Stutter Fix? Railworks America

[gptech]

I've found a small (maybe 5 fps) improvement by installing the 9.10.0513 version of PhysX, available at http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx-9.10 ... river.html and then copying the file C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common\PhysXLoader.dll into the ....Steam\steamapps\common\railworks\plugins folder----after renaming the original file of course, just in case it went base over apex.
The graphical quality seems to be slightly better too, but not enough to say this is a definate fix for problems, though it might be interesting to see if anybody else gets any benefit from it.

I'm running a Core2 6420 @ 2.13Ghz, 2Gb of RAM and an nVidia 6800XT (128Mb) O/S is XP Pro, all in all nothing spectacular.

[markpullinger]

Thanks for tip gptech - copied the version across for my current physx & way smoother especially with steam loco valve gear - & this is only version 09.10.224

[djt01]

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.

Same here, r-Factor, GTR2, GTR Evolution, Race On, F1 2010, Dirt2, Ferrari Virtual Academy 2010 and iRacing.

The problem is comparing a racing sim to a train game/sim is almost like comparing an apple to a banana.

As far as I know most if not all tracks in a racing sim are all ready loaded (pre-rendered) before you start a race. I don’t think you’d have much luck even with today’s hardware pre-rendering 50-100 miles of track in a train sim.

[Shadders]

Hello,

I've been reading some of the threads about stutter within Railworks as it seems to have reared its head again with the release of WCML North. Here's attempt at helping. If anything comes across as condescending or inflammatory, it’s not intended, honest!

As far as I can tell, the following are true:

1. Railworks does not load all objects on a route into memory in one go. This means that as the players train advances along a route, any assets that need to be displayed further down the line are loaded as the train crosses invisible boundaries.

2. Railworks is not multithreaded (I'm not including the physics engine here). All the work; displaying assets, playing sounds, updating weather, checking to see if the user is pressing any buttons, updating signals, controlling AI trains, moving cars along roads and more is done by a single CPU core.

3. To make Railworks as flexible as possible there are a LOT of small separate files that go into making Railworks work.
Model builders; please correct me if I'm wrong here!
Take a model of a house for example; you could make a really simple house out of a cube (assuming it has a flat roof). But for it to start resembling a house rather than a cube, it needs a texture with the doors and windows drawn on. But if you want the house to look different in the summer, autumn, winter and spring, you’re going to need textures for those seasons. What if you want the house to look different at night? That's another texture. So in theory, you could have eight textures just for one house and they are all separate files. I think that just about everything in Railworks that we would consider a single entity is actually a mass of files, not one or two files.

So Railworks load stuff on the fly, there are a lot of little files to load and it all has to happen on one CPU core, oh dear. This causes a problem for most desktop systems because your average hard drive may theoretically have a throughput of X gigabytes a second, but that maximum is for large, single files that are organised into a single block. With a lot of little files, the hard drive spends a good portion of its time moving the disc head from location to location rather than actually reading the data.

Even a fully defragged hard drive can struggle because the defragmenter does not know what the relationship is between the files used by Railworks. Going back to the house example above, how does a defragmenter know that the winter texture should ideally, be located next to the model’s geometry file and all the other textures? The only clue it has to go by is the directory structure which is good enough in most cases, but still not ideal. It would seem that the issue is not so much the size of objects or their complexity, rather the number of them that have to be loaded.

I’m lucky enough to have a SSD as my system drive and I’ve just finished experimenting with running WCML on it. I can say that the stutter is reduced a far bit but is by no means gone. I’m reluctant to recommend it as a solution to people because, as solutions go, it’s rather expensive.

I’ve also been having some success with a defrag program called MyDefrag. It’s free and differs from commercial defraggers in that it runs scripts. Rather than rely on the program to work out where everything should go, you can tell it. Railworks lives on my D drive where I have all my other games and apps. I’ve created a script that tells MyDefrag to put the volume information first (info about the files on the drive), leave a 1GB gap, put all the files in my FSX folder next, sorted in directory order, another 1GB gap then all the files in the Railworks folder etc. The most interesting thing about it is that you can also feed it a text file full of files and it will then order the files on the drive in same order as they are in the text file. Therefore it should be possible to create a program that could analyse the relationship between the files in Railworks and work out the optimum file order. However, I’ve a feeling that this is far simpler to suggest than it is to write.

I haven’t said much about the single core issue yet, mainly because we as users can’t do much about it.

I think that scenery makers and route authors can help by limiting the amount of stuff that goes on each tile. I’d bet that a single 10000 poly object is less of an overhead than 10 different 500 poly objects as there the amount of files involved would be far less. Of course I’m talking from a purely technical standpoint; there could be a load of reasons that make this difficult or impossible.

