Trainz+ poor performance and latest update error

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dinsdale

New member
Hi People,

First - MacBook Pro 2018 with i9, 16Gb ram and Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB. So not the fastest these days. Trainz+ build 123844.

Since updating to the most recent set of upgrades, I have found the performance worse and with this week's upgrade at least one of the routes is unable to be played. I have got to Newcastle on the Deltic Flying Scotsman route having saved my progress so far. I can no longer access the train controls either on screen or in the cab. Help. What can I do. With this long route don't want to start from scratch.

Regards

Andrew
 
Running Trainz becomes more and more demanding. What can you do?
1.) Stick with an old version of Trainz you are happy with (Tane maybe?)
2.) Upgrade to a more robust Mac and run settings on lowl
3.) Build or buy a Windows machine for gaming.

I'm a Mac guy but I did #3 and I'm happy I did. There are just too many great games/sims that are Windows only and there are so many different upgrades available for a gaming box. I just recently upgraded my CPU and graphics card. But I still use my five Macs for everything else. I loaded up the latest release on my Mac M1 mini just to check performance and the results were not good.
 
Gpu performance is always going to be an issue with Macs, I have 8gb rx580 on mu cheesegrater mac pro and that could be brought to its knees on large routes with old assets , probably due to the elderly mac pro internals not processing the info fast enough , newer units are better if they are top end, but even the top end specs wont get much better then 3060 performance . my three year old acer nitro laptop with 6gb 1660ti runs rings around the 8gb card in my 2010 hex core mac pro, it can run at ultra settings with no issues. I hate to say it, but if you buy a mid range PC games unit you'll get better trainz results unless you splurge on the top end macs .
 
Thanks for the feedback. I probably should have noted that I also use Train Simulator on Crossover with much better performance. Might switch to trying Trainz on that platform.

Only have room for the one device but am planning on a M3 based device in the next year.

Any ideas on why the train controls are missing?

Andrew
 
dinsdale said:
Thanks for the feedback. I probably should have noted that I also use Train Simulator on Crossover with much better performance. Might switch to trying Trainz on that platform.

Only have room for the one device but am planning on a M3 based device in the next year.

Any ideas on why the train controls are missing?

Andrew
Click to expand...
Hope you are not going to buy a high end M3 for gaming or also for gaming. I’ve wasted a lot of money for a Mac Studio Max (not just for gaming, eh!) but if could go back I would buy a MacMini 16/512 for work and my actual Wintel gaming machine I got for 1100€ (5800x3d, Rtx 3050, 32gb ram and 1tb ssd). Me too I’m running Dovetail’s TS and there’s no alternative to a Wintel machine. Parallels is a good option but not for dx9/dx10 graphics demanding games.
 
I am a Mac guy! Since before Mac (my first Apple computer was the pre-Lisa Apple ///). I have around me five Macs. (and 3 old ones "on the shelf") However, for my gaming I built a PC. There are just too many good games available on PC only. Yes, I tried a PC VM on my Mac, but I "simplified" my life by running Mac software on Mac and PC software on PC. If you game you really should have a PC. Do I wish it were this way? No. But it is the reality. My "go to" sim is Windows only. Many (most?) of the top games are Windows only. It is what it is.
 
Thanks for your thoughts people. Unfortunately I only have room for one computer to Crossover/Parallels for me. I am using Crossover for gaming instead of Parallels as the performance appears to be better. I tried the Windows version of Trans in both and performance was abysmal - way worse than native Mac. So will need to put up with it until I can afford a Mac upgrade.
 
The Mac do fine for Trainz. They don’t optimize Trainz as much as they do Windows but they are making it better on the Mac. Turf-FX is still in beta I think, but ASi and Metal optimizations have been done. More should be done, but it works and I think doing well.

One thing to keep in mind, they completely changed what the performance settings do on the latest versions of Trainz22/Plus. If you ran on Ultra settings before, you need to drop it down to high settings, etc. play with your settings to gets things to where you like it.

Wait for M3 version of your Mac form you want. It will be a while before Trainz is optimized for it, but it has a good deal of power for Trainz in the meantime. Enjoy Trainz on your Mac. I do enjoy Trainz on my M1 Mac mini. If we don’t push them to do better on Trainz with Macs, it will never be better. One thing some people think is bad about ASi Macs is they don’t have Intel CPUs, but in reality that is a good thing for many reasons. By having ASi Macs, developers can share code between their iPhone/iPad versions and the Mac versions. That saves time and money. ASi Macs pack a lot of power in them, while saving energy and this saves money on electricity. Also saves money by not so much heat generated. ASi Mac’s have replaced most or all the Intel Macs in processing power.

I figure at some point, the green people are going to put a limit on power consumption of PCs.
 
