Looking at a New Laptop and Graphics Card for Trainz 2019

thezooexpert

New member
Hello everyone,

I'm looking at purchasing a new laptop to run my Trainz 2019 program. I'm trying to decide which graphics card would be the best one. The systems are all HP Laptops with I7 plus 12-16 GB's of RAM and 1 TB of hard drive. The options for graphics are all NVIDIA GeForce. There is a GTX 1660 Series (TI or MAXQ) and an RTX 2060/2070 Series (MAXQ and SUPER).

I was wondering if anyone could make a recommendation for the appropriate graphics card that would handle Trainz 2019 and future versions.

Thanks.
 
Hello everyone,

I'm looking at purchasing a new laptop to run my Trainz 2019 program. I'm trying to decide which graphics card would be the best one. The systems are all HP Laptops with I7 plus 12-16 GB's of RAM and 1 TB of hard drive. The options for graphics are all NVIDIA GeForce. There is a GTX 1660 Series (TI or MAXQ) and an RTX 2060/2070 Series (MAXQ and SUPER).

I was wondering if anyone could make a recommendation for the appropriate graphics card that would handle Trainz 2019 and future versions.

Thanks.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

for comparison. Ideally you want about 10,000+ on the 3D score. Typically desktop users are happy with something about the 2070 super area which scores some 18,000+ and expect that to meet the requirements of TS19 and later versions. The RTX 2060 mobile has a score of over 10,000.

Things to think about are the balance of components. Take a look at Dell.com just for the component side of things. You'll see two lines for gaming, the first is the G5 and the other is the Alienware. If you look at the processors you'll see they select different ones. The G5 are budget gaming machines where the performance is balanced against the cost. So they tend to use things like the GTX 1650 Ti which comes in at 7,000 more or less. The top of the line Alienware comes with a RTX 2080 SUPER mobile version so 15,000 on the 3D score but note the hard drives. The higher end systems go for 2x 2TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSDs not a conventional hard drive, and dual channel memory. So check your choice doesn't just have a 16 gig memory stick rather than two 8 gig ones.

Then take a look at their G5 gaming PCs, the GPUs are full blown ones not the cut back mobile ones, cooling is a lot better, on a laptop you can expect to see some slowing down as things grow warm to protect the CPU and GPU from overheating. Note that a desktop will always outperform a laptop at the same price point and the top end desktops will out perform any laptop.

Note I'm not saying you must buy Dell, but what I am saying is they balance their components nicely ie they avoid putting in an i9 with at GTX 1650 ti so look at their configurations to see what makes sense at a particular price point then look at the HP model configuration.

Having said that it does depend on the content. Middleton for laptops will run quite happily on intel integrated graphics series 4,000 or later which has a score of 350. The later ones reach a score of 1150 so you should be able to run a wider range of content on them.

Cheerio John
 
Oh and it should be mentioned that both AMD and nVidia have new graphics cards that have just been released offering better price performance on the desktop side. No doubt the laptop side will follow.

Radeon RX 6800 XT for example and the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080.

Cheerio John
 
I've got the Alienware M15 i7 with RTX 2070 with MAX-Q. It handles Trainz with no video stuttering, very smooth, and I am very happy. It really helps while building routes, specifically smoothing terrain. My last one was a Dell with GTX 960M, and it would stutter while smoothing terrain and driving in Driver. I don't think going to the RTX 2080 or the next new one is worth the extra money unless you play other games that would need it.
 
I've got the Alienware M15 i7 with RTX 2070 with MAX-Q. It handles Trainz with no video stuttering, very smooth, and I am very happy. It really helps while building routes, specifically smoothing terrain. My last one was a Dell with GTX 960M, and it would stutter while smoothing terrain and driving in Driver. I don't think going to the RTX 2080 or the next new one is worth the extra money unless you play other games that would need it.

The RTX 2070 mobile has a score of 12,354 so above 10,000, the desktop version of the RTX 2070 is 16,168. So it can be done on a laptop but tends to be a bit more expensive.

Cheerio John
 
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