On a personal level, much as I love Railworks and have respect for the people at RS.com who are continuing to work on it, there is only so much time and money I’m willing to invest in getting it to behave. I’m one of the lucky ones that don’t have a performance problem, sure I get stutter, but I can live with it. I don’t know if RS.com have the resources to rewrite the game engine to take advantage of the many core systems that are the norm today. But while I would not see it as a universal panacea that would end all the problems people have with Railworks in a stroke, it would be nice to see what hardware we have utilised more efficiently.

Kindest regards,

Shad.

[markpullinger]

Slight downside - reloading saves causes some spectular effects & controls don't work - so back to old version & a rerun!

[pilot37]

So what about Flight Sim X? My PC doesn't load up Australia in full detail first!....as I said somewhere before, I can fly a 4 engined B17 Accusim (all engines and systems modelled) with a huge 3 d cockpit full of live gauges and dials, all controls interactive by mouse, Track IR head movement so I can look anywhere including leaning close to check gauges and rolling into turns. I fly over high detail payware Australian scenery with Flight Sim Xtreme payware real time internet weather downloading and displaying complex cloud patterns and real time lighting. Meanwhile the CPU calculates the maths of flight and allows me to interact with control towers. I have live garmin satelite systems, navigation controls....I could go on!

So, accepting that we are comparing apples with banannas, but also that it is possible to do things better, what is the bottleneck with Railworks, how can we fix it or get around it to make it a better experience for all....because if it can be improved we can run great routes like WCML North and even better routes to come in full detail.

[ightenhill]

Probably the fact that every asset is individual and unique and placed individually and uniquelly on the tile.. That doesnt happen in for instance FSX where most calls in the engine for landscape items are generated by the engine or a mod of that engine. Full cities and airport addons are designed from the ground up where a terminal building can be efficiently made of efficiently optimized materials rather than several huundred often highly quality items mapped into the tile, lets not even start on the track.. I know its hard to hear but you really cant compare different things.. what your in reality looking for is a whole new game...

[pilot37]

Probably the fact that every asset is individual and unique and placed individually and uniquelly on the tile.. That doesnt happen in for instance FSX where most calls in the engine for landscape items are generated by the engine or a mod of that engine. Full cities and airport addons are designed from the ground up where a terminal building can be efficiently made of efficiently optimized materials rather than several huundred often highly quality items mapped into the tile, lets not even start on the track.. I know its hard to hear but you really cant compare different things.. what your in reality looking for is a whole new game...

I completely disagree. I can put custom buildings all over FSX and most of the landscape is custom. WCML North is payware an can be built "from the ground up" My point is, it can be done.

The fact that it hasn't is because it is a different game engine.

The question is, can it be improved, or can we do something to get around the issue. There are different users with different perceptions of stutter and different stutter, so what is the correlating factor to get the best performance and so on and so forth.

If we can improve things it is good for everybody, so I remain positive. I cannot understand why these threads descend into negativity. Let's help each other move forward.

[Shadders]

So what about Flight Sim X? My PC doesn't load up Australia in full detail first!....as I said somewhere before, I can fly a 4 engined B17 Accusim (all engines and systems modelled) with a huge 3 d cockpit full of live gauges and dials, all controls interactive by mouse, Track IR head movement so I can look anywhere including leaning close to check gauges and rolling into turns. I fly over high detail payware Australian scenery with Flight Sim Xtreme payware real time internet weather downloading and displaying complex cloud patterns and real time lighting. Meanwhile the CPU calculates the maths of flight and allows me to interact with control towers. I have live garmin satelite systems, navigation controls....I could go on!

Morning Pilot37,

I was going to include some info about FSX in the last post but it was getting too big at it was. Funny thing is, FSX started life as a single threaded app. There was much wailing an gnashing of teeth because it brought the most powerful systems of the day to their knees. So what they did was go back and rewrote the engine to be multi-threaded. There's a four page programming article available here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... osoft_.php

Although they did a cracking job (with the help of Intel). It took them six months and put them massively over budget. I've read that this is the reason that any further improvements to FSX and the development of Trains Sim 2 (which was going to use the same engine) got canned. Much as I'd love to see a modern multi-threaded DirectX11 enabled with DirectCompute software running the dispatcher or physics and hardware tessellated landscapes, I also don't want RS.com to die trying. The sad fact is that making a multi-threaded game engine is not just something you can turn on in the programming tools and away you go (I wish).

