor and GPU. Shut down some background processes and saw dramatic performance increase.

 

[JCitron]

Going to contend you on that, I've noted that between Trainz and Win 8 that almost all of my resources are used other than processor and GPU. Shut down some background processes and saw dramatic performance increase.

In general, Trainz will remain on one of the cores. The OS and other background process, however, will use the other cores and probably the same one that Trainz is using at well, which would explain the better performance when shutting down these other processes.

John

 

[DRS337]

Everything being said in this thread makes a lot of sense. At the moment I'm only running TRS2006 (got a lot of time invested in a 500+board route)
my Pc is -:
Mobo - Asrock 890FX Deluxe3
CPU - AMD Phenom IIx4 Quad Core 980 Black Edition O/C @ 4.2Ghz
Memory - Crucial 16 Gb
HDD - WD Velociraptor 10,000rpm 500Gb
HDD - WD Green 1Tb x3
Graphics - SAPPHIRE HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB GDDR5 128bit x 2
Monitor - ViewSonic VA19 x3
O/S - Windows 7 64bit Professional

My Graphics are just budget jobs but I run Trainz on a 6Gb Virtual Disc with all sliders up full no problem at all with just one card, the other 1 running the other 2 monitors. But if I Crossfire the cards and run just 1 monitor to run Trainz (significantly increasing their capability) the whole system gets upset. Using 1 of the other monitors to run system watch apps, the CPU appears to be doing the majority of the work running at around 45-50% usage where as the Graphics is running at around 20% usage. Looks like I'll have to invest in a new Graphics card if I upgrade to Tane.