Stuttering.

[dipper6]

I am suffering a dose of the Stutters that I don't really want, so I wish to get some medicine to cure it if possible.
My system.
ASUS P5AD2-E Premium. P4 Prescott 3.4gb 2gb Corsair DDR2 Ram (4 pieces of 512mb)
650watts Targan PSU 2 Sata hard drives, each with 3 partitions.
I use a caddy to swap HDrives with the OS & MSTS on one and Vista on the other for "normal" computering. XP on the MSTS drive has only the essential programs, no internet or anti-virus etc.

I have 2 graphics cards & 2 soundcards. Radeon X800xl and Radeon X1950L
I tried both but continue to get stuttering, I also tried various releases of the drivers from 7.1 up to 8.
I have a Soundblaster Audigy 2 value and the new ASUS Xolar that I got specifically to try to stop the stutters, no change. Both their drivers are Vista & XP compatible.
I get it on routes where there is a lot of scenic and other traffic at speed.
I can't think of anything that would cause / stop the stutters, would the chipset drivers affect it ?
I recall on a forum on another topic that Drives I/O can affect things, any thoughts, and how do I fix that.
Have not got a clue what Drives I/O is do I.

Just had a thought, MSTS is installed on a NTFS partition (all partitions are NTFS).
Would a FAT32 partition help ?
Everythings else is working now except the stutters.

BTW, I might flog the ASUS Zolar as I doubt I'll use it. It has every audio system that is available (Dolby etc etc), and sound affects too. Plenty of cables. Was £113 a couple of months ago and is as new.
It's not broken or bits missing or anything, I would not flog it like that 'cos I wouldn't like to buy something like that.

[delticcity]

Hi Ian. You know far more about computer hardware than I do by the sound of it so I'll stay clear of that subject. Do you use Trainstore, and have you installed the BIN patch? Both of these are known to improve stuttering, the first by preventing msts from loading up a lot of unnecessary files when you run an activity and the second by improving 'memory allocation' within msts. Hope this helps. Dave.

[Lad491]

Dipper, you are looking in completely the wrong place since the problem is unlikely to be your computer, but more likely how you have msts set up.

Firstly start off by installing the Bin patch, if you havent already, as this help msts with memory management and can improve frame rates. Secondly use trainstore, as suggested above, and make sure you are running just one activity unstored at a time, this again can lighten the load on msts. Try reducing the quantity of sounds to medium, sounds are one of the biggest hits on msts resources.

If there still is no improvement turn your best graphics/best performance two notches down towards best performance and turn all other graphics settings down two notches. if that improves things you can then experiment with different settings to reach a happy medium.

You will never eliminate stuttering altogether, but you should be able to get it down to an acceptable level with just an occasional stutter. Remember that msts is a 7 year old piece of software that cant take advantage of all the fancy stuff the latest graphics and sound cards have, so there isnt any point in upgrading anything. I run Dorset Coast and Thame Mersey with only minimal stuttering on a P4 2ghz machine with a 128mb graphics card and onboard soundblaster 5.1 soundsystem. Biggest isnt always best with msts

[alanch]

Just a few things to add to what Laurie has said, which is sound advice.

MSTS is very dependent on processor power and the speed of data transfer from disk to memory to processor. Looking at your computer specification, getting data off your disk drives is the most likely cause of your stuttering, and I'm not sure you will ever totally eliminate it - after some research I installed a 500 Gb Samsung HD501LJ Spinpoint T from Scan Computers for less than £70 delivered including VAT as it seemed to be the fastest access time 7200rpm drive around. With system and other software on my first drive, and the second drive partitioned in two - one for MSTS and other games, and the other for data which isn't accessed when I'm driving trains - I definitely saw some improvement in frame rates and reduction in stuttering, but it hasn't gone completely.

Once you have reduced the data load at startup by running through Trainstore and improved memory management by installing Bin, you might see some improvement. Someone somewhere discovered a runtime switch for MSTS that allocates a set amount of memory, and that seems to have improved things as well - with 2 Gb of memory my MSTS shortcut reads "D:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator\train.exe" -rungame -mem:1024", and I use the same switches when I run through Trainstore (which is always). In practice, MSTS doesn't appear to use more that 750 Mb of memory.

I don't use the graphics switches in the shortcut - I've set them up with profiles in the nVidia control panel and nHancer - 4x AA, 16x AF, Trilinear optimisation off, Anisotropic sample optimisation on and force bilinear mipmaps.

Hope this helps.

[dipper6]

thanks to all of you.

When I had "finished" my post above and submitted it, on re-reading I thought there were some details missing, and that has emerged from your very kind replies. I apologise very much for that.

I am using Trainstore and I have just installed MSTSBin this afternoon. On running MSTS there was a little stuttering though I was really paying attention to MSTSBin if it was working OK & the difference it was making.
The settings in MSTS are at the half way setting.

I have a Seagate 200gb SATA Perpendicular Barracuda 7200 rpm drive.
2 SATA Samsung 160 7200 drives & 1 Samsung 120gb.
I got exactly the same results from all 4.

I think Alans suggestion is near the mark, I have been looking at the hard drives, but as the Seagate is one of the new breed I was thinking it would be a top performer though that does not always hold.
If the above ideas don't help much then I'll specifically look for a faster drive.

I shall be trying your suggestions shortly.

[steveenefer]

if you want performance from your hard drives the best ones to buy for speed are without a doubt wd raptors they spin at 10000 rpm and have an average seek time of 4.5ms where as the seagates maxtors etc of this world have a seek time of 8.5ms upwards and spin at 7200rpm, i would also look at trying to run a pair odf sata's in raid so you have 2 drives doing the work of one that will also help.

[alanch]

Hi Steve

I looked at the Raptors when I was researching my new drive, but apart from the cost per Gb and the size in Gb being limited, their transfer rate rather than their seek rate didn't look much better than the Samsung that I bought.

In reply to dipper6, I run MSTS with all the settings at maximum, including all the boxes checked, and Terrain Error Threshold at 30. And usually running in the background is AVG antivirus, Zonealarm firewall, Threatfire, Ashampoo Magic Defrag, Google Desktop, etc plus Firefox, Thunderbird, Windows Explorer and often other applications along with live network and internet connections - I've added this because you may come across old postings from Otto Wipfel recommending these are all closed down/turned off. I've just started an activity on LSE, and checked with Task Manager, and Processor activity is at maximum 10 percent on my 3GHz dual core with MSTS using about very little of that and only about 200 Mb of physical memory.

[GaryG]

Hi

Defragmenting the MSTS partition and persuading Microsoft to actually create a true multitsaking file system would assist. The first option is one that is possible, the other, well, keep waiting. We will continue to wait for each file to be accessed so faster access will help.

A SATA2 drive if you have a SATA2 controller can also help. I found a single new SATA2 drive was almost as fast as an older RAID0 pair of SATA1 drives as my system drive.

Defragging is the quickest and cheapest thing you can do that might assist faster access.

GaryG

[dipper6]

Thanks all.

Re Defragmenting, heres what I do - with MSTS.
I have the excellent O&O Defragmenter, you have 5 methods of defragging, space, name, access, stealth and modified.

Space just fits a file into any available space, name defrags into alphabetical order so the files can be What I do found a little quicker, access is in the order of how often the files are accesssed, the other two I haven't used.

What I do is to install MSTS, I use name to defrag it. Next I install an add-on, then I defrag using space and so on for each add-on. I use space because after some add-ons are installed every file will be moved with the other methods and take much longer to defrag.
What I did do once was install everything. Then I moved the MSTS folder to another partition, about 14gb.
I copied the lot back by one folder at a time, for subfolders I made the parent folder and in that I copied each folder on it's own, then after each folder I used name to defrag. Took me 5 hours, and it made no difference to the method just above.

I ordered a 32mb cache Seagate 7200 hard drive. Read 8.5. 500gb