I have the same issue on a Windows PC. I'm running TRS22 build 123794 on the following setup:
Windows 10 Pro Version 22H2 Build 19045.3693
Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.19053.1000.0
64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900K 16 Core 3.20 GHz LGA 1700 Chipset
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 MHz DDR4 32.0 GB (31.7 GB usable)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
Motherboard: ASUS 2790 Plus WIFI D4 TUF Gaming

When running UMR the track disappears. It is like I am running on ballast only. The problem appears even at the lowest settings. I did not have that problem on the previous build.
 
When running UMR the track disappears. It is like I am running on ballast only. The problem appears even at the lowest settings. I did not have that problem on the previous build.
Click to expand...
It's the track being used. Try a different track and the route will run better. Some track is "heavy" and causes really bad performance. One of the symptoms is the track drawing in S L O W L Y and coming in chunks a bit at a time. The other symptom is moving around and having nothing but spline points then the track appears.

If you still experience this kind of performance problem, I recommend dropping the vsync down to half. That helps a lot and I noticed that also dropped my GPU temps a lot too.
 
Can I throw in my tuppence worth too? I'm finding that my TRAINZ Plus (Build 123844) is not only running at a slow frame rate when in use (I'd estimate as low as 2 frames a second sometimes), but even when it's paused and in the background it's slowing my entire computer down (M1 iMac). For example, any video I try to watch runs as jerkily as TRAINZ does and selecting items from menus in Finder is like using a mouse that's been liberally dowsed with treacle. Typing this post with TRAINZ paused in the background, there's a half second delay for every keystroke. Activity Monitor tells me that TRAINZ is using between 37% to 55% of CPU time and a fair old whack of the GPU too, even when paused. I think there may be a cumulative effect in that it seems to get worse the longer TRAINZ is dormant the background. Is TRAINZ doing something surreptitiously that I could stop without affecting performance (eg - some sort of debug routine). As far as I can see I haven't consciously selected anything or invoked any needless gremlins. ps: All performance settings are already low.
 
johnnytrain said:
Can I throw in my tuppence worth too? I'm finding that my TRAINZ Plus (Build 123844) is not only running at a slow frame rate when in use (I'd estimate as low as 2 frames a second sometimes), but even when it's paused and in the background it's slowing my entire computer down (M1 iMac). For example, any video I try to watch runs as jerkily as TRAINZ does and selecting items from menus in Finder is like using a mouse that's been liberally dowsed with treacle. Typing this post with TRAINZ paused in the background, there's a half second delay for every keystroke. Activity Monitor tells me that TRAINZ is using between 37% to 55% of CPU time and a fair old whack of the GPU too, even when paused. I think there may be a cumulative effect in that it seems to get worse the longer TRAINZ is dormant the background. Is TRAINZ doing something surreptitiously that I could stop without affecting performance (eg - some sort of debug routine). As far as I can see I haven't consciously selected anything or invoked any needless gremlins. ps: All performance settings are already low.
Click to expand...
What route are you running? My m1 Mac mini isn’t that bad. What is version? How much ram do you have and how much space free on your hard drive? I don’t think it is doing anything deliberately wrong. I have been running using 8gb ram on my other computers and 16gb on my mini. Is everything up to date?
 
capdiamont said:
What route are you running? My m1 Mac mini isn’t that bad. What is version? How much ram do you have and how much space free on your hard drive? I don’t think it is doing anything deliberately wrong. I have been running using 8gb ram on my other computers and 16gb on my mini. Is everything up to date?
Click to expand...
Thanks for replying. It's my own route and it is large (an scenic area of 26 x 16 grid squares in an overall area of approx 50 x 40) - I've constantly and recklessly added to it, not to mention converting the entire thing to HD Terrain. To be fair, it's probably pushing the boundaries. The thing is, the downturn in performance was quite sudden and I think it coincided with the recent update, although to be fair it may have been me adding the scenic straw that broke the camel's back. That said I made a few changes which seem to have ameliorated the issue somewhat, namely: Swapped the two Tornadoes that I was running up and down for a blue pullman unit, and deleted some grass spline assets which I had used very extensively that suddenly became faulty. (Wherever I had a trackside wall or fence I would CONTROL-key duplicate the entire spline, offset it slightly, then REPLACE that spline with the grass (or fireweed, etc) spline. Quick and efffective following every curve and contour with minimum effort.) Anyway, today everything's running a bit more smoothly. Maybe it was the iMac doing something yesterday like Spotlighting my TRAINZ folder in the background? Not sure. I see that TRAINZ in Edit Mode is currently still using 60% of my CPU capacity though. For the record iMac with 8GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, Sonoma 14.2. 303 GB of disk space still free. I would dearly love a few more Petabytes of RAM though.
 
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