TC3 performance help

H

hokitika

New member
Hello,
I wonder if others have had difficulties in gaining reasonable fps in TC3 and if so can anyone please suggest any optimizations that have been found helpful. I have TC3 as a standalone installation without T2006 orT2009. My system specs are : WinXP sp3, Intel core 2 CPU 6700 @ 2.66GHz, 2048MB RAM and a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics chip. I've defragmented the hard drive after the installation. I am really dissapointed that this system specification cannot manage reasonable fps ( it does in other software ) most often only single figures. It is paticularly dissapointing as some of the models, Locos and buildings ( signal boxes for instance) are very nicely modelled indeed.
I appreciate any thoughts or suggestions
 
Push the memory up to 2.5 gigs or slightly more. That will give you another 512mb of memory that Trainz can use.

Your graphics card looks very reasonable:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-price,2323-6.html

What sort of display are you using? if its much larger than 1440 by 900 then you have a lot more pixels to drive.

TC3 has some settings for performance, do you have these all maxed out? If so try dropping them back a little especially the distance one.

The other thing you can try is running TRS2009 and importing the TC3 content. Native mode should give you all the performance you desire even if the trees aren't perfect.

Cheerio John
 
Thanks very much for your help....I'll try to downsize the screen resolution ( 1680_1050) as you suggest. I think that 32bit systems can utilize 3.5Gs of RAM....so I can try that. The CMP asset dependencies system has stopped me now, as I can't now load a built in scenario, ie 'the condor' as I'm told there are missing dependencies....however I could run it last night which is when I discovered the problem with performance? I can't think what has happened. Trainz system has quite a learning curve for me.

Your suggestion that I could run it through the T2009 game sounds interesting, although I don't really want lots of extra content I feel it would be worthwhile if it does increase performance...is that your experience? Is the importing of TC3 into T2009 straightforward?

Many thanks for your advice.
 
TC3 is a bit of a resource hog it has to be said, sorry about that.

Best things are to give it as much memory as you can and to stop all those background tasks (skype, MSN, Anti-Virus auto scan, iTunes, etc etc) that may be running.

Reducing the resolution may take some of the strain off your graphics card as suggested.

If you don't intend to run the whole route from Skipton to Carlisle you may find you get better performance with one of the three route sections.

The worst areas for framerates will be around the large stations at Skipton and Carlisle.

To transfer TC3 into TS2009 use CMP to open for edit all the TC3 assets and then from TS2009 CM2 import content and point it at the TC3 'Editing' folder.

It will take a while and there will be content which shows as faulty in TS2009. Some people report much better framerates in TS2009, personally I find that not to be the case though.

You should be able to find some other threads that discuss this in more detail.

Hope that helps,
Mike.
 
Try the latest driver from NVidia. This made a big difference for me. I have the 8800GTS, which is a slightly slower than the card you have.

John
 
Hi,

The other "problem" with TC 3 is that the route creators added a lot of detail to the route...

As i view a train past some of the towns, there's stuttering, back into the open country and it's a lot better.

I think it's possible to create a landscape that is just too much for the latest PCs (with all the display settings on max).

One thing that helped my system was to adjust the "resource memory" - logic dicates that this should be as big as possible - but it didn't seem to work like that for me. Do try different settings!

As a lat thought - not all the content that shows as "faulty" doesn't work...
 
Hi

You have not mentioned it, but I assume that you have changed some of the standard 8800GTX config settings? I am running the 8800GTX card with very nice results but it took a fair bit of experimenting with nVidia settings and the trainzclassicsoptions file. Performance settings I pretty much max out.

Colin.
 
Fats HDD

The biggest jump up in speed/FPS for me was putting Trainz on to Western Digital Raptor hard drives. They spin at 10.000 instead of the normal 7200, this gives a vast improvement on access times. I now have 3 of them, one for each of 06,09 nd TC3. They are not too expensive now either. :wave:
 
Faster HDD

The biggest jump up in speed/FPS for me was putting Trainz on to Western Digital Raptor hard drives. They spin at 10.000 instead of the normal 7200, this gives a vast improvement on access times. I now have 3 of them, one for each of 06,09 nd TC3. They are not too expensive now either. :wave:
 
Hello and thanks for all the helpful information in this thread. The ccleaner utility is useful...thankyou. The nVidia driver is up to date. Hokitika is on the west coast of NZ, but I've not been there, ther are various places on the south coast of the UK with Moari names etc.

I have made a Graphics chip profile through nHance as opposed to the nVidia control panel, using moderate settings for AA in order to aid performance. Its helpful to hear about the Western Digital raptor drives...does the GB capacity factor into how a game performs?

Of interest for nVidia users is that nHancer has a switch to allow both CPU cores to be selected in a games profile ( if this works), however I don't know how to test whether or not TC3 is indeed utilising both CPU cores? Possibly games do that autommatically and I've read somewhere that TC3 does utilise multi-core CPUs. Could someone advise if this is so and does it need to be enabled somehow?
Thankyou for all the help!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top