Graphics Card; What's the best bang for my buck?

Howdy all. I'm relatively new to trainz still, I've only had it for about a year now, and I'm still learning how to use it.

I got trainz because I was disatisfied by Dovetail games' train simulator game since it both had poor framerates and also just not fun after a while. So I went to trainz hoping for a better result.

I was satisfied with it but it shockingly was not a big improvement performance wise. I've turned my graphics down much more and it runs mediocre now but I'm still dissatisfied, since I have a limited palette when it comes to building routes or running on them. I can't run on routes that use pofig trees or high quality buildings because they turn my game into a frame soup. Even worse is that some older objects or units drop the frames a bit on occasion. Plus, it's pretty embarrassing for my computer when the description of a route for trainz 2009 says "designed for low end computers so it should run fine" but ends up being choppy.

It would be really nice to be able to go all out when building or running a route and having near perfect settings and not having to worry about the game crapping out on me, but it's tricky. I've been doing research on graphics cards to buy but I'm worried that A.) They'll be too big, B.) They will do little to nothing to fix the problem or C.) They're great and sure to work, but are too expensive.

I have an HP desktop designed for office/home use I believe. It has an Intel HD Graphics card. I'm pretty sure my computer meets all other requirements for the game, but I'm not sure (I can post my specs later on but I'd like to see if anyone will respond first, as I'm typing this post up at a place where I currently do not have access to my computer.) It has a quad core processor I believe but the graphics card is what's killing it. So now comes my question.

What's the best graphics card I can buy that makes the game run practically butter smooth, while not taking so much out of my wallet? I'm not very fortunate and I don't wanna make myself broke just to play the game. I'd like to be within the 50-150 dollar range at the very most when buying my card.

What are your recommendations? What's the best card to use?

Sorry for the long text, I wanted to be as descriptive as I could.

A 4 gig GTX 1050ti from newegg.com is around $170 and is the most likely to meet your needs. It will run TANE and should give you better frame rates than TS2009 or TS12. It needs 75 watts so power supply is important. Prices are dropping at the moment as bit coin mining on GPUs is no longer economic.

Since you don't list your country its difficult to know if the constraint is US dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars etc.

Realistically in the states buy a refurbished Dell T3610 direct from Dell with 16 gigs of memory and drop in a GTX 1060 but that is a little out of your price range. You need to keep an eye on the Dell site https://www.dellrefurbished.com/computer-workstation?filter_category=307&filter_grade=14 as machines arrive and disappear and also drop in price. They come with win 7 or 8.1 but there are incantations that will get you a free upgrade to win 10 that were still working a month a go.

Cheerio John

johnwhelan said:

A 4 gig GTX 1050ti from newegg.com is around $170 and is the most likely to meet your needs. It will run TANE and should give you better frame rates than TS2009 or TS12. It needs 75 watts so power supply is important. Prices are dropping at the moment as bit coin mining on GPUs is no longer economic.

Since you don't list your country its difficult to know if the constraint is US dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars etc.

Realistically in the states buy a refurbished Dell T3610 direct from Dell with 16 gigs of memory and drop in a GTX 1060 but that is a little out of your price range. You need to keep an eye on the Dell site https://www.dellrefurbished.com/computer-workstation?filter_category=307&filter_grade=14 as machines arrive and disappear and also drop in price. They come with win 7 or 8.1 but there are incantations that will get you a free upgrade to win 10 that were still working a month a go.

Cheerio John

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Thanks for your input. I'm American so everything is in USD. I'm not sure about going with getting a whole new machine because I use the one I currently have for school and playing other titles instead of trainz. The other games i have seem to work just fine but trainz is the only one that lags out so that's why I'd go with a card instead.

I would definitely buy TANE if my computer was tough enough to handle it but I'm not sure I want to go with the 1050. 170 is a bit off my range and I really don't want to have to spend any more than 150. I'll look into it however and get back with some questions. Thank you for your input!

What's the rest of your machine?

Intel HD graphics series 4000 will run TANE if you are very selective Iris Plus Graphics 655 is almost respectable.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html an nVidia GT 1030 would be about the best below the GTX 1050 TI. The thing to remember is TANE runs the GPU harder than TS12 but the CPU runs cooler. TS12 if you are on 32 bit operating system.

nVidia are what they use when the code Trainz so stay within nVidia bang per buck stay with the later cards such as the GT1030 or GTX 1050 TI.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/GTX-1050Ti...758895?hash=item3632ef03ef:g:a8IAAOSwt5VbCTFW might be of interest.

