Stutter Fix? Railworks America

[RSderek]

some thing like that yes


regards

Derek

[AndyUK]

...I get hardly any stuttering, I run full details, with most options on. So what do I do differently?....

Probably you don't do anything differently, a lot of it is down to perception and expectations. Your "hardly any stuttering" may be perfectly acceptable to some users and not be considered worthy of comment or complaint, whereas to others it may be horrendous. Until there is an agreed definition of stuttering and a reliable way of measuring it these debates are unlikely to lead very far.

Andy L

[nigeltouatievans]

Or even better and probably easier to implement, they will be shifting the PhysX engine used by Railworks over to the CUDA based PhysX SDK so that the calculations can be done on the Graphics card watch this space and get ready to buy yourself a NVIDIA graphics card! (Am I correct Derek?? )

As I understand it, the recent PhysX version released this summer (2.8.4) is fairly significantly faster even when run on the CPU due to using SSE2 instructions. If so there might even be hope for those of us with ATI cards.

Edit: not sure if this is actually possible unfortunately, as older Athlons (eg Athlon XP) are above the minimum requirements for Railworks but don't support SSE2, but maybe there could be alternate libraries for older machines? I don't really know enough about this to be honest.

[idiot]

Just thought I'd pass this on.
Yes, I have stopped 99% of the stutters in my RW.
I got one of the relatively new Western Digital 10000rpm hard drives.
Read Time is 4.2ms
Write time is 4.7ms.

-----------------------------------------
It was me who posted that originally in RailWorks, it really did get rid of stutters etc, but its not
doing much good in the WCML as I'm getting them in that route, no doubt caused by
the high density of all the items in some of the sections.

[djt01]

That is why the game runs the same speed no matter what graphics card you run

Not completely true if you value image quality. I usually upgrade every time a new high end video card comes out and without a doubt each newer card has handled higher AA and resolution better than the last. The frame rates have always improved in RailWorks with each new video card.

This is not to say that the game engine RailWorks uses is fully utilizing the GPU either and that fix is going to take more than just a simple patch.

even the highest end CPU's struggle to run Railworks

Who's struggling? My two i7 gaming setups regularly sit well in the triple digits with RailWorks at 1920x1200/1920x1080, 8x super sample AA/16xAF.

Frames rates aren't an issue it's when the game goes through a scenery/object loading transition that's the problem.

[ightenhill]

I have to agree with djt.. (though luckily I dont have to pay for the new cards and boy my sig is out of date) every card update does show a reasonable improvement,the problem is you still know the card is not being used to anywhere near its potential. But it doesnt solve the loading stutter problem

In simple terms if what derek is hinting at is true, then the P element being moved to the card could be a good move..

[djt01]

In simple terms if what derek is hinting at is true, then the P element being moved to the card could be a good move..

That could help things a little and is something that should have been done a long time ago especially with all the PhysX advertising going back to when RailSim was first released.

I've got a few games that do use PhysX but in order to wring out as much performance as possible I stick in a second video card just for PhysX work. I can just see the complaints from ATI/AMD video card users and those with one weak Nvidia card if full utilization of PhysX is implemented though.

I don't see any major improvements coming out of this, full multi-core utilization as well as properly using GPU resources (DirectX 11 maybe) is the only real fix.

[vlado960]

I was already writing about it but I don't remember where. You can try a small program. An explanation of what it is on this forum and there is a link to the program.

Regards
Vlado

[jimmyshand]

Walking back to happiness whoop bam oh yeah!!! I've cracked it, I set scenery and object to medium in the settings and hey presto no more crashes. The drop in quality is barely noticeable on WCML so I am a happy camper. I just made it from Glasgow central to carstairs without a single sbhh. Once out in open country on the way to Carlisle I can set the settings back to high, not that it makes much diff to the quality anyway. Still getting stutter but I can live with that so long as it's not crashing every five minutes

[Kromaatikse]

Actually I don't think PhysX is the problem. As far as I can tell, very little of the workload is physics related, at least in the problem areas I've outlined above. I'm getting high (enough) framerates when it's not loading new scenery tiles or dealing with an extremely dense-scenery area, no matter how many trains are trundling around.

