Sorry to talk about Grpahics Cards again!!!!

[sargnickfury]

That may be, but the OS is still also working in the background. Also the CPU power will have an effect on a modern graphics card performance as well. Jumping to i7 with same graphics card netted an increase in performance of 30% or more over i3 for me.

[gptech]

Can we drunk the rubbish about core usage once and for all?
The game processes data on 2 cores, it doesn't matter how hard a core is being pushed, in fact a core pushed at near 100% for long is a core that's in danger of locking up and indicates a programming fault.
All we can claim is that the multi-core capabilities aren't yet fully optimised but there's no such thing as "using half a core"

[gptech]

Drunk??....I meant debunk

[shanyiqua]

That may be, but the OS is still also working in the background. Also the CPU power will have an effect on a modern graphics card performance as well. Jumping to i7 with same graphics card netted an increase in performance of 30% or more over i3 for me.

That background work normally is negligible (when a game runs about 0-2% of the cpu usage of the full OS, other 98% is used by the game). Of course if the new cpu is faster in core to core performance, or the rendering or compressing video at the background, or a lot of running malwares eating the resources, than it can help, but that's not an average usage

[ttjph]

Can we drunk the rubbish about core usage once and for all?
The game processes data on 2 cores, it doesn't matter how hard a core is being pushed, in fact a core pushed at near 100% for long is a core that's in danger of locking up and indicates a programming fault.
All we can claim is that the multi-core capabilities aren't yet fully optimised but there's no such thing as "using half a core"

Well... having discovered that you can track thread CPU usage using Perfmon, it appears that:

- Railworks shows about 23-25 threads
- Only two of these (0 and 2) continuously use any significant CPU
- On my system, with the GPU running below full load (so CPU limited), thread 0 varies around the 90% level and thread 2 around 40%
- The next largest users were Firefox (still open with UKTS and Hotmail), and occasional blips from mmc.exe - which apparently is used to run perfmon.

Presumably there are limitations in Windows which prevent any one thread from running absolutely continuously, hence the ~90% usage shown on what appears to be the limiting thread.

Gary, I think the point about core usage is that (assuming you're neither GPU limited nor running into the fps limiter) there is one thread that determines the frame rate and that will use all the CPU time it can get - which equates to the capability of "one core", whether it's set with affinity to one or shared between more than one. There is a second significant thread which requires about half as much processing time as the limiting one, so again if RW isn't otherwise limited this uses around half the available time of a second core, or equivalent. Therefore, the game uses up the available processing power (or time if you prefer) of roughly one and a half cores.

In terms of processor choice, this still suggests that, unless you're running a lot in the background, a dual-core system should be just as good as a quad-core with the same single-thread performance - but it's possible there are other bottlenecks which aren't covered by my simplistic understanding.

[sargnickfury]

and what if you like to record your train rides?

[tads1970]

Can we drunk the rubbish about core usage once and for all?

It's also worth noting that Intel CPU's have what you call CPU parking feature,if not all cores are needed,it will park cores up to save power,or some
people might misinterpret this as not utilizing all cores.When a program that can utilize all cores - the parked cores will change state to unparked.

Daz