Cheerio John

johnwhelan said:

What's the rest of your machine?

Intel HD graphics series 4000 will run TANE if you are very selective Iris Plus Graphics 655 is almost respectable.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html an nVidia GT 1030 would be about the best below the GTX 1050 TI. The thing to remember is TANE runs the GPU harder than TS12 but the CPU runs cooler. TS12 if you are on 32 bit operating system.

nVidia are what they use when the code Trainz so stay within nVidia bang per buck stay with the later cards such as the GT1030 or GTX 1050 TI.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/GTX-1050Ti...758895?hash=item3632ef03ef:g:a8IAAOSwt5VbCTFW might be of interest.

Cheerio John

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Was able to get to my computer today, here are the specs:
OS: Windows 10 Home
System Model: HP DESKTOP-6P4H2EF Model 110-406
System: 64 Bit
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU J2900 @ 2.41GHZ, 2408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s) (As I thought, quad core system)
Physical Memory (RAM): 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory: 3.88 GB
Total Virtual Memory: 5.00 GB
Graphics card: Intel(R) HD Graphics w/ 1792 MB of avaliable memory, 64 MB of dedicated video memory, 0 MB of System Vid Memory, and 1728 MB of Shared System Memory.

I've been considering getting more ram but I'm debating it since it's not too critical right now. If I make the transition to T:ANE I might get more but for now it's fine especially considering most of my other games require 16 Gigs of Ram but run just fine.

I'm operating TS 12 on a 64 bit, so is that going to make a difference if it's running the machine harder or not? And as for TANE, what would the difference be?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-Bay-Trail.103037.0.html it does support directx 11 but don't hold your breath. Your J2900 is close to an i5, your power supply is apparently only 65 watts so forget about adding a video card and even more memory is suspect. I don't think you can upgrade the power supply and even if you did the case is not designed to deal with the heat. I note Walmart had them for sale for $150 so we aren't talking top of the line machines here.

A refurbished dell i5 3020 in a mini tower would cost around $350 but only has a 290 watt power supply and that's barely enough for a GT1030. To get a reasonable power supply you really are in the workstation range.

Dell have a few laptops with HD 5500 which is close to the top of the intel line but they are more expensive than a refurbished workstation etc.

For comparison have a look at newegg.com in gaming machines what a xeon or i7 gives you is cache and lots of it and shovelling things in and out of the CPU is usually a bottleneck. Trainz hammers the CPU so proper cooling is important and I don't think you have it on your existing system.

I think the expression is you can't get there from here.

Cheerio John

johnwhelan said:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-Bay-Trail.103037.0.html it does support directx 11 but don't hold your breath. Your J2900 is close to an i5, your power supply is apparently only 65 watts so forget about adding a video card and even more memory is suspect. I don't think you can upgrade the power supply and even if you did the case is not designed to deal with the heat. I note Walmart had them for sale for $150 so we aren't talking top of the line machines here.

A refurbished dell i5 3020 in a mini tower would cost around $350 but only has a 290 watt power supply and that's barely enough for a GT1030. To get a reasonable power supply you really are in the workstation range.

Dell have a few laptops with HD 5500 which is close to the top of the intel line but they are more expensive than a refurbished workstation etc.

For comparison have a look at newegg.com in gaming machines what a xeon or i7 gives you is cache and lots of it and shovelling things in and out of the CPU is usually a bottleneck. Trainz hammers the CPU so proper cooling is important and I don't think you have it on your existing system.

I think the expression is you can't get there from here.

Cheerio John

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So I guess the practical option is to go with a new PC then huh... Fair enough. This one did crap out on me before so I don't think I want to repeat that. It'll probably be a while before I scrape enough cash up.

What do you currently have? Does it run TANE just fine or does it get choppy occasionally, and how much was it?

What would be a good PC to buy right off the bat and just start playing with no troubles at all?

Currently I'm running on a couple of 16 gig Xeon workstations the latest one is a refurbished dell 6 core with a 250 gig SSD boot disk cost me $670. I have both a GTX 980 and a GTX 1050 TI running on a small layout there is nothing to choose between them on a larger more complex one then the GTX 980 comes into its own. The GTX 980 is a big beast and I had to get a new power supply and case for it.

