Atomic Systems

Hello everyone! I'm glen and this is my first post here. I wish it was a happier one, but ho hum!

Before I bought RW3 from Steam, I went to the System Requirements Lab site and checked that my system was up to standard to run this sim. I'm not too savvy with computer tech, so I figured this was the best way to go. Well, it gave me an apparent pass with flying colours; however, it didn't display any recommended specifications, which confused me somewhat. I've copied the results of this test below:

CPU Speed
Minimum: 2.8 GHz or faster
You Have: 3.2 GHz Performance Rated at: 3.84 GHz

RAM
Minimum: 2 GB
You Have: 3.3 GB

OS
Minimum: Windows XP / Vista/ Windows 7
You Have: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (build 7600), 64-bit

Video Card
Minimum: Video 256 MB with Pixel Shader 3.0 (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 or greater; ATI Radeon 9500 Pro or greater)
You Have: ASUS EAH6770 Series
Features: Minimum attributes of your Video Card

Video RAM Required: 256 MB You have: 2.4 GB
Pixel Shader version Required: 3.0 You have: 5.0

Sound Card
Minimum: Yes
You Have: ASUS Virtual Video Capture Device Driver (Not sure why it's listing my graphics card as a sound card...)

Free Disk Space
Minimum: 6 GB of free space + 3 GB for DLC
You Have: 8.3 GB

Is my system up to a high standard with regards to this sim? Also, could someone help me get the best out of this sim, please?

Thankyou very much for your time in reading.

Glen.

Hi Glen,

Assuming that your video card is based on a Radeon 6770, and assuming that the processor is a reasonable match for that (if it was supplied with Win 7 Ultimate 64 there's a good chance it should be) it certainly looks like an acceptable system.

When you say "lag", what exactly do you mean; and what detail settings (both in the launcher window, and the game menu graphics options) are you running?

Have a read through this guide:
http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 9&t=118677
and let us know how you get on.

Hi, thankyou for your reply! I haven't checked that link yet as I thought it best to clarify my system specs first.

I have an Intel Pentium D processor, at 3.2 GHz and an Asus Radeon HD 6770 video card.

When I say "lag" I mean what appears to be an incredibly low frame rate. When it stops for a second or two and runs smoothly, it continues from the point it froze at; it doesn't skip to a point into the future, if you get my meaning. So it's the entire thing that's lagging, both sound and graphics at the same time, along with user inputs; I can't activate the wipers while it's frozen, for example. Am I making sense? I'm under the impression that it's occurring when trying to load 'new' scenery/objects into view, as I can explore a certain distance ahead of my consist with the external camera and it doesn't lag through that area of scenery. I have gone for nearly a minute at a time between these 'frames' waiting for the next one to load.

As for settings in the sim; I briefly tried it with everything at maximum but it lagged so horribly that I ended up ending the process, in the space of 25mins, I'd only been able to load my route and rotate the camera for three frames... I've tried all the default settings from the highest through to the lowest, but nothing's working the way it should.

Loading routes also typically takes anywhere from one to five or so minutes, depending on the route. Is this a normal loading time or not?

Also, I've noticed that if I try and alt+tab out of the sim, upon re-entering it, it crashes and won't display anything, forcing me to kill it with the task manager. I'm not sure if this is related or not. I haven't patched anything or upgraded owt yet, but I will do if it may help.

Just to add: I'm using a rather large display and, as such, rather high resolution. I've not changed this as yet, but my friend tells me that this could be the issue. My display's native resolution is 1360x768 and that's what I use for both Explorer and any games or sims I use. If I'm to reduce the resolution that the sim runs at, where do I do it and what ought I change it to, please?

I'll take a look at that link now, thankyou very much! I hope we can get these wheels running smoothly soon!

Glen.

Free Disk Space
Minimum: 6 GB of free space + 3 GB for DLC
You Have: 8.3 GB

You need 9GB and the system has 8.3GB free

This does not look correct (but perhaps the situation after TS2012 installed)

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That's right, I went and re-ran the test after I installed and noticed problems. Another thing to add actually, having said that: My Steam installation is on an external hard drive, via USB 2.0. I do this with all of my important programs due to Windows needlessly corrupting or going wrong all the time and forcing me to reinstall everything. Since doing this, I've had one reinstall of Windows and everything is still running fine; I haven't had to reinstall any of my programs and have saved a LOT of hair. None of my other games, sims or programs appear to have any issues with this, so I'd assume it's all hunky dory. It's a very quick drive, for a USB one though, so I think that has a lot to do with it.

