How much memory on the graphics card

CGD

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How much memory on the graphics card

I intend to buy a new monitor with a resolution of 2560X1440 and a GeForce 760 card. Is it better with 4GB over 2GB? For the same price as a 760 4 GB card can I buy a 770 2GB cards. Or is 4GB much better so I should try to stretch me to a 770 4 GB card?

What is best given Trainz?
 
It was an easy answer.
Do you want to write a little about why 4GB is so much better than 2 GB. Do I have any use for it in Trainz?
 
2560X1440 is going to work the system fairly hard, bigger screens mean more content to render. It depends a lot on what you will be running, many are happy with a 1 or 2 gig card but much depends on the content, pick the right content and screen size and 256 mb will do fine, don't forget TS12 has DXT compression so the texture files take up 25% of the space that TRS2004 texture files did.

Personally I'd go for something fast with a fast bandwidth 512 rather than 256 so something along the lines of a R9 290 but the price is high at the moment, but it should be back to $400 within a month.

Think about what's important to you, a smaller screen size would work fine with a slower video card but when you push the limits on the screen size you need the hardware to support it. What CPU are you thinking in terms of?

Cheerio John
 
im my experience with the game a 770 would be beyond overkill(i have a 660 that sits 'idle' while playing ts12)...it seems this game caps out software wise before it can even touch the hardware(of todays standard).
 
I agree with sdiesel that the software is limiting (particularly the fact that it is still 32 bit and uses limited ram) on most new systems. I bought at 670 with 4gb since I use 3 monitors for work/play. Trainz runs in a 1920 window on 1 monitor with other streaming programs on the others. Using Aida 64 to monitor the system I have never seen the GPU memory usage go over 2 gb even running Roy's CPR route. The GPU utilization does go up to 99% at times (there are up to 40,000 speed trees of 24 types) but GPU memory doesn't seem to be used up. Using most routes even multitasking with several other programs neither the CPU (6 core) nor the GPU Utilization go over 20% very often. Try downloading Aida and check your current graphics card memory use, but I think that 2 gb should be plenty of memory. The rendering speed of the GPU will become more important with the next Trainz version.

- Glenn
 
it depends on what resolution you use .higher resolution means more pixels which filled more memory so if you just want to ue montier on that resolution then 2gb if u want to game o this resolution then 4 gb
 
I agree with sdiesel that the software is limiting (particularly the fact that it is still 32 bit and uses limited ram) on most new systems. I bought at 670 with 4gb since I use 3 monitors for work/play. Trainz runs in a 1920 window on 1 monitor with other streaming programs on the others. Using Aida 64 to monitor the system I have never seen the GPU memory usage go over 2 gb even running Roy's CPR route. The GPU utilization does go up to 99% at times (there are up to 40,000 speed trees of 24 types) but GPU memory doesn't seem to be used up. Using most routes even multitasking with several other programs neither the CPU (6 core) nor the GPU Utilization go over 20% very often. Try downloading Aida and check your current graphics card memory use, but I think that 2 gb should be plenty of memory. The rendering speed of the GPU will become more important with the next Trainz version.

- Glenn

I wouldn't base a computer on a single software product whether it's a super train simulator or a professional graphics rendering program. With today's computers it's wise to make an investment at the level you can afford that can give you the best performance in the future, or at least for a few years if possible. Having said this, never go for the bottom-most level and don't go for the way over the top, but rather go for the middle where you can get the best performance for the buck. A 4GB video card should handle the new 4K LCD displays out there very nicely while a 2GB can handle 1980-1080 very nicely without overdriving the hardware. What you don't want to do is go for the lower denominator, to save a buck, then get a super-large display. You'll end up with a large display that's not running at its native resolution and everything will look awful. This technology is not like it was a decade ago with CRT displays. A CRT could auto-sync down to 1024 x 768 and still look decent. Running an LCD display at less than optimal resolution, and you end up with a horribly displayed image. This is due to how the graphics are now drawn on the displays.

John
 
I have a EVGA 760GTX with 4 Gig on it,only because I play at very high resolutions 2570x1600 which runs flawless,anything at 1920x1080 or below you probably only need a 2 gig card.
Running Failworks and monitoring it often eats up to 3.1 gig on the card,its better to be a little overpowered than underpowered.

The 760 is a nice card,gone are the days of turning things down,every game I own runs max and ultra settings,very pleased with this mid end card.

Just posted some screenshots in my steam account.search for tads. TS12 runs and looks great.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970689228/screenshots/
 
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Benchmark Route?

It would be nice if there were a short benchmark route that would have sections that would test the various system hardware components in turn.
E.g. initially maybe heavy disk download to test that, then a section to test heavy CPU use, then main system memory use, then maybe GPU speed and then graphics card memory capacity etc.
So running the benchmark would reveal a lot of info about the system it is running on.
No idea what kind of things in a route test the various components - any ideas?
Maybe there is an existing route known to be resource use heavy?
Once there's a benchmark, running it on a few dozen random configurations and comparing results would help a lot in figuring out good hardware configurations.
 
Sure it's an old thread but the subject of what hardware you need to run version X of Trainz is a perennial one.
Is a cheap 2GB graphics card still sufficient?
 
Sure it's an old thread but the subject of what hardware you need to run version X of Trainz is a perennial one.
Is a cheap 2GB graphics card still sufficient?


depends on your definition of cheap, it maybe different to mine and what is acceptable.

If you want a benchmark use Middelton for laptops session and looked at the frames per second. Easy enough although whether it is representative of what you'd like to run is a different matter.

Cheerio John
 
Sure it's an old thread but the subject of what hardware you need to run version X of Trainz is a perennial one.
Is a cheap 2GB graphics card still sufficient?

i would say NOT, un;less you are happy with using lower end routes. i am currently using a 1gb radeon 5870 and it will work as long as you have simple routes , my gtx 680 2gb wasnt happy with larger routes and I went to 8gb which sorts out most issues , even an 11gb 2080 can be brought to its knees if the wrong assets are used.
 
In my opinion

In my opinion, a video card with good bandwidth and 2 gigabytes of memory is enough. Now games do not use a lot of memory, even at maximum settings, always the main thing was not volume but bandwidth. Just take the current card for today and don’t buy budget models.
 
In my opinion, a video card with good bandwidth and 2 gigabytes of memory is enough. Now games do not use a lot of memory, even at maximum settings, always the main thing was not volume but bandwidth. Just take the current card for today and don’t buy budget models.

Since this thread has been resurrected from the boneyard again, I'll disagree. Video cards today need much more buffer RAM due to the larger task they play in overall computer operations. Today's programs make more use of a video card and GPU than they did in the past for other things besides porting images to a screen. A video card today is called in for calculations and other fast mathematical processing needs because the GPU is many times faster than the video card and uses very fast, far faster dual-ported RAM that runs circles around the system RAM. Having a lot of system RAM is also beneficial in this regard as well because today's video cards use the system RAM for caching and buffering and will use a big chunk of that so you don't want to chintz on that either. Your Phys-X and other special functions are found on the NVidia GPU and not on the system themselves.

This wasn't always the case. Up to about 5 years ago, if not a bit more, video cards were just that video cards that processed and transferred images and data to the display-port and out to the display device. This is how it was since day one. In the 1980's I even repaired video terminals and early personal computers that had such circuitry on their motherboards for this purpose. As video cards got faster and faster, they spent lots of time idling away while the CPU and the rest of the computer system was processing data. Rather than waste this high powered processor with extra fast memory, developers, both hardware and software, found ways to make use of this computer within a computer to process stuff that requires lots of computations by a very specialized mathematically-oriented processor.

Dual-ported memory means that there are two separate in and out address spaces that allows for much faster and efficient concurrent operations. This extra port on the RAM comes at a cost and this RAM is very expensive compared to the cheaper single-ported RAM that is used in the rest of our computers.
 
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