nVidia Control Panel settings ignored by TS2014

[crumplezone]

Hum..with ctrl + S I get this type of screenshots which seems to still have AA on the pic

Ctrl + S : http://i.imgur.com/oU910nT.jpg
Steam UI screenshot button : http://i.imgur.com/2xmVcZ4.jpg

Seem to both be capturing AA from ingame.

[deltic009]

Hum..with ctrl + S I get this type of screenshots which seems to still have AA on the pic

Ctrl + S : http://i.imgur.com/oU910nT.jpg
Steam UI screenshot button : http://i.imgur.com/2xmVcZ4.jpg

Seem to both be capturing AA from ingame.

Perhaps my explanation wasn't clear, I have no AA set in TS2014 - you have, from what you posted. All AA and effects I have are applied by the nVidia Control Panel settings. I am going to set up some static photo shoots that allow me to do direct comparisons between images captured through the sim (Ctrl+S, HUD button or F12) and using something like Fraps or MSI afterburner etc.

[crumplezone]

Hum..with ctrl + S I get this type of screenshots which seems to still have AA on the pic

Ctrl + S : http://i.imgur.com/oU910nT.jpg
Steam UI screenshot button : http://i.imgur.com/2xmVcZ4.jpg

Seem to both be capturing AA from ingame.

Perhaps my explanation wasn't clear, I have no AA set in TS2014 - you have, from what you posted. All AA and effects I have are applied by the nVidia Control Panel settings. I am going to set up some static photo shoots that allow me to do direct comparisons between images captured through the sim (Ctrl+S, HUD button or F12) and using something like Fraps or MSI afterburner etc.

Ah ok, well yeah in that case if ingame AA is off the screenshots via the steam interface, HUD and Ctrl+S will just render what is available ingame since its effectively applying a filter over the image. 3rd party screen capturing should grab what is viewable to your eyes, in theory, but not really sure with the TSX engine to be honest.

[johnwatto]

Crumplezone

A question on the NVidia card setup, in game at the 'Graphical Options' I have set the AA as FXAA + 2X2 SSAA as you suggested and the graphic detail I get running the game is a great improvement, With the Texture Filtering at the 'Graphical Options' I have set this at X8 is this correct??

Regards
Johnwatto

[crumplezone]

Crumplezone

A question on the NVidia card setup, in game at the 'Graphical Options' I have set the AA as FXAA + 2X2 SSAA as you suggested and the graphic detail I get running the game is a great improvement, With the Texture Filtering at the 'Graphical Options' I have set this at X8 is this correct??

Regards
Johnwatto

Yes, that is fine to set at 8x aswell.

On another note, when I had been troubleshooting a FPS issue in the past I found "highest" setting on scenery quality is very buggy with nvidia cards and would cause a abnormal FPS drop of near 30+ frames, settings this to high saw a massive huge leap in FPS aswell as not really impacting anything graphically ingame from what I could see, everything looked like it did before so I don't really know what it changes in the background.

I had tried this on 3 different Nvidia cards and saw a FPS increase each time the setting was changed and having it on highest nuked the fps each time, so I assume that setting is buggy with nvidia cards at this point.

[JustRight]

On another note, when I had been troubleshooting a FPS issue in the past I found "highest" setting on scenery quality is very buggy with nvidia cards and would cause a abnormal FPS drop of near 30+ frames, settings this to high saw a massive huge leap in FPS aswell as not really impacting anything graphically ingame from what I could see, everything looked like it did before so I don't really know what it changes in the background.

Additional to this, I have found, after a tip from Richard Armstrong, that running the Scenery Quality at 'Highest' can also impact the ability to run particularly complex scenarios. I have certainly found this to be true, and many of 'AP's' and 'Rosgars' complex fully featured scenarios that will not run for me with Scenery Quality of 'Highest' will run flawlessly with the Scenery Quality set to 'High'.

Like you Crumplezone, I can barely notice any visual difference between the two settings. I have found only one thing that this appears to affect and that is that the texture of the Windscreen Glass when in the Cab View on some locos, and not all, can have a slight pattern in the 'glass' and are not as clear as on the 'Highest' setting. How this affects the programs performance is not clear, but as you say, it certainly does improve my systems performance and more importantly it's stability with complex scenarios.

Cheers.

[deltic009]

Thanks for all the further input, I just did a test shot with MSI Afterburner to capture the screenshot and that still didn't have an AA visible on the screen capture. