What hardware will you need for TRS2019?

[JAGG]

HW test link says: typeform doesn't exist... :-/

[Tony_Hilliam]

Thanks Jagg - fixed.

[dangavel]

hmm, i note yet again that all the examples on this new missive are nvidia cards, so I'll ask you this question for a forth time.

Have you tested the new version using any AMD cards on the mac platform ?
Has anyone tried to use the new version with a nvidia card on the mac ? ( no current or gtx 900 series Nvidia cards have native Mac drivers and the updates that i have tried to get my GTX 970 to work with are so far useless for TANE )

Will any new version of Trainz take advantage of Metal on the mac platform to overcome the woeful performance of non supported nvidia cards on the mac ? .

if you aren't going to test using any of the RX series cards as you don't have access to any current or recent macs just let us know and put us out of our misery. i can understand its a tiny market but it would be nice to just level with us that its not possible for you to do mac testing ....:-)

[Tony_Hilliam]

We’ve tested on Mac and AMD. Given Nvidia”s dominance and the ability to compare benchmark scores, listing one card is a good starting point to work from. We will provide a similar set of info for Mac towards release.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Nvidia’s TurfFX doesn’t run on Mac so that performance barrier is removed. Again if your system runs TANE it will run trs19.

[capdiamont]

Will we be able to use eGPU on the Mac to improve performance?

[Cayden]

We’ve tested on Mac and AMD. Given Nvidia”s dominance and the ability to compare benchmark scores, listing one card is a good starting point to work from. We will provide a similar set of info for Mac towards release.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Nvidia’s TurfFX doesn’t run on Mac so that performance barrier is removed. Again if your system runs TANE it will run trs19.

Disappointing that you continue to develop for the PC features that are not available on the Mac. Kind of turns Mac users off.

Cayden

[dangavel]

We’ve tested on Mac and AMD. Given Nvidia”s dominance and the ability to compare benchmark scores, listing one card is a good starting point to work from. We will provide a similar set of info for Mac towards release.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Nvidia’s TurfFX doesn’t run on Mac so that performance barrier is removed. Again if your system runs TANE it will run trs19.

Every time I ask you about Metal Tony, you seem to go all quiet......:-) I take it hasn't panned out as a performance booster as you hoped it would when TANE came out.... or perhaps it has as the latest version is coping quite well with my 2gb gtx 680 card .
Anyway, eventually i suppose somebody will report back on whether TANE and the 2019 version works well on the new iMacs, i am not going to buy one unless i have a report that says its flying along with a RX 580 with 8gb inside .....

[mcguirel]

Dangavel, you're asking for a direct response and we all should know by now Tony has the art of masking the truths. I hate to say it, but you're wasting your efforts. Furthermore, Nvidia is no longer the most dominant card as AMD in fact got ATI right in line with Nvidia. Tony, you're explanation of card coding preferred choice is basically stating, "We will do what is best for us, not best for the individual user"

And for the love of XXX, learn how to do proper lighting on Speedtrees…… Your example above still demonstrates even with this being the third version utilizing Speedtree you can't do it correctly...… Trees is the most predominant scenery asset of a route in most cases and trees do not turn brighter by 50% in the distances in real life with more definition from directional lighting than when you are close up...…. NOT IMPRESSED AT ALL and continues to be very distracting.

Buyer Beware, this will be a repackaged T:ANE SP3 with a couple of enhancements and maybe one unique feature, but that is about it. I feel way to many will be disappointed over the long haul

[Tony_Hilliam]

How do I respond to someone is accusing me of masking truths? It's a very tough position to be in when responding to a customer, but I'll do my best of responding with facts and not with emotion.

I thought I had answered the post pretty well, but it appears I missed the statement that we are not yet supporting Metal (although the omission was pretty much evident that we have not yet implmented this, otherwise my post, if it was simply to "mask truths" would have mentioned it).

McGuirel, we will do the best with our limited resources for the majority of our users. With 80% of users being Nvidia PC users, that is our focus. If you prefer that we focus on the 10% AMD PC and 10% Mac users (https://wccftech.com/nvidia-amd-inte...share-q3-2017/), then please provide us with the additional funding that is not going to come from product sales from these minoroty groups.

We know that we're not going to convert all the Trainz naysayers, but from the feedback we're getting so far i our closed beta testing is that those predicting our downfall (yet again) may be disappointed.

At some point we have a right to stick up for our company values and dismiss these offhand comments that attempt to do nothing but try to perpetuate the downfall of the company and product that so many other people want to thrive and survive.

