Video/monitor/ram/upgrade

[Dermmy]

Hi Folks

Current System:

Intel #6300 2 Core Duo CPU
ASUS P-58E Mobo
2Gb PC6400 DDR2 RAM
7600GT 256Mb Graphics Card
17" LCD Monitor

Trainz is just about all I run, but in pursuit of higher fps on poly-heavy routes I am considering an upgrade....

The budget will just about stretch to:

Additional 2Gb System RAM
8600GTS 512 Mb Vid Card
21" Widescreen LCD Monitor.

...the first two cause it will be faster, the third because it will be sexier

Any comments/suggestions on what might be more appropriate to running Trainz....

Andy

 

[johnwhelan]

Hi Folks

Current System:

Intel #6300 2 Core Duo CPU
ASUS P-58E Mobo
2Gb PC6400 DDR2 RAM
7600GT 256Mb Graphics Card
17" LCD Monitor

Trainz is just about all I run, but in pursuit of higher fps on poly-heavy routes I am considering an upgrade....

The budget will just about stretch to:

Additional 2Gb System RAM
8600GTS 512 Mb Vid Card
21" Widescreen LCD Monitor.

...the first two cause it will be faster, the third because it will be sexier

Any comments/suggestions on what might be more appropriate to running Trainz....

Andy

32 bit XP / vista can only address 2.7 gigs of memory anything else you can leave in the packaging since all it does is get warm so a 512 Mb upgrade will probably work as well. The trendy video card this week is the 8800 GTS so I'd hold back until the price drops on that one or you have enough cash to buy one. I'd go video card first.

Cheerio John

 

[ZapperJet]

Drop the extra RAM and spend the money towards the video. As of right now I use 2GB of RAM without any issues, and on average I have at least 512mb left while running any of my apps (Trainz, Oblivion, 2142). My video, though, makes the big difference. It's a frame pusher, especially for Trainz (which means that It'll get the max that Trainz has to offer, not necessarily 100 fps all the time!).

If your looking for cheap, the 8800GTS 640mb OC reaches the same range of FPS as the 8800 GTX 768mb.

Cheers,
John

 

[llebrez]

All of the above are very good answers. I second them. But: Everybody talks about frame rates. I think the trick is to get high frame rates at the max resolution. Using my 8800GTX I get just so-so resolution (or image detail), but high frame rates. Oh yes I have tweaked evrything there is to be adjusted and everclocked. Problem is that 8800 cards have no sharpness control. 79XX cards do have it, and are sharper! So my 8800 sits in the box waiting for a solution that may never come. Remember that the 8800 heats quite well and consumes quite a bit more. I have even thought to use it to toast my bread in the morning!

 

[Euphod]

Forget the RAM, put the money to an 8800 GTS 640....you won't be disappointed. OC that 6300 for maximum pleasure.
I am well and truely pleased with my 8800, and don't feel a need for "sharpness" at all.
Ed

 

[Dermmy]

Hmmmmmm...

Without the 2gb of RAM the budget will (just) stretch to a 8800GTS 640 and a 22" ASUS widescreen.

Confused about the 'sharpness' thing though and also about all the 'will Trainz run on a widescreen' posts in the forum...

Anybody care to quantify the probable performance difference between a 8600GTS 512mb and the proposed 8800GTS 640mb? There is a significant difference in price...

Andy

 

[johnwhelan]

Hmmmmmm...

Without the 2gb of RAM the budget will (just) stretch to a 8800GTS 640 and a 22" ASUS widescreen.

Confused about the 'sharpness' thing though and also about all the 'will Trainz run on a widescreen' posts in the forum...

Anybody care to quantify the probable performance difference between a 8600GTS 512mb and the proposed 8800GTS 640mb? There is a significant difference in price...

Andy

Look it up on tomshardware.com then buy the 8800 and leave the monitor a week or two.

Cheerio John

 

[GP_38-2]

Possibly my most favorite site
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=512&card2=475

Highlighted in bold is where the 8800 GTS is faster.
Short overview: Yes the 8600 GTS has faster GPU and memory speeds, However those speeds aren't everything. The more pixel pipelines the better. In this case the 8800 GTS has 24/20 over the 8600 GTS's 16/8. This leads to nearly twice the memory bandwidth available and nearly double the pixel fill rate.

The 8600 series really isn't a high end gaming card. It will work but if you can spare the cash the 8800 GTS 640MB will keep you going for a long time.