Cheerio John

I've been having an idea of building a computer from scratch, but I'm not sure what to get and how to make it. I've watched my fair share of budget build videos playing games such as Far Cry 4 and Bioshock Infinite with no problem at max settings, but as I said before, I'm skeptical to know if trainz would run since my Trainz 12 came installed on max settings and did really badly, while other games I had ran just fine.

So would it be wise to follow the build video or experiment a bit on my own? Or maybe just find a gaming PC and save up for it? I'm in no rush to build perfect stuff and I can surely save cash to buy something good, but I'm no technical guy and really I have no clue what to do when it comes to having an optical playing machine.

Trainz is a collection of user built content. 'If it works on by machine its fine' is used by some content creators. One I know used a machine with two GTX 1080 TI video cards so some content is going to kill you no matter what you have. There are a few sketchup assets that kill machines as well. at the other end of the scale if you know what you are doing you can run a reasonable layout on quite a low end machine.

Middleton for laptops, even your machine should give 20+ frames per second running TANE. It works because the engine is low poly around 2,000 and the wagons and so forth all use the same undercarriage which is repeated. It uses very few scenery objects and the ones it does use are very large. the wagons all start 17_5 by the way and they will run in TS12. You can pick them up from JATWS.org.

So you're into what is reasonable and that's a difficult call. For TS19 Tony would like everyone to have a GTX 1070TI on a quad or better machine with 16 gigs of memory so the game shows what it is capable of. That to me is an expensive rig.

There are performance sliders so you can trade off things like shadows against frame rates.

The benchmarking of machines for TS19 was interesting, 50% were GTX 1050 TI or better, 50% were worse.

From comments I've seen from beta testers TS19 runs fine on something that will run TANE.

If you have lots of cash then you can buy something and if it isn't good enough buy something more powerful. If you don't then its better to spend a bit more the first time and know it will work.

Build your own well a copy of Win 10 will cost you $100 retail and you need one. People don't always include it in the budget. I've been around hardware a long time and I'm not comfortable installing a CPU and cooler on a motherboard. You might be more daring.

Your machine will run HOT so you need to plan out where components go to keep them cool. It's called thermal engineering. Dell is good at it. Walmart machines tend to skim on it. My main Trainz machine is at least seven years old and keeping it running cool and not overclocking is probably why it has lasted as long as it has. It's also had its video card upped to the GTX 980.

Switching a video card is moderately simple. Use an antistatic wrist strap by the way. The workstation cases are big and easy to work in and they come with high grade power supplies. Toms www.tomshardware.com tested some power supplies at the low end they melted before delivering the power they were rated at. You don't want to skimp on the power supply.

Personally I'd hold off until nVidia come out with their new series of video cards. Canals work fine and with no bogies and invisible track the poly counts are low.

https://www.jatws.org/johnw/Middleton_for_Laptops_TS12.zip should give you a version that works in TS12.

In an ideal world you want something with a reasonable power supply at least 500 watts and a brand name, an i7 or XEON processor for the cache and don't worry about the speed. Ideally an SSD to boot from but you can add that later over time. Ideally allow at least a gig hard drive unless its refurbished then 250 gig min. An external hard drive to back it up on. That's why the Dell refurbished workstations are attractive but watch them over time. Some are very highly priced, some come with 4 gigs of memory avoid them. A 10 core CPU sounds nice but its $200 for a copy of Win 10.

Have fun

Cheerio John

I've been around hardware a long time and I'm not comfortable installing a CPU and cooler on a motherboard. You might be more daring.

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Prebuilt motherboard bundles is the answer if you don't fancy fitting a processor, some come complete with ram some don't but often it's cheaper than buying the bits separately, then all you have to do is fit it in a case.

Why do folk ask these somewhat silly and pointless questions at all?

Common sense dictates that you buy the 'best one' you can afford that's within your budget. The 'best one' being the one with the highest spec that's available within your budget. The choice is entirely up to you !

Rob.

robd said:

Why do folk ask these somewhat silly and pointless questions at all?

Common sense dictates that you buy the 'best one' you can afford that's within your budget. The 'best one' being the one with the highest spec that's available within your budget. The choice is entirely up to you !

Rob.

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Not everyone is as knowledgable as yourself. In this case no GPU upgrade was viable and there have been cases when people have brought cards that didn't fit.

Cheerio John

BajaBlasted said:

I'd like to be within the 50-150 dollar range at the very most when buying my card.

What are your recommendations? What's the best card to use?

