Trainz Settings and Nvidia Settings Assitance

[MDG84]

I just bought a new computer in which my friend built for me. Since I spent a lot of money on the system I would like to run Trainz at the best possible performance possible and I have a few questions regarding Trainz settings itself as well as the NVIDIA settings. Before making this thread I did research this quite a bit and came across a few ideas here and there, but all the information I found was either older or did not help me.

Firstly, I will post my specs.
Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell 3.5GHz
ASUS Maximus VI Hero Z87
ASUS GTX770 GeForce GTX 770 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5
Samsung 840 Pro Solid State Drive
Crucial Ballistix Tactical 16GB DDR3 RAM
Corsair HX Series HX750 750W Power Supply
Windows 8.1

The Trainz settings itself under options I currently have at. Should these values be changed at all such as DirectX to OpenGL?
1920x1080
DirectX
Antialias mode set to 4
Verticle sync and refresh rate set to Auto

Option Sliders
I have been messing around with these a bit and it seems like I get really good frame rates with the settings maxed out, however, I notice some slight in game hesitation such as jerkiness every now and then. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens occasionally enough to where it is an annoyance. The jerkiness is sort of a back and forth motion with the train itself if viewing from an angle where I am watching it pass by. If I lower these settings and move the sliders all the way to the left I still get the jerky movements.

NVIDIA Settings
This is where I am confused and not sure what my settings should be. Under the the 3D Settings in NVIDIA Control Panel I currently have 'Let the 3D application decide' checked. There are 2 other options such as using advanced settings and choosing performance over quality or vice versa or having that option in the middle of the two. If I choose the 2nd option which is using advanced 3D settings I go under 'Manage 3D settings' where you can either select a program to customize and gives you options such as anisotropic filtering, antialiasing - FXAA, antialiasing gamma correction, texture filting, etc and/or gives global settings as well. I am not really familiar with these settings and not sure if they should be left alone or what. I am thinking if I don't have advanced 3D images setting selected I don't have to worry about those?

Lastly, what should the PhysX setting be? I currently have my graphics card as the selected option. The other 2 options are letting the CPU handle it or autoselect.

Basically, I am fairly happy with how Trainz is running on my new PC, but the one nagging issue is the jerky motion I occasionally see and if I can eliminate that issue then I will be 100% happy. I am also wondering if my monitor could be the issue. I bought the monitor in 2007 and is a Samsung Syncmaster 2494HM. Resolution is Full HD 1920x1080p and is 60hz.

 

[mcguirel]

I have my physics performed by the CPU because I have a 8 Core 4GHz CPU as of a recent upgrade for Maybe T:ANE and SpeedTree.
My resolution is 1920x1080 on 42inch 3D Monitor (and yes, play Trainz In 3D on Occasion, but not fully supported therefore not optimum. Does really assist with SpeedTree Creation to see it in 3D and you have a better appreciation for SpeedTree)

Found these to work the best for me (EVGA 660Ti). Could go much higher on settings, but I prefer FPS over minor visualization improvements with the very old game engine.
Manage 3D Settings:

Still stutters and that is the game engine, not the hardware but very minimal with how I have things configured.

 

[MDG84]

Thanks for posting. I will go ahead and copy those settings and see how things worked out. Is there anything that needs to be changed or added into the trainzsoptions.txt file?

This is what I currently have and I believe I have never changed or added anything.

-DepthBits=24
-StencilBits=8
-Jet=bin
-cabinfov=60
-DefaultAutoMip=none
-DynamicVertexBufferSize=4194304
-DynamicIndexBufferSize=196608
-VBO
-width=1024
-height=768
-framerate=200

 

[RoysTrainz]

Morning,

Yes you can use the settings Mcguirel provided the should work nice but I strongly advice to play with settings so you understand what the do and don't for your config not just do what others do after play and test more soroughly.
The trainzoption change the widht and height to what your monitor is!

these are mine:
-DepthBits=24
-StencilBits=8
-Jet=bin
-cabinfov=80.696
-surveyorfov=60
-DefaultAutoMip=none
-DynamicVertexBufferSize=4194304
-DynamicIndexBufferSize=196608
-VBO
-width=1920
-height=1080
-allownoctrlrightclick
-freeintcam
-showkuids
-framerate=30

let me know if this helps

Roy

 

[MDG84]

Thanks joosten. I will change the resolution to 1920x1080. I was wondering that myself. I am not sure what cabinfov and surveyorfov are, but the only thing I changed was resolution. Would I possibly benefit from changing the framerate at all?

 

[JCitron]

the FOV values, or Field of View, change the depth of the camera. The surveyorfov is very useful as it allows you to zoom way out and not end up in space looking at the map, and thusly you can zoom out far enough to edit baseboards, place textures, and even objects. Adjust to your liking and experiment until you find a setting that works for you.

John

 

[MDG84]

Thanks for the clarification John.

I seem to be running into an odd issue after making the changes in the NVIDIA Control Panel. I will post the screenshots below.

The grass/weeds look different if you move around. The top picture is what I am not noticing. The bottom picture is the way it is supposed to look like. Any idea why this is happening and what setting it is to where I can change it back to get normal looking grass?

 

[mcguirel]

Having the same issue with the new driver.

