How Many Frames Per Second

widescreen · Post by **widescreen** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 12:03 am

MSTS on a machine with 2 x Intel 2.8 GHz Processors and 2 GB of Ram, the Video Card is an ATI Radeon X550.

I just loaded Fraps and it shows a Frame Rate of 8 to 15 whilst MSTS is running ECE3.

MSTS runs fine a little jerky but playable.

My question is really what is a good Frame Rate for MSTS.?
Is mine average.?

Would a better Video Card improve Frame Rate.?

Thanks in advance guys.

thegoonden · Post by **thegoonden** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 12:22 am

24 works on a TV screen, after all, nobody says east enders is framey.
On a monitor, 30+.

Measuring with Fraps is calling down the wrath of heisenberg, run the game and press shift z for a true reading

widescreen · Post by **widescreen** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 1:04 am

thegoonden wrote:24 works on a TV screen, after all, nobody says east enders is framey.
On a monitor, 30+.

Measuring with Fraps is calling down the wrath of heisenberg, run the game and press shift z for a true reading

I tried

press shift z for a true reading

but saw nothing.?

Lad491 · Post by **Lad491** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 7:08 am

the frame rate appears as a small green figure in the bottom left corner of the screen

My system is about the same as yours, with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.14 Ghz on a 1066 Mhz motherboard. Ive only got 1GB of Ram but the same graphics card (i think). Frame rates vary but with the Bin patch installed and all settings on maximum my best frame rate is 60fps in countryside or lightly built up areas, dropping to around 25 - 30fps in built up areas. Some areas are particularly bad - Clapham Junction on Dorset Coast is about 8 - 10 fps ( but it used to be 2fps on the old PC

) Eastleigh on DC is about the same too. I havent loaded ECE yet so cant make a comparison there.

But the frame rate is governed largely by the speed of your hard disk, which you didnt mention, since stuttering ( and so frame rate ) is caused by the delay in loading data from the hard disk into memory. I have a 150GB SATA drive running at 7200RPM which performs significantly better than its IDE equivalent. If you can run the whole of the route in memory as some do, by using a RAM disk, speeds can be even quicker

emrhd01 · Post by **emrhd01** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 7:10 am

Hi widescreen,

Make sure you press the shift key down first and hold it whilst pressing the Z key once (while running an activity) and then try looking in the bottom right hand corner, shows in Green something like FPS:51 (written quite small). To turn off repeat above.

See below, Click on pic for larger image.

Click the image to zoom in

Bob

thegoonden · Post by **thegoonden** » Tue Jul 10, 2007 9:41 am

Lad491, simllar results here with an 8800GTS AMD 5600+ and 2GB of rather nice RAM, no more frames per second, but I DO get to run at those same rates with 16QxFSAA and 16xanisotropy.....such things make an astonishing difference to the realism, jaggy rails are yucky.

I suspect MSTS is capped at 60fps, because even with the DirectX refreshrate override set to 75Hz (confirmed by monitor), and running in empty terain, it just will not go higher than 61/62 (close enough to 60 to be accountable by calculation inaccuracies...see the aforementioned Heisenberg

).
If it IS, and it's hackable, I'd set it to 30, because, I don't know about anyone else, but on sections where it runs at around 50 fps, with a 60Hz refresh and Vsync on, it's actually quite twitching and jumpy as the otherwise pefect animation skips a mere one frame. Locking it off to 30 would give horsepower to spare most of the time on a good macihine, reducing twitchyness. 30 being the best choice from the point of view of being quite fast enough and coincidentally exactly half the most common refresh rate....ideal for Vsync purposes, and should actually make the game run as IF Vsync was on even when it's not.

PS: frequent jerking and slowing down is too little RAM, the machine constantly loading and dumping and loading and dumping. Sudden stops or brief seizures indicate you probably have enough RAM but could do with a quicker drive....it's always going to have to do a big load approaching busy areas, so total RAM doesn't really matter as much as quick you can fill it.

PPS.....2GB of RAM or more? turn your swapfile to the minimum size allowed and nail it there. This stops windows doing completely pointless swapping exercises midgame. As long as the ONLY time it ever complains about it is when it's sitting doing nowt on the desktop, you're on a winner, as that error is triggered because windows is looking to waste some RAM and can't. Trust me on this, I run my machine as a Digital Audio workstation as well as a gaming box, and it's pretty damn solid.

widescreen · Post by **widescreen** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 2:55 pm

Thanks for the replies, I finally found the tiny text bottom right.

FPS is 8 to 15 on ECE3.

I will try a faster drive first I think.

Cheers to everyone.

emrhd01 · Post by **emrhd01** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 2:59 pm

Have you got Bin installed, this often obtains higher FPS than without.

Bob

widescreen · Post by **widescreen** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 3:35 pm

Yes I have, I just think maybe I was expecting too much.....

thegoonden · Post by **thegoonden** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 7:56 pm

Your CPU and RAM is broadly simillar to mine, and I get far higher rates than you, which would suggest your video card really, as I said, a slow drive on a machine with loads of RAM should only become a pain when you approach a large builtup aread after some sparsely detailed rural running.
ECE can be a swine even on my machine though.
One thought....stick the latest Tsection in again, ECE, GE, LSE, many routes get sick with the wrong one in place.

dkightley · Post by **dkightley** » Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:15 pm

You need to remember that MSTS can only use about 380MB of memory....doubled to around 750MB if you have the MSTSBin patch applied. So loads of memory make little difference...unless you have lots running in background that might restrict memory for MSTS. Certainly 2GB is more than adequate

As Laurie has indicated, a fast drive is the most effective cure...combined with the Bin patch, that is!

thegoonden · Post by **thegoonden** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:44 am

well, with a dual core 2.8HGz and 2GB of RAM, I can sit at flat 60FPS for most of the way up the GE, given that the slowest drive likely to be around will be ATA133, vs my SATA-II-300, I cannot honestly agree that a new drive will lift his performance into line with mine.

I am not familliar with his Video card, but keep thinking it must be the problem.
Then again, my RAM is 800MHz with 4 4 4 2T timing, maybe that helps.
Or maybe Intels are really that much slower than AMD, but I doubt it.

Still, no harm in a new drive, and it's cheaper than a videocard, so if it fixes things, fair enough.

PS, do any of you bwana's know if it IS capped to 60FPS, and if so, can that be tweaked down to 30?

widescreen · Post by **widescreen** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 1:36 am

Thanks to everyone.

Bying a new Drive AND Video card next week.

Cheers.

Lad491 · Post by **Lad491** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 6:43 am

do any of you know if it IS capped to 60FPS

I suspect it is as even on sections with no scenery at all I still cant get more than 60fps. Wouldnt know how to go about capping the frame rate.

thegoonden · Post by **thegoonden** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 9:05 am

widescreen wrote:Thanks to everyone.

Bying a new Drive AND Video card next week.

Cheers.

That's no fun :

Fit them one at a time and see, for the good of the people, which does more good.

And take a good look at that wiki article, it's stop you getting scammed (remember more bandiwidth and more fillrate=good)