Which drives should Trainz be installed on for optimal performance?

J

JonMyrlennBailey

Well-known member
I have a Windows 11 Home computer. There is a C 1 TB solid state drive which is connected via SATA cables. There is also a D 2 TB solid state m.2 drive connected directly to a slot in motherboard.

Windows 11 Home is installed on the C drive and so is Trainz TRS 2022 and TANE SP4 right now.

Is it better to:

1. Install Trainz on the C drive but have local data on the D drive in my case?
2. Install both Trainz and local data on the D drive?

May I specify a LOCAL DATA location at the time Trainz is installed?
Will LOCAL DATA have to be moved from the C drive manually after Trainz is installed?

I had TS 2022 PE installed on my C drive and tried to move local data to my D drive and it was a total flop. All My Content (routes, sessions, locos and other content) is now gone!
I followed the instructions on this link and there might have been a goof on my part.

Moving or creating a new Local Data Folder - Powered by Kayako Help Desk Software

support.trainzportal.com support.trainzportal.com

I will have to reinstall Trainz from scratch again.

Thankfully, each and every bit of my personal Trainz stuff is backed up in CDP.

I was hoping that by having my data/content on the speedy m.2 drive, frame stutter would be absolutely minimized all else equal. There are two m.2 drive slots on my MSI A5 socket motherboard. My "chewing-gum-stick" D drive is in the slot closest to the AMD Ryzen 9 CPU.
 
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Anyway, I have just reinstalled TS 2022 with both the program and the content/data folder on the D drive (the one of two M.2 slot closest to the CPU socket). There seems to be less frame shake noticeably with shadows and most every other setting maxed out on my initial test run of West of Denver with snow on the ground, cloudy skies and night-time driving for about two hours of driving so far. I'm thinking about doing the same for TANE SP4 soon and trying it out.

If anybody here has anything more to chime in about custom drive/folder location installation options vs quality of their overall Trainzing experience, please join in!! My notions are that data for rendering Trainz graphics feeds into driving sessions faster without a relatively slow SATA-connected SSD with Windows installed on it to stand in the way as a bottleneck to gum up the works. Am I correct for assuming this? My goal is to have Trainz run upon a "well-oiled machine" instead of "swinging upon a rusty gate" as a matter of speaking.

My 2 TB Samsung M.2 SSD is in fact "NVMe".

Here is an interesting video on M.2 drives:

<iframe width="930" height="523" src="
" title="M.2 and NVMe SSDs Explained" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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mick1960 said:
Actually there is one old but still valid rule of thumb 'drive C:\ is for Windows and Windows only...'
Click to expand...
True but it was also being used in the days of CP/M and in particular the likes of the Amstrad 8512 machine, a very capable desktop PC, which had two 3" drives, one for the OS the other data. As for today's technology the main advantage of two drives is that when Windows crashes you should still be left with the majority of your data. Multi-core CPU can of cause read-write to multiple drives simultaneously but in turn each core can still only do one thing at a time be it, for example, communicating with a drive or a GPU. Your NVMe drive is by far the fastest, in theory over three times that of SATA. You load Windows once and fiddle with Trainz for hours so logically Windows should be on the slow drive and Trainz on the faster. With hard drives and fragmentation that was very much the advice offered to gamer's but as today's SSD don't suffer such drawbacks resulting from endless OS updates and issues, OS, programs and data separation is today far less of an issue. That said in view of your current configuration in my view your option 2 would I believe be the better option. Peter

CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) was an OS from the last century and pre-dated DOS, Bill Gates, Microsoft and Windows so it wasn't all that bad.
 
I recently went through this decision making process of where to store Trainz files. I have two M.2 slots on my mother board. Both contain 2TB SSDs. My C: drive is where Windows 11 and all other programs are stored including Trainz TANE, TRS19, and Trainz Plus. After installing to the C: drive, I redirected my Trainz Local Data Folders to my second M.2 slot a 2TB SSD and named it T: drive (for Trainz) naming the folders appropriately to identify the Trainz version and build number(s). I have a third external 2TB SSD in a housing and its connected via a Super Speed USB. I back up my Trainz D: drive regularly to the external SSD.
 
Update: I have just reinstalled TANE SP4 and it's local data to boot on my m.2 "race drive".

Indeed, frame shudder has noticeably diminished for TANE this way too even with game settings cranked all the way up. There will be an occasional hiccup (graphics fish bite) on the screen. It's all about the smoothness of rendered graphics motion to me. I still don't think Trainz animated graphics will ever have the level of fluid smoothness of a Hollywood motion picture filmed in Panavision and Technicolor. Trainz is still a computer-generated cartoon. My current game-playing PC is priced at about $1,800 for the total cost of the hardware guts inside the chassis. I doubt if even a 50 grand PC could make Trainz run any smoother.

TS 2022 does indeed seem to use much less power and run cooler temperature-wise on my gaming PC than does TANE SP4 by observing the GPU performance data in NVIDIA Experience. It seems as N3V Games software engineers engineered TS 2022 to take it easy on computer hardware resources. They did at least one thing right.
 
@JonMyrlennBailey - Two notes. One: yes, it’s best to have the application and the data on the fastest drive (M.2 being a much faster interface than SATA) and not compete with Windows, as you ended up doing. The biggest benefits are faster loading times, quicker world generation and faster DLS installations (not downloads unfortunately).
Two: While TRS22 is more optimized than TANE, it’s still pretty poor by gaming standards. Trainz as a franchise is notorious for being super CPU heavy; on top of using GPU horsepower it drains a lot more from the CPU than most games. For some weird reason, TRS22 is actually worse than TRS19. I remember reading a thread where someone showed the difference between the two, and it was pretty insane. TRS19 got over 190 fps vs TRS22’s 40 fps (I have played both and can confirm). Sometimes the newest game doesn’t necessarily mean a better performing game. I did some testing with NVidia global settings to improve performance as well, I wrote about it in this thread.

Cheers
 
Trainz on M2 4x, 3DSMax on M2 2x, SO W10 on C:
I readdressed also the TRS's AppData to a folder on the M2 4x
 
Yes indeed, following the reinstall, personal CDP content seems to load in much faster with the whole Trainz works now at home on the M.2 D drive.

Other sims I have (Jet-engine/Auran TRS 2012, Steam-based American Truck Simulator and Microsoft Flight Simulator X Deluxe) don't give any drive location install options. I would still have liked an N3V Games-included install wizard to have relocated the Local Data folder from AppData to another drive folder. More WIZARDS in Trainz, N3V, please.
 
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I have my Trainz22 on two separate SSD drives both 2T. I have a total of 4 internal drives 2X 2T SSD, 2 SATA 2T and 14T which are used for textures, reskins, Trainz back-ups, & other non-program files. I have had this set-up for about a year and haven't any problems.
 
No amount of expensive PC hardware, it seems, will ever make any edition of Trainz absolutely shudder-free and as slick as a freshly-polished ice skating rink. Microsoft Flight Simulator X Deluxe and Steam American Truck Simulator both have smoother and slicker animated graphics than does Trainz, apples for apples, regardless of what machine they are installed on.

Trainz locos in T22 still stumble (hesitate at the throttle and slow slightly) when executing the DRIVE VIA (track marker) command, loco headlight beams still penetrate bridge decks and the Chase camera doesn't hold it's original set low angle going through tunnels as the previous Trainz editions did with the optional Underground Boundaries placed at portal ends. The Chase camera tips up in the air exiting a tunnel in TS 2022 (or when Chase mode is resumed) and looks down at the top of the loco. I have to keep manually moving the camera back low again following tunnel passes and in scenes out of range of lineside cameras. Underground boundary objects won't work their old familiar magic in 2022. They still will put you inside the cab through tunnels and keep rain out of tunnels. In older Trainz editions, the Chase camera would gladly resume its low angle following the exit of the train through a necessary underground boundary track object. This way, I could just sit back and train-watch with hands off the keyboard and mouse.

In a number of ways, TS22 is crappier than TANE SP4 and even Jet-based Trainz editions as well. I miss the flashes of lightning and the roar of thunder from TS12 in a stormy WEATHER ENVIRONMENT. The only plus side of TS22 is the cool Rocky Mountains West of Denver route, the improved road Carz and its cooler and lower wattage performance for the GPU. I don't think TS22 has a resettable trip odometer for locos.

Some of the content (particularly certain pieces of rolling stock especially custom boxcars with closeable/openable doors some with bicycle riding murals on them) that is compatible and downloadable for TANE and TS12 won't work (import or load into) in TS22.
 
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JonMyrlennBailey said:
Yes indeed, following the reinstall, personal CDP content seems to load in much faster with the whole Trainz works now at home on the M.2 D drive.

Other sims I have (Jet-engine/Auran TRS 2012, Steam American Truck driver and Microsoft Flight Simulator X Deluxe) don't give any drive location install options. I would still have liked an N3V Games-included install wizard to have relocated the Local Data folder from AppData to another drive folder. More WIZARDS in Trainz, N3V, please.
Click to expand...


This may help @JonMyrlennBailey, for your Flight Sim >>> How to install Flight Sim on a different drive?
 
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