 

[MDG84]

I switched from DirectX to OpenGL which eliminated the issue with the grass. Problem now is I am getting pretty low frame rates of around 10 and perhaps a little less than that in some instances with the settings I changed in NVIDIA. Not sure why as I believe the PC I have is sufficient enough for this game to be running at a high level.

edit: Frames increased significantly by switching back to DirectX. Might just have to deal with the weird grass for now.

 

[jankvis]

Is the grass from my collection (JVC)?

If so, there is a light issue on the latest versions of Trainz. When these where created they looked fine in the current version but as you see in your last picture, it have unwanted 'dark' areas. As far as I know, the only solution is to re-make the mesh in GMax (or other 3D software). It looks 'dark' in both DX and OGL on my PC. I also use NVidia (730 desktop v.) I have not used Blender so I do not know how mesh appear when exported to Trainz. It would take months to update all freeware assets so I have no update or support for it. The big question is how it will look in T:ANE...

Jan

 

[mcguirel]

Not the problem, Jankvis.................

 

[jankvis]

Not the problem, Jankvis.................

If not, why does this issue disappear when I use mesh with other export settings?

Jan

 

[mcguirel]

The new Nvidia driver is causing alpha issues during fast motion I never saw with previous versions of drivers.
If you can fix it, great more power to you.

 

[MDG84]

Yes, it is part of your set. I definitely do not blame you for the issue. I think the issue is with the drivers. The last couple of times opening up Trainz I have not had the issue though so it must be a hot or miss thing. Thank you by the way for all of the awesome stuff you make. It seems like I discover different grass types in different routes and I end up either getting new ideas and having to change or place new JVC grass splines in the route I am creating.

 

[jankvis]

The new Nvidia driver is causing alpha issues during fast motion I never saw with previous versions of drivers.
If you can fix it, great more power to you.

We are talking about the same issue but as you say there is an issue with the new NVidia drivers. Still you have some 'dark' areas (even with previous drivers) with some of my previous grass splines (as the one on the screenshot). This happends from TS2009 or TS2010 and TS12. In TS12 it's more obvious. This has to do with the export settings in GMax and the graphics engine in the latest 2 or 3 version of Trainz. If you look at the trees from author Clam1952 you don't have this issue?

Jan

 

[pcas1986]

Hmm. I'm going to join in this thread as I've also experienced some jerkiness but in surveyor. For example, while panning around a consist in Surveyor. My new PC is very close to the original poster except I have a Gigabyte 780Ti 3GB video card. The processor is the same. I've tried both DirectX and OpenGL and the jerkiness does not occur in DirectX so that's where I'm staying for now. I too have looked around in the NVidia settings but, as yet, I haven't changed anything. The reference to TS2004 didn't fill me with confidence!

I mostly create and test content so running sessions is a little unusual for me although I did take it for a spin in S&C. There was still some hesitation but I'm going to blame that on the game engine.

I bought this setup mostly for T:ANE so I'm not going to get too wound up with problems in earlier versions including TS12.

What was the kuid for those sample grass/weeds? I'm curious to see if I have the same issue.

 

[MDG84]

JVC@-Grass359s 20x40m,<kuid:328583:1057> is the grass spline.

I changed the settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel, but for whatever reason I could not change Antialiasing Transparency to Multisample. For whatever reason the setting is greyed out and can't be changed.

 

[pcas1986]

JVC@-Grass359s 20x40m,<kuid:328583:1057> is the grass spline.

I changed the settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel, but for whatever reason I could not change Antialiasing Transparency to Multisample. For whatever reason the setting is greyed out and can't be changed.

Thanks. This is what that asset looks like in my system: (Edit: sorry I used the wrong grass. This is the correct one.)

It looked much the same in both DirectX and OpenGL.

I've yet to play with any other options but I did look at the Anti Aliasing Transparency and I can select Multisample and the other oversample options. Perhaps some other settings is overriding it.

 

[clam1952]

I find in anything over an Nvidia 4xx, it's best to avoid any anti-aliasing settings in the Nvidia Control panel, has one or two strange undesirable effects on some assets that use alphas, I just leave it all at default.
That works well enough for a GTX 680 in DirectX or Open GL at 20% less FPS. Just checked that spline, appears to be fine here.

i7 -3770k @3.5Ghz 16GB DDR3 2GB GTX680 750 Watt Antec PSU, 3 SSD's 120, 240 & 480GB (OS and two dedicated Trainz drives) + 1 Conventional drive.
What I have changed are the following.

Maximum pre-rendered frames :- 4
Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration :- Single display performance mode
Power Management mode :- Prefer maximum performance.
Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias :- Allow
Texture filtering - Quality :- High Performance
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimisation :- On

Slight stutter still present in tracking camera mode when "target" passes the Camera if it's close to the track even with SSD's. This occurs in exactly the same places as it did pre SSD which was more noticeable and in TS2010, and TS12 pre SP1, so putting that down to internal coding. No stutter otherwise.

Also use the same settings on my number 2 PC which is a Phenom 1090T x6, 8GB DDR3 and GTX460 + SSD, apart from lower FPS which are still good, there is no difference.

 

[mcguirel]

It is not the meshes as I stated before - Here is the solution that corrected this issue for me.
It is Driver Related............
Was driving me nuts with my LOD Grass Mesh that compliments my textures and other assets