Trainz Update Announcement (SP6)

[pware]

32gb RAM is the minimum I would use and while I have DDR4, I would like to upgrade to DDR5 at some point. I get good performance with a GeForce RTX4060 8gb and an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU. Lower specs than these and I would expect to see lower FPS and some stuttering.

My main system specs:-

CPU Intel Core i7 10700F @ 2.90GHz
RAM 16GB
GPU 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

I have no problems such as stuttering running high density routes in TRS22PE

 

[passanger]

But those are my experiences. I appreciate that others may have different experiences.

Yes, that's the point. I'm really happy for those who is satisfied with the newest updates and I would like to be in your club, but many users, unfortunately, get rather bad experience. And many of us reported that.
So, currently, it seems N3V has even no intention to communicate anything about upcoming fixes (traditionally) to let all the users who bought the game to finally play. And that is concerning.
So, if somebody from beta testers or development team has any info on how it's going with upcoming fixes for TRS22 (I also have PE), it would be great to know when to expect them.

For now, it looks like N3V's business model is like breaking previous version of the game to make more users buy new TRS26. But does anyone guaranty that that new version is not worse then previous?

 

[pware]

it seems N3V has even no intention to communicate anything about upcoming fixes

I don't blame them. It has always been they case that they are "damned if they release information about an upcoming update and they are damned if they don't". But that said it would be nice if they could give a "heads up" on what is happening but without the product details and definitely they should NOT make the mistake of giving a release date, no matter how vague - if they are a day late there are those who will scream "blue murder".

I have the beta version of Trainz Plus (build 134634) and it does have some nice features that are sadly lacking in the retail (subscription) version. I test it out on work I have developed in the non beta version.

it looks like N3V's business model is like breaking previous version of the game to make more users buy new TRS26

A business model that is used by many in the software and other industries. Not a bad tactic.

 

[wreeder]

but many users, unfortunately, get rather bad experience. And many of us reported that.

Did you file a bug report or an helpdesk ticket? Creating a post in this forum is not reporting anything. N3V has made it very clear they do not monitor this forum as a normal part of their business activity.

So, currently, it seems N3V has even no intention to communicate anything about upcoming fixes (traditionally) to let all the users who bought the game to finally play. And that is concerning.

If you are not filing bug reports then this is normal for them. They do not respond to random posts in this forum. I have in fact after filing a bug report been told that the bug is fixed and will be in the next release or that the team is working on the issue and it won't be in the next release. That is about as specific as they get. Of course, this process can be greatly sped up by supplying a repro case that shows how you can cause the bug to happen but most users don't want to do that.
BTW, I was a private beta tester for TS2009, TS10 and TS12. They never told us about new features until they appeared in a test build and we had all signed a NDA.

 

[JCitron]

There is a performance hit with the current retail build and it's related to the new to the new tree engine. In addition to the new trees, which are flipboard objects, the game engine now converts all assets to billboards and flipboards including SpeedTrees. When there are a lot of objects, this can impact the performance as the assets are flattened out, figuratively speaking.

The developers have since worked on improving the performance and this is apparent in the current beta.

There are some system-level things you can do to improve your graphics performance and this definitely helps with TRS22/PE and PLUS. Go to your BIOS and make sure the Resizable Bar is enabled.

There used to be an option in the NVIDIA control panel to enable this, however, the option is now missing. To enable this you need to use the NVIDIA Profile Inspector.
https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=00eb...3dubG9hZC9udmlkaWEtaW5zcGVjdG9yLWRvd25sb2FkLw

After enabling the option here, I used the profile for Red Dead Redemption 2 because that seemed to work best for my RTX3080.

This resizable bar is also available for AMD systems but is called something else and does the same thing.

 

[passanger]

Did you file a bug report or an helpdesk ticket? Creating a post in this forum is not reporting anything. N3V has made it very clear they do not monitor this forum as a normal part of their business activity.

Of course. We had long chat under the ticket with performance statistic, video recording, system configurations, etc. I provided all possible information, shared DLS map where the issue is reproducible as well. Eventually, they just closed the incident and left a comment "passed to QA for investigation". So, I cannot even see the actual status, investigation results or any other updates on that...

 

[wreeder]

That normally means that the devs believe that there is an issue but they can't reproduce so it gets passed to QA because they have a wider collection of hardware to test on. At least that is positive. But you aren't going to get feedback until QA has something to report. It is a slow process.

 

[bolivar]

There is a performance hit with the current retail build and it's related to the new to the new tree engine. In addition to the new trees, which are flipboard objects, the game engine now converts all assets to billboards and flipboards including SpeedTrees. When there are a lot of objects, this can impact the performance as the assets are flattened out, figuratively speaking.

Yep. This issue has been mentioned by many a Trainz members on this forum. Thanks John for providing that summary and also the possible solution.


From AI:
Resizable BAR is a PCI Express interface technology that allows the CPU to access the GPU's entire video memory (VRAM) at once, rather than being limited to small 256 MB chunks. By enabling the CPU to efficiently map the full framebuffer, the technology facilitates concurrent data transfers of textures, shaders, and geometry, which reduces latency and eliminates bottlenecks in communication between the processor and graphics card.

When enabled in the NVIDIA Control Panel (indicated by "Resizable BAR: Yes" in System Information), this feature can improve gaming performance in supported titles, with benchmarks showing frame rate improvements of up to 10-15% in specific games. However, NVIDIA utilizes a whitelist system where the feature is only active for specific game profiles where performance gains have been verified, meaning it may be disabled by default for many applications unless manually forced via tools like NVIDIA Profile Inspector.

I have enabled the bar via Nvidia Profile Inspector.
I will investigate the performance improvements, if any. Thanks.

 

[pware]

To enable this you need to use the NVIDIA Profile Inspector.

The Profile Inspector has to be downloaded and installed (after running an AV scan of course) from the link given by @JCitron above.

In the Profile Inspector list of controls/settings it is in Section 5 under the somewhat obscure label of rBar - Enable. If the entry next to this label, in the second column, is showing Disabled then click on the Disabled entry, delete it and type Enabled. Then click the Apply changes on the top right corner of the app window.