BajaBlasted
Standard Cab Fanatic
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.
Personally, I'd rather run TS 12 at max settings instead of going for TANE. I've heard that TS 12 topped out looks almost close enough to TANE, and I'm not really concerned about getting extra DLC and what not. I've had plenty of ideas for building my own routes but I've just been limited with a really poor pallette and a lack of motivation to getting low-fi routes to work. It's, like I said, humiliating to run a route built for TS 06 on my machine and having it top out at 15 frames tops, dropping to like 8 every other second.
All I want is to have a better game experience, not have to upgrade my trainz version. As long as JR still supports TS 12 I'm there. It may be soon that they stop supporting it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
For now, I just want a way to have a great experience for a low price rather than having to look at eye splitting and irritating slideshows. Everything in my computer is built for it, it's just my graphics card that needs help. Now I'm enlightened about power supplies and sizes and stuff so that's why I turned here to try and find a good card that won't burn up my computer and empty my wallet. I've heard windows 10 is bad and I agree that it has its flaws, but I'm not so sure about downgrading my system, and I'm not even sure how to do it if it's even possible. Considering windows XP's service ended only about 4 years ago, Win 7 is sure to follow shortly behind.
Thanks for the input though.
-Kai