Imagine a single threaded app is like a single track railway with no passing places or signals. You can quite happily run a single train back and forth all day long. Add another and disaster strikes. You need passing loops and signals to make the thing safe. It's same problem for the program.

Ightenhill in the post above makes a good point about the scenery too. In FSX, there's a form of terrain data that it uses called Landclass, rather than it containing data about how high a landscape should be, it encodes what exists at a given position on the Earth's surface. Trees, houses, farmland etc. FSX reads this data in and places generic scenery at that location. Things like landmarks are specially constructed (like all the scenery items in Railworks) and placed in the appropriate position.

So, accepting that we are comparing apples with bananas, but also that it is possible to do things better, what is the bottleneck with Railworks, how can we fix it or get around it to make it a better experience for all....because if it can be improved we can run great routes like WCML North and even better routes to come in full detail.

As end users, there is little or nothing we can do software wise that will help overcome the current limitations of the software engine. I suppose you could try and create a new engine that used RW assets like the folks at OpenRails have done with Train Sim. But I doubt that would win you any friends at RS.com since RW is still alive and kicking. You can try any of the following:

You can make your PC as lean as possible by getting rid of apps that load into the system tray. Disable any services you don't need; http://www.blackviper.com/ has a ton of info on what most services are and what they do. If you laugh in the face of danger, you could also disable any real-time virus scanning while playing Railworks.

Make sure ALL your drivers , firmware and BIOS are up to date. You'd be surprised how much one part of the system can rely on another.

You can throw hardware at the problem, then it's a case of how deep your pockets are. You could RAID 0 a couple of SATA SSD drives. Or if money really is no object get a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) controller and RAID 0 a couple of SAS SSDs (a cheaper option would be to use SAS mechanical drives that spin at 15000 RPM and have a 3ms seek time). http://www.scan.co.uk seem pretty good. I went to them after Overclockers took 3 months and still failed to deliver my PC, Scan took a week, texted and emailed me the whole way through.

W7 64-bit and enough RAM for the OS and 4GB for RW will help. You don't want RW to be competing with the OS for resources. On my system, W7 take about 2GB, so 6GB should be OK, or you could get more just in case.

Since in other posts I've seen that you don't mind getting you hands dirty modifying routes, you could just make a copy of WMCL and start deleting scenery. It depends on how much you value your time (and sanity).

Sorry for the long post (again), but I hope that something I've said can help you out.

Best regards,

Shad.

[davveb]

Excellent post Shadders. I've tried to make the point in the past that comparisons with the capabilities of MSFS are meaningless, because of the vast resources M$ has available. It can even afford to develop a game like flight sim as a loss maker, just as a showcase for Microsoft's software capability. The fact that it cancelled it (or did it?) speaks volumes. By comparison rs.com is a small single product company which must balance the books. So demands for the graphics engine or AI engine to be "thrown away" and completely rewritten are unlikely to be realistic aspirations.

Regarding your mention of hardware improvement. I was a little "economical with the truth" with my post in the "worst Railworks PC" thread. Although the low specs I quoted are genuine, I didn't mention that I have Railworks installed on twin fast rpm SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration (just as you suggest). Probably helps my data throughput. As with most technology, any setup is only going to be a good as the weakest link.

Dave

[markpullinger]

Hi probably true - as most people have noted, the programme takes info off the hard drive in lumps, so I would imagine that the burst read speed has more of an impact than the average read speed - so if it can get the info from more places at once it should be quicker to load - providing it can get the memory cache flushed quickly enough for the new data to fit in

[pilot37]

Thanks for the effort put into the replies. There are 2 debates going on here.

1. Comparisons with other software were made because certain folk were making excuses for Railworks that somehow it had a tougher task than other sims. I do business turnarounds for a living and 95% of companies I go into take the "we are a special case" excuse as to why they don't shape up. If I buy a route then everything is controlled and predefined. If it is free then accept that it is uncontrolled. Same in FSX when I buy predefined airports, scenery, aircraft, weather whatever. Even Railworks have introduces a Railworks Ready badge...so it better be!

2. We have what we have. The Railworks software probably has a stutter problem (unofficially). There is variation from computer to computer so some of us can optimise to mimic the best equipment either with new components or better settings / drivers / Operating systems etc. Tricks can be learned and developed. I have had every version of Flight Sim so I have been through it all with graphics tuning, less power hungry trees, unofficial patches and so on. That's where a forum can help. How many people who walk into a shop, see a Trains Game and buy it, are familiar with nHancer, Alchemy (and it's problems), sound card settings, Gamebooster etc..etc..

So I say keep the topic going. It can only help.