An interesting card that just is appearing on the market:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=544&card2=475
I don't believe it's been released yet, but if you can wait a few weeks this might be card to consider. Decent performance, and I'd expect it to be a bit cheaper than the 8800 GTS 640MB

 

[ZapperJet]

Hmmmmmm...

Without the 2gb of RAM the budget will (just) stretch to a 8800GTS 640 and a 22" ASUS widescreen.

Confused about the 'sharpness' thing though and also about all the 'will Trainz run on a widescreen' posts in the forum...

Anybody care to quantify the probable performance difference between a 8600GTS 512mb and the proposed 8800GTS 640mb? There is a significant difference in price...

Andy

I haven't got a clue what sharpness is. The control is greyed out. But if it's anything like anti-aliasing then you should be fine.

I would go with the 640mb version, as a precaution. I am 100% positive that the BFG 8800 GTS 640mb OC (note: the OC version, not the standard!) reaches almost identical marks as the 8800GTX 768mb. So, to be sure, I'd go with 640mb over 512mb.

Cheers,
John

 

[SuperFudd]

If you are of the opinion that the "people" in Trainz appear under fed, go with the wide screen. :hehe:

 

[Euphod]

There are two BFG OC'ed 8800 640 cards, one is OC and the other is OCII. I have the former, and am well pleased with the results. It is also paired with an Asus board, 2G ram and a dual core 6850. The 6300 should do well with it, especially if you tweak it a bit.

As far as the monitors go, I have a Syncmaster 403, at standard 4:3 ratio aspect, so I can't really speak for the widescreens.

Ed

 

[Dermmy]

Longish post, but probably worth the read if you are interested in trainz performance...

As noted above, I today replaced my 7600GT 256Mb card with a brand spanking new 8800GTS OC 640Mb card.

Expecting great things i deliberately created a poly-heavy session through Belen Yard on my upcoming Clovis Sub route. Before the change i ran the session carefully noting FRAPS frame-rates at various identifiable spots.

At the grade crossing - 27 fps.
Under the overpass: - 12 fps.
Passing the ground signal - 15 fps.
passing the first sanding tower - 4 fps.

Yes - four! It was poly-heavy. I won't bore you, but there were 20 spots benchmarked.

After the graphics card upgrade guess what? In every single spot the fps was EXACTLY the same. I spent 4 hours with my local computer guru and we tried everything. With and without Anti-aliasing, with and without Anisotropic filtering, different screen resolutions, different refresh rates, different video drivers old and new, the lot.

We must have run that session 50 times and in every test at every benchmark spot the fps was identical every single time.

The only explanation I can think of is that at some point the video bottleneck stops being in the GPU and/or Graphics memory and starts being some upper limit on the amount of data the Jet engine can throw at the system hardware. I guess my 7600 surpasses that level.

And as mentioned by Ileberez the screen is absolutely definitely sharper with the older card.
------------------------------------------

The new widescreen monitor didn't work out either. No matter what we tried the screen was not re-sized to suit, but simply stretched, resulting as SuperFudd pointed out in short fat people (which is OK) but also short fat trains, which isn't OK.

So I am now sitting in front of exactly the same rig as I had this morning, but am out of pocket 4 hours labour plus restocking fees on a shiny new graphics card and a short fat monitor.

Live and learn...

Andy

 

[Euphod]

What resolution are you accustomed to using? The advantage to having more card is usually to run in higher resolutions with the same frame rate. Trainz does use both the CPU and the GPU to a more or less equal degree. At least, that's been my observation.

I went from a P4 3.6 and an AGP 7800 card to a Duo Core 3.0 (6850) and an 8800 640 GTS and noticed huge gains all around.

Ed

 

[Dermmy]

1280 x 1024, which is the natural resolution of my present screen.

We ran the widescreen at it's natural resolution and at several other sizes down to 800 x 600, no changes. I have tonight run my present screen set at at 1024 x 768 and at 800 x 600 (and made relevant Traizoptions changes) with NO change in framerates.

I agree with the CPU though - when I changed from my old PIII 540 to the 6300 Dual Core there was a significant change.

