Should I consider a different version?

[NikkiA]

Norm,

Try a different video card if you can. This is a big part of your bottlenck on your machine. TS2010 makes more use of the video card than the other versions. SpeedTrees, in particular, use the video card for rendering instead of the CPU, which was used all the time by the older versions.

There are quite a few people here with the same machine specs that you have, and their machines run TS2010 quite nicely. I think the difference is their video cards.

John

While an 8400 isn't a *great* card, it's his CPU that is the furthest below spec - a Prescott Pentium 4 3.4GHz is *not* a "Pentium D or better", the Pentium D is a dual-core chip.

And while speedtrees do use the GPU somewhat, trainz is still very much CPU bound.

Of course, upgrading CPU is going to be a 3-item process, since he'll need a new CPU, motherboard and (most likely) RAM, which means it'll also be the most costly thing to upgrade.

By all means try a faster card if you can do so with a 'no questions money back in 7 days' deal or have some way of loaning a faster card. But don't be too surprised if it only adds a few FPS.

 

[johnwhelan]

I've had 2010 for about a week now, and Im finding that it doesnt run very smoothly on my older PC. I've been involved with computers professionally for over 30 years now, and fully understand the relationships betwen CPU, Memory and Graphics speed. My guess is a nice duo core system running a 64bit OS would be the way to go, but it just isnt in the cards right now. I dont have a problem using older apps, as long as they run well and still have available addons. I see many users here have multiple versions of Trainz and Im wondering if perhaps I should pick up 2009 or maybe 2006, if still available, until at such time that i can build a new PC. All thoughts appreciated. Thank you and Happy New Year!

TS2010 usually gets better frame rates than other versions as it dumps a lot more work down to the GPU especially in native mode. Speedtrees seems to be dependent in the GPU. I've also been around computers a long time. The first versions of Trainz used the cpu for most things, the locos and scenery objects were fairly low poly and the textures small. The cpu is the usual bottleneck on all versions before TS2009.

Try creating a small layout with just track and drop a simple diesel loco and boxcar on it and see what you get for frame rates. Look for items that have a small .im file which relates to the mesh size, that means not so much detail so shouldn't be so demanding. Avoid items that have multiple texture files. There is an overhead of 200 poly equivs for each texture file and this wasn't always well understood.

The difference between the recommended cpus etc for each version can be ignored. As Trainz has progressed so people have made bigger and better models or in other words more demanding in hardware requirements. They don't reflect the requirements to run comparable layouts and models more a sort of more realistic need of what you need to run the average layout / model.

Remember also that most content has not been created by professionals, so that means you get a wide range but some content is much more demanding than others.

Have you found the performance settings yet? In surveyor, main, options start in the video section and move the sliders across the to the left. Then adjust them slowly to the right as you trade off performance against visuals.

In particular TRS2006 drawing distance was much shorter than the TS2010 default so taking this down to 2000 meters the TRS2006 figure should improve performance substantially.

Somewhere in surveyor there is something to display the most demanding asset. Some fences are particularly demanding and frame rates have shot up once these have been switched to a less demanding style.

Cheerio John

 

[Normb6e]

Great advice John. Just spent an hour or so designing a simple layout and running a handfull of rolling stock around. Little by little I will add a few things and take note of what happens. Perhaps "rolling my own" will be the way to go until that new computer arrives later this yer. Thanks again.