We do as good as we can with our limited resources. We have many competing priorities. If we produces the prefect Tree Simulator, then McGuirel would be our first, but perhaps only customer. Instead, we have chosen to focus resources on things like Driver UI, stability, performance, and many other things.

So to summarize, I myself am NOT IMRESSED AT ALL about the attempt to turn TRS2109 into a Tree Simulator exercise.

I am very sorry if I have offended you, but if you're prepared to claim that I am hiding anything, you need to be prerared for my response, and my only option is to not hide anything and say it as it actually is!

And as for the "only one feature" comment, I assume you mean the "one" feature that improves "the lighting, materials, shaders, colouring, shading and texturing", and you've chosen to ignore the UI, AI, Command systems, and other changes completely.

McGuirel, as far as I know, you haven't actually seen the beta, so I would suggest that we try to calm things down now that we've both said our piece, an wait for (i) The Early Access version to be released and (ii) the final version to be released, before we go claiming that everything is a complete mess.

[Saieditor]

I would never have said you are masking the truth, Tony. Never.

That happened with TRS 2006. Huge change for all of us.

It is my intention to purchase TRS 2019 when it comes out because I intend to support you.

I figure your team are people of integrity, tested and tried, time and again, and you have always said what you are updating, and seek to improve or bed down anything you say you are updating in the hotfixes and the service packs. To that extent you stand up to your word, and that is human integrity: that is, unity between thoughts, words and actions.

Philosophy over; keep going.

Chris

[WindWalkr]

Every time I ask you about Metal Tony, you seem to go all quiet......:-) I take it hasn't panned out as a performance booster as you hoped it would when TANE came out....

Hi Dan,

As the resident Mac guy, I thought I'd weigh in on this one.

T:ANE was actually developed prior to the release of Metal for Mac. As such, it was written to support OpenGL, that being the only supported 3D graphics API on the Mac platform at the time. In fact, my own primary development machine did not (and still does not) support Metal. (Note: I have access to other machines which support Metal, but that doesn't change the fact that Trainz will no longer run on my current 'main' machine once we move to Metal.)

In TRS19, we're choosing to focus on features rather than the underlying APIs. This means that we are not moving to Metal just yet. I have in fact dabbled with Metal to review how much effort it will be to move us across, but a lot more time will need to be spent before we can determine whether Metal brings the performance benefits that Apple claims. As with anything, vendors love to show off the best-case scenarios, so while we know that certain cases do benefit substantially from Metal, it's not clear as yet whether Trainz falls into that category. My personal belief is that we will, but that's entirely unproven.

We'll certainly be moving Mac Trainz over to Metal in the future, but I can't put any particular date on it. It depends heavily on other priorities.

chris

[mcguirel]

Face realities Tony:

1) Limited Resources is not the fault of the consumer.
2) With T:ANE, hype played a 80% marketing and as of even today 3 years after release it is bugged to all get out in so many regards it isn't funny.
3) #2 leads me to this, attention to details matter more today than ever before. Lack of focus to attention to details will show significant face this go around.
4) #3 leads me to this..... WHO SAID I WAS MAKING THIS A TREE SIMULATOR????? YOU and utilizing to draw attention away from the facts and fail to see example used to illustrate said facts of attention to detail.
5) Why would anyone knowing their efforts will not be rewarded as a result of limited resources waste time to early access and reporting? Tony, face realities TIME IS MONEY.....

Say what you want, your rebuttals are nothing more than misdirect fluff in my opinion. MY OPINION and may not be reflective of yours (forum members).

[hminky]

What other Train-sim runs on a Mac?

None, because resources are too valuable to devote to a small minority market with a varying operating system .

AMD video cards? only bought one for TS12 that was enough for me.

Nvidia is better hands down.

Harold

[dangavel]

Hi Dan,

As the resident Mac guy, I thought I'd weigh in on this one.

T:ANE was actually developed prior to the release of Metal for Mac. As such, it was written to support OpenGL, that being the only supported 3D graphics API on the Mac platform at the time. In fact, my own primary development machine did not (and still does not) support Metal. (Note: I have access to other machines which support Metal, but that doesn't change the fact that Trainz will no longer run on my current 'main' machine once we move to Metal.)

In TRS19, we're choosing to focus on features rather than the underlying APIs. This means that we are not moving to Metal just yet. I have in fact dabbled with Metal to review how much effort it will be to move us across, but a lot more time will need to be spent before we can determine whether Metal brings the performance benefits that Apple claims. As with anything, vendors love to show off the best-case scenarios, so while we know that certain cases do benefit substantially from Metal, it's not clear as yet whether Trainz falls into that category. My personal belief is that we will, but that's entirely unproven.