Now, I've gone through that guide on the other end of that link there and I get roughly 20fps at the start, that's with the TSX on at step 3. It actually fluctuates between 17 and 21 when those two trains pass, if you're feeling picky. I get between one and four pauses when they pass but they don't last any longer than half a second at a time and they only appear when the trains are practically alongside my viewpoint; about 10 metres in front and there are no pauses.

Now then, I whacked the scenery detail up and tried again; no noticeable changes, then I maxed the shader quality. The pauses were just as frequent but appeared to last very slightly longer this time although there was nothing noticeable in the fps.

I then proceeded to only change view distance and texture levels, one increment at a time and I can't get above medium on these without unacceptable lagging occurring. I'm going to try a lower resolution and see if that helps any. If I can get it to a resolution low enough for it to find palatable but keep it high enough for me to find palatable, I might try knocking up some other settings, but as it stands right now, my system isn't performing as well as I'd hoped!

Let's see what we can do!

Thankyou so much for your help so far, it's saved a lot of hair!

Glen.

Hi the lag will be because your CPU is struggling to run bigger scenarios. Try ticking the 30fps lock tick box in the Railworks launcher settings tab. this should help smooth things out a little but it will still stutter a bit if you have a lot of rolling stock. Railworks likes a fast CPU and fast memory bandwidth.

I don't understand why you have such a good graphics card yet one of the weakest CPU's you can get, that CPU needs upgrading ASAP as there's nothing you can really do about the issues you've mentioned.

Hi folks!

I've posted since Acorncomputer's post, but before msmith4000, but the post has not yet been approved by a mod, so I apologise if this all comes in the wrong order or whatnot; it's a bit confusing!

Firstly, to msmith4000: I've tried the 30fps lock, as you kindly suggested, but I'm still getting lag, and a monumental amount of it when running the HST at full tilt, so it obviously can't handle the higher speeds, which seriously sucks! I waited almost a minute and a half for it to move one frame then pause for another age while doing 125 in the cab view of the HST, then I got fed up and killed it. I'm going to have a bash at the Game Booster program I tried on my last machine and see if I can't clear up some clutter when running this sim. It worked for me before, but we'll see.

Secludedsfx: I bought the graphics card to increase rendering times for my 3D modelling projects, and to help with some other games and it worked very well. I also upgraded the RAM for the same reasons. I know you mention that the CPU needs upgrading, but the fact of the matter is that it's not just the CPU, it's the whole package! I'm afraid that I can't afford a whole new motherboard and CPU right now, those things are far more expensive than a video card, so I chose that first. I'd ideally like a quad-core, but I just can't scrape that much money together for one of those. I'd hoped that, as my system apparently well exceeds the minimum requirements, I'd have been able to play this thing on the minimum settings... >.>

Well, I'm really rather disappointed, as my system still lags this sim with everything at it's lowest setting. It all looks fine when you're standing still, but as soon as you start to move, it all goes bum over apex, as it were. If I'd found a demo of this to try first, I might have spotted these problems and saved myself the heartache and money of buying it and finding it all out too late. Very upset Glen!

If this Game Booster program doesn't work, it looks like it'll be yet another wasted purchase; and it looks like such a great sim! I might just get my lump hammer ready for this PC soon. -.-

Many thanks for all your help and advice folks. I'll keep fiddling with things and see if I can get any desirable effects from this mess, but I'm not holding my breath.

Glen.

I have said this on many occasions before but I have little computer knowledge of the technicalities of computers so I usually stick to the default settings. TS2012 runs fine for me with most settings in the options menu set to max. I have shadows turned off and water set to high (not the highest setting) and this seems to provide me with a good all round performance. I have set the NVIDIA card to be controlled by the program and the program is located in the default location.

The program is designed to be used by the average person who does not know about or want to get involved with game boosters or other modifications. Logic says to me that the program will work best under default conditions for most people. I am amazed when people say that they have to keep re-installing TS2012 and even Windows. In all the time I have been using personal computers (since 1980) I have never had to re-install an operating system and TS2012 has never been re-installed other than when I transferred to a new computer or set up additional copies on other computers.

Could I suggest that you install the program in a conventional manner and modify nothing and perhaps you will get a better performance.

Just a suggestion

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Yes unfortunatley your CPU is getting very old now so the only way to really fix this problem properly is to upgrade the CPU mainboard and RAM (your video card is OK). It should be noted that, in my extensive experience, CPU and GPU power are more or less bound together, that is, a very fast video card requires a very fast CPU to drive it. An SLI/Crossfire setup with two high end cards will require pretty much a top of the range CPU to drive them properly.

