FPS Speed-Up

rdawes · Post by **rdawes** » Mon Sep 23, 2002 1:30 am

I read on the train-sim.com forum today that if you disable your firewall and anti-virus program while running MSTS that your frame rate will improve. I tried it with two runs of a saved activity with the same throttle setting in both and it doesn't work. In both cases my FPS were 15-19 over the same part of the route and time period.

Bob

Jonnie1972 · Post by **Jonnie1972** » Tue Sep 24, 2002 5:18 pm

Hi

Of course shutting down programs that run in the background is a help to any application we are running, but unfortunately MSTS is a bast"Â£@ for frame rates, I have just recently bought a GeForce3 TI4500 128MB card, even though its great with other games, I can still see that great stutter time to time in MSTS.
I am in the process of hopefully receiving some info on tweaking the system bios, so I`ll post it here if any luck in getting it.

scefhwil · Post by **scefhwil** » Tue Sep 24, 2002 5:33 pm

Jonnie1972 wrote: ........ I have just recently bought a GeForce3 TI4500 128MB card, .................... I can still see that great stutter time to time in MSTS........

If by stutter you mean the periodic pause or even lock-up in the sim, then buying the most expensive video card avaiable won't solve the problem. Thats because stutter is caused by the sim pausing from grphics processing whilst it read more .s, .ace, .eng, .wag and .wav files from your hard drive into memory. This happens whenever new world/traffic items come within the active area (ie the circule defined by the distance setting in the sims main options). The way to improve it is to have compiled .s and .ace files. Even then your stuck with the remaining files types loading. The worst culprit left are thw .wav files. These can be big and there can be lots of them. But this problem may be about to be addressed - see the LoadAllWaves posting in the Sound forum.

Jonnie1972 · Post by **Jonnie1972** » Tue Sep 24, 2002 9:34 pm

Hi

I can understand the fact....for example coming into Manchester on the ME3 route I can hear the Hard drive loading in new things etc and the stuttering occurs.

As I stated MSTS is a sod for frame rates and I think at the end of the day we all suffer. End of story.

decapod · Post by **decapod** » Wed Sep 25, 2002 9:12 am

Ignoring stuttering for the moment (which has many causes)

<gripe mode on>

The framerate is really not helped by modellers who are lazy with culling hidden faces or using too many polys on tiny items, do not spend time including distance levels of detail or adjusting the maximum visible distance (thats for locos as well as scenery) and use far too many and far too large textures.
Even setting the ESD_Detail_Level in the sd file to a reasonable value for scenery items would help a bit.

That 10,000 poly loco pulling 8 5000 poly coaches shows as about 1 pixel 2km away, but still uses 50,000 polygon calculations in MSTS

no wonder it's slow

<gripe mode off>

sorry about that, just having a bad morning....

LucaZone · Post by **LucaZone** » Wed Sep 25, 2002 1:15 pm

There aint no such thing as a Gf3 ti4500. Gf3's come in ti200 and ti500. Ti cards for the Gf4 come in 4200, 4400, & 4600.

Jonnie1972 · Post by **Jonnie1972** » Wed Sep 25, 2002 4:56 pm

Its actually a ti500 must have typed the 4 by mistake, christ sake.