I do recall though on the old PIII updating the vid card on that for no apparent performance gain. Apparent because that sad old rig wouldn't run Trainz and FRAPS... LOL

Andy

 

[DaveW]

I have a nVidia 8800GTX 768mb, DX9, OpenGL 2.1.
I still use the nVidia drivers that were supplied with the card,
ver. 97.92(6.14.10.9792.)
The system and card run flawlessly in DX or OpenGL.
I updated to 163.71 and this caused display problems, I did not get as far as trying Trainz before reverting to the original driver.
I also use the older "Nvidia control panel " ver. 1.3.6.20.
Have you tried using Nvidia nTune on your system?

DaveW

 

[Dermmy]

Dave - tried several drivers including the one issued yesterday, 163.71, 97.92 (which is the driver I run the present card on) and several suggested in threads found by googling the problem. Some older drivers wouldn't recognise the card, but every 'good' driver produced exactly the same results.

Nvidia nTune? Not familiar with that, but most of the 'tweaking' was done by Matt - these things get a bit over my head...

Andy

 

[DaveW]

Hi Dermmy,
I am not much of a "techi" myself.
Nvidia nTune is software that is available free, from the Nvidia site
It will optimize your computer/graphics system.
Might be worth a try.

DaveW

 

[johnwhelan]

Longish post, but probably worth the read if you are interested in trainz performance...

As noted above, I today replaced my 7600GT 256Mb card with a brand spanking new 8800GTS OC 640Mb card.

Expecting great things i deliberately created a poly-heavy session through Belen Yard on my upcoming Clovis Sub route. Before the change i ran the session carefully noting FRAPS frame-rates at various identifiable spots.

At the grade crossing - 27 fps.
Under the overpass: - 12 fps.
Passing the ground signal - 15 fps.
passing the first sanding tower - 4 fps.

Yes - four! It was poly-heavy. I won't bore you, but there were 20 spots benchmarked.

After the graphics card upgrade guess what? In every single spot the fps was EXACTLY the same. I spent 4 hours with my local computer guru and we tried everything. With and without Anti-aliasing, with and without Anisotropic filtering, different screen resolutions, different refresh rates, different video drivers old and new, the lot.

We must have run that session 50 times and in every test at every benchmark spot the fps was identical every single time.

The only explanation I can think of is that at some point the video bottleneck stops being in the GPU and/or Graphics memory and starts being some upper limit on the amount of data the Jet engine can throw at the system hardware. I guess my 7600 surpasses that level.

And as mentioned by Ileberez the screen is absolutely definitely sharper with the older card.
------------------------------------------

The new widescreen monitor didn't work out either. No matter what we tried the screen was not re-sized to suit, but simply stretched, resulting as SuperFudd pointed out in short fat people (which is OK) but also short fat trains, which isn't OK.

So I am now sitting in front of exactly the same rig as I had this morning, but am out of pocket 4 hours labour plus restocking fees on a shiny new graphics card and a short fat monitor.

Live and learn...

Andy

I think this is why we need to build up some information on what works and what doesn't work. If you could be kind enough to run one of the benchmarks that would be very useful. They exist for both TC and TRS2006.

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=14993

Also I note you don't give any other details about the system. Memory, cpu etc would be nice to know.

Thanks John

 

[SandwichSpread]

Hi Folks

Current System:

Intel #6300 2 Core Duo CPU
ASUS P-58E Mobo
2Gb PC6400 DDR2 RAM
7600GT 256Mb Graphics Card
17" LCD Monitor

Trainz is just about all I run, but in pursuit of higher fps on poly-heavy routes I am considering an upgrade....

The budget will just about stretch to:

Additional 2Gb System RAM
8600GTS 512 Mb Vid Card
21" Widescreen LCD Monitor.

...the first two cause it will be faster, the third because it will be sexier

Any comments/suggestions on what might be more appropriate to running Trainz....

Andy

You obviously missed his first post John, now this gets really interesting!! Can I have your old 7600 Dermmy?? :hehe:

Chris

 

[johnwhelan]

You obviously missed his first post John, now this gets really interesting!! Can I have your old 7600 Dermmy?? :hehe:

Chris

This is nuts. The only thing I can think of is there is something wrong possibly in the drivers or a bit of Malware.

Pity the new card was returned. I would probably reformatted the drive and reinstalled the operating system.

It would be nice to see how the today's system benchmarks against the others using one of the standard benchmarks since we have the figures for the faster video card already. If the figures are the same then Trainz is unable to take advantage of the latest video cards which I personally doubt if not then there is something wrong on the machine.

Cheerio John