We'll certainly be moving Mac Trainz over to Metal in the future, but I can't put any particular date on it. It depends heavily on other priorities.

chris

Thanks chris, it’s been a longtime finding this out, tony mentioned it way back when TANE first came out.I was interested as my 2010 Mac Pro will support metal , so essentially it’s of no advantage and open gl is the most important aspect. This will help me make a decision as to what to purchase card wise in the future.

[dangavel]

What other Train-sim runs on a Mac?

AMD video cards? only bought one for TS12 that was enough for me.

Nvidia is better hands down.

Harold

Nvidia is only better on PC or if they are supported Mac versions., i have a GTX 680 2gb which is about the last Nvidia card that is Mac bootable thst runs TANE well on low settings
. i also have a GTX 970 and that runs TANE like a snail as for some reason its not optimized to use open gl well on the mac, probably its the nvidia drivers. i run the gtx 680 using mac native drivers.
. the current RX580 may well be not as good as the Nvidia cards in theory, but as they are in current iMacs and ( some of them ) that one can buy for PC ,boot out the box. They "should" work well with TANE . However i'm not going to take a punt of $570 to see if one does or not as i've already spent $400 on the GTX 970 which was a complete waste .....

[hminky]

Nvidia is only better on PC or if they are supported Mac versions., i have a GTX 680 2gb which is about the last Nvidia card that is Mac bootable thst runs TANE well on low settings
. i also have a GTX 970 and that runs TANE like a snail as for some reason its not optimized to use open gl well on the mac, probably its the nvidia drivers. i run the gtx 680 using mac native drivers.
. the current RX580 may well be not as good as the Nvidia cards in theory, but as they are in current iMacs and ( some of them ) that one can buy for PC ,boot out the box. They "should" work well with TANE . However i'm not going to take a punt of $570 to see if one does or not as i've already spent $400 on the GTX 970 which was a complete waste .....

PC gaming is done on the Windows platform always has been always will be.

MAC is just a stepchild.

I remember the old quote "Why would I buy a MAC it can't run DOOM".

My late brother bought a MAC because his wife's coworkers said how great they were. Went back to a Windows system six months later.

Not that there is anything wrong with a MAC.

Harold

[johnwhelan]

PC gaming is done on the Windows platform always has been always will be.

MAC is just a stepchild.

I remember the old quote "Why would I buy a MAC it can't run DOOM".

My late brother bought a MAC because his wife's coworkers said how great they were. Went back to a Windows system six months later.

Not that there is anything wrong with a MAC.

Harold

Yes but if you do other things on a Mac then Trainz can be added. Remember many people with a graphics background started on Macs and having to learn something different after twenty years isn't always easy. I'd probably buy a refurbished Dell or HP workstation and drop in the GTX 970.

Talk nicely to Anne she picked one up for $399 somewhere close to Aussy.

Cheerio John

[Vern]

Most veteran simmers with an interest in more than just one product, will also more than likely be using Nvidia as these are the only GPU's under which MSTS will now run.

Not taking sides in the tree discussion, but these are a fairly essential part of most routes unless you're building the Victoria Line or Glasgow Subway. If you were to count the assets used in the average route, the majority of these will be foliage of some kind. So essential the program is optimized to treat these as efficiently as possible, both close up and as distant scenery.

[dangavel]

Yes but if you do other things on a Mac then Trainz can be added. Remember many people with a graphics background started on Macs and having to learn something different after twenty years isn't always easy. I'd probably buy a refurbished Dell or HP workstation and drop in the GTX 970.

Talk nicely to Anne she picked one up for $399 somewhere close to Aussy.

Cheerio John

I have a rog750,top specs, hardly ever use it, ( and quite honestly it doesn’t run TANE much better then the Mac Pro does ) I just don’t like windows and all my graphics software is Mac. I just need a good graphics card that will work with TANE , should not be too much to ask, but it appears it is !

[dangavel]

Most veteran simmers with an interest in more than just one product, will also more than likely be using Nvidia as these are the only GPU's under which MSTS will now run.

Not taking sides in the tree discussion, but these are a fairly essential part of most routes unless you're building the Victoria Line or Glasgow Subway. If you were to count the assets used in the average route, the majority of these will be foliage of some kind. So essential the program is optimized to treat these as efficiently as possible, both close up and as distant scenery.

Yep they are frame rate killers , I used a few of the jvc pine groups in the distant background , they were low poly, but they were animated to blow in the breeze, the route ground to a halt, but once I swapped them for the non animated version, things went back to normal. It’s important that we can use vegetation freely and still attain decent frame rates.