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I think a video card would cost you several hundreds of dollars, and a 1070 or 1080 would be $600 to $900 ... Depending on your power supply wattage, you just can't go plugging in a 1080 high wattage video card, if you only have a 300 watt LiteOff® power supply ... A laptop is a different story ... most laptops can not qave a video card installed as they have no sockets

cascaderailroad said:

I think a video card would cost you several hundreds of dollars, and a 1070 or 1080 would be $600 to $900 ... Depending on your power supply wattage, you just can't go plugging in a 1080 high wattage video card, if you only have a 300 watt LiteOff® power supply ... A laptop is a different story ... most laptops can not qave a video card installed as they have no sockets

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I think its a 70 watt power supply.

Cheerio John

My old beater Toshiba Satellite 105 Integrated Graphics laptop was blue screening, and I disasembled it to get at the CPU cooler, requiring the screen, KB bezel, all 45 screws, unplugging dozens of miniature wiring connectors (which one 2mm x 5mm 4 prong plug cracked into pieces), and also required unmounting and flipping the motherboard over ... just to get to the heat sink cooler, to apply arctic silver thermal paste. ... Now if the back of the laptop had a removable panel, I could have gotten to the CPU cooler by removing 5 screws ... no problem ... Now I need to go out and buy another PC ... Probably a desktop PC ... Why are laptops so hard to get to the heat sink cooler, just to pick the blanket of dust which was clogging the heat sink cooler radiator fins ? ? ?

My present Circuit City - HP Pavilion M8100N, 64bit desktop PC, has a 1TB HD, 8GB RAM, a 300 watt LiteOff® power supply that only allows a GT430 video card wattage wise. I am unsure if I can just swap in a higher wattge power supply, or if it would damage my PC. I would think that my present system would have many bottlenecks in performance, even if I put in a high end video card

I could go out to BestBuy and buy a supposed "Gaming Desktop" that actually has a PeeYouNey® video card, and low end hardware inside

Now with the Trade Tariff war, I would expect a price jump in PC prices from China, just when an 8 gereration, I8 gaming laptop PC is comming to the market

I am not going to go out and buy a $3800 ROG or MSI laptop, just to run Trainz on, only to have it clog its CPU,GPU cooling radfiator fins with a blanket of dust (I think I'll build a 60° F, dust free "clean room", just to run Trainz in)

I would think that blowing the clogged CPU,GPU cooling radfiator fins out DAILY, with a blast from a canister of DustOff®, DAILY, would help keep the blanket of dust from clogging the CPU,GPU cooling radfiator fins

Wait for the GTX 1160.

This game is rediculous ... Trainz is outpricing most users from running it ... As you need a $2700 PC, and tack on another $1000 for a video card ... just to run a Twain' ... Just how many users have installed this game, just to find that it causes video card sharding, and overheats the PC ... Any other video game on the market will run on a low end $379 laptop ... Not Trainz ... Requires a Nitrogen cooled, 4.7GHz PC

If you want an affordable computer that can run TANE then get yourself an ex-lease quad core Xeon workstation. Being enterprise grade machines their quality is considerably better anything you can buy down at the local shopping centre. My two ex-lease Xeons have seriously good cooling and my XW8400 Xeon even has cooling fans for the RAM modules. If you want good performance then don't use the broken down mess that's Windows 10 and use Windows 7 instead. Windows 10 has far too many background tasks running which will just soak up your computer's performance capabilities like a sponge and every upgrade which will claim to be 'making your computer better' will only serve to knock back performance a little more each time; - that's if if doesn't screw up your computer first and turn it into a brick as has happened with some Windows 10 users I heard about recently from a friend in the computer industry.

As to a graphics card I have yet to upgrade mine which I hope to be doing soon, but my present one runs the 1930s Cornwall route just fine with the sliders set to 'normal'. I don't know about other routes as I don't run anything with diesels in it, or weird plumber's nightmare steam locomotives, or representing railways in strange foreign countries that nobody has ever heard of or would want to visit.

Hi, thanks all for your responses.

cascaderailroad said:

I think a video card would cost you several hundreds of dollars, and a 1070 or 1080 would be $600 to $900 ... Depending on your power supply wattage, you just can't go plugging in a 1080 high wattage video card, if you only have a 300 watt LiteOff® power supply ... A laptop is a different story ... most laptops can not qave a video card installed as they have no sockets

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I saw a graphics card that was only about 150 that was able to run top of the line games at 1080p settings, And apparently it didn't guzzle up a lot of power. I'm not one hundred percent certain about it though which is why I'm asking around first.