[msmith4000]

Just thought I'd pass this on.
Yes, I have stopped 99% of the stutters in my RW.
I got one of the relatively new Western Digital 10000rpm hard drives.
Read Time is 4.2ms
Write time is 4.7ms.

-----------------------------------------
It was me who posted that originally in RailWorks, it really did get rid of stutters etc, but its not
doing much good in the WCML as I'm getting them in that route, no doubt caused by
the high density of all the items in some of the sections.

Yes it would improve some of the less CPU intensive scenario's such us some of the Barstow San Bernandino if you had a slow drive before hand. I think though most people would not benifit much from such a drive though for running railworks, money being better spent on a new CPU or towards a new CPU and mainboard.

Not completely true if you value image quality. I usually upgrade every time a new high end video card comes out and without a doubt each newer card has handled higher AA and resolution better than the last. The frame rates have always improved in RailWorks with each new video card.

This is not to say that the game engine RailWorks uses is fully utilizing the GPU either and that fix is going to take more than just a simple patch.

Indeed concide I agree if you are running high resolutions 1080p or higher and lots of AA or have a very fast CPU. I have run Railworks on my 1680x1024 monitor and my 1080p TV with 2xAA and noticed no difference with frame rates indicating that the video card has leg room to spare and not the limiting factor. Thats with 8800GTX which I would class as only a little bit better than a current mid range card these days. Your CPU is much faster than my aging Q6600 though, so if you have a fast Core i7 like yourself and a slow video card then the scales would tip and the video card would become the limiting factor, hence you would need a fast vid card too keep up with the CPU. The key is to have a video card that matches the CPU you have, no point having a top end video card and a bottom of the range CPU (or ancient cpu). And vice versa.


Railworks is has pretty graphics but not as near impressive as say Crysis which makes the Railworks graphics look a little basic. I dont think the graphics engine is all that taxing in comparison to the physics calculations the simulator is having to do.

[djt01]

Indeed concide I agree if you are running high resolutions 1080p or higher and lots of AA or have a very fast CPU. I have run Railworks on my 1680x1024 monitor and my 1080p TV with 2xAA and noticed no difference with frame rates indicating that the video card has leg room to spare and not the limiting factor.

At 2xAA probably not, use 8x super sampling AA at 1920x1200 resolution or above and the story is different.

Railworks is has pretty graphics but not as near impressive as say Crysis which makes the Railworks graphics look a little basic. I dont think the graphics engine is all that taxing in comparison to the physics calculations the simulator is having to do.

Here’s an example of pretty graphics –

http://www.codemasters.com/games/index.php?gameid=3188

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGRdSIIz ... re=related


I’d love to see what a train sim would look like in this game engine -

http://outerra.com/wgallery.html

I dont think the graphics engine is all that taxing in comparison to the physics calculations the simulator is having to do.

As far as the train handling physics go from what I’ve seen in RailWorks so far I don’t see that as being very demanding at all, very little in common with what I’ve experienced in the real world any way.

[ightenhill]

The problem with train sims is that the engine has to involve a rather clumsy asset editor.. In an ideal world we would buy routes where the route is designed from the ground up with efficient design rather than thousands of individual assets being placed on tiles,

Despite the physx element being rather clumsy the problem is its still being handled bu rather un optimized code stuck in the cpu cycles.. Despite the fact its doing little , that little part is interfering with everything

[CaptScarlet]

Despite the physx element being rather clumsy the problem is its still being handled bu rather un optimized code stuck in the cpu cycles.. Despite the fact its doing little , that little part is interfering with everything

From what I remember there was an interesting article recently about PhysX and its software drivers re how inefficient they are because of the type of programming level it was written in which does not take into account a lot of CPU instruction sets. Apparently Nvidia is rewriting that side of them sometime soon.

John

[pilot37]

The problem with train sims is that the engine has to involve a rather clumsy asset editor.. In an ideal world we would buy routes where the route is designed from the ground up with efficient design rather than thousands of individual assets being placed on tiles,

Despite the physx element being rather clumsy the problem is its still being handled bu rather un optimized code stuck in the cpu cycles.. Despite the fact its doing little , that little part is interfering with everything

True, there is a lot that Railworks has to be flexible for.

On the other hand I run rFactor which is all freeware tracks and cars and modified physics and runs like silk with 40+ cars, all different etc.