If you don't properly match a decent CPU with the type of video card then one will hold up the other. In your case, the CPU is holding up the system and the video card is idle whilst waiting. The opposite is true. If you run a game on an overclocked Core i7 but are using Intel HD integrated motherboard graphics adaptor, the game is only going to run as fast as what the graphics chipset can process. The Core i7 is wasted as it sits idle for 90% of the time waiting for the graphics processor.

Try loading a freeroam in the test track and see how performance fairs. If it is still laggy, reduce the game resolution to 1024x768 (disable TSX 2012 effects) and see how it goes. Until you update your system thoug I'm afraid you will only be able to run at low detail levels and small scenarios with not too much AI trains and rolling stock.

I think you've correctly identified the the big freezes as scenery loading. This and the initial loading time is almost entirely about hard disk speed - your external USB drive installation may not be helping.

Loading times of a handful of minutes are normal, unfortunately, and they tend to increase as you install more DLC (depending on the scenario, it may have to load all the default stuff plus the DLC, in simple terms).

Your CPU's definitely weak, but I ran RW3 for a bit on a Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz with acceptable results (TSX off); and you're getting OK framerates on the Autumn Leaves test. I would suggest that a faster hard drive (ideally SSD) might improve things significantly (and should be portable to your next system).

Unfortunately this hobby does seem to involve unexpected hardware costs - I eventually succumbed when I saw the system in my sig being sold for £300 by a colleague!

I'm sorry, but it's late at night, and without knowing what his CPU actually is, and the ASUS board it runs on, then this thread is mostly speculation. He has not said "WHAT CPU" he is running, only that it runs at 3.2Ghz - how many cores? 2, 4, 6?. Memory is by far the weakest part @ 3Gbs - Win 7 can handle up to 16Gbs depending on your M/board, so please tell us. As for the GFX card, as I have no 1st hand experience of these, then I can't comment.

You have W7 (x64) - download 'CPU-Z' (its free) or 'Speccy' and then tell us the real specs of this machine.

Chris
Somewhere above he did say he was running a Pentium D probably dual core.
A couple of things the 3.3GB of RAM is throttling his cpu Win 7 64 likes to see around 4GB in matched pairs (2 x 2Gb), I don't know what configuration the OP has got that 3.3 GB in, but it ain't helping. His video card is being throttled by the cpu, ie the cpu can't deliver the data fast enough for that card. The RAM I would guess will be a DDR1 variety which is extremely slow even when compared to today's DDR3 modules, another bottleneck. What we don't know is if the mobo supports PCIe or AGP, if its the former then its likely to be PCIe 1.0 which could throttle that video card, AGP might be marginally better.
We don't know how full the HDD is or if it is defragmented regularly (over 60% full and you will see a slow down in data loading, and above 85% all sorts of random idiosyncratic issues).

On a couple of benchmarks that I use (not 100% quantitative) a Pentium D would have a rating of around 10 compared to say a SB 2600K rated at 9000. I know the OP says he's running at 3.2GHz but that applies to that cpu at that time* and compared to a modern duo core eg E8600 @ 3.2Ghz (rated on the same scale at 3500) it is quite slow. I know that these figures do not translate into how a system will run TS2012 but it will be an uphill struggle for most of the routes and scenarios.
(*Around that time AMD and/or Intel changed the way that the processor GHz related to performance (devaluing the GHz so to speak) so it may not attract the same rating today).
The OP may well be able to run a minimalist version of TS2012 but my guess is that it will be plagued consistently by slow frame rates and intermittent hangs.
Regards
PeterH

Glen85 wrote:I do this with all of my important programs due to Windows needlessly corrupting or going wrong all the time and forcing me to reinstall everything.

To me, that indicates an underlying problem with either the machine, the Windows installation or indeed the user---if we could identify what's going wrong there and fix it rather than work round it I'm sure there'd be an improvement. Windows 7 is a very stable operating system, and works well on even low spec'd machines so a Pentium D should move along just fine, albeit for RW not at a record breaking speed.

To give a slightly more quantitative comparison: cpubenchmark.net lists a Pentium D 3.2GHz at 887, and my old P4 3GHz at 489, so assuming that particular benchmark uses multiple cores well it probably has similar single-core speed and better overall performance. His 6770 is also way better than my old 7600GS.

I ran RW3 successfully on that system (albeit with the details turned way down) so it's not out of the question - it just won't be as pretty, and as mentioned may struggle with the more detailed routes.

peterfhayes' call on HDD fragmentation and space may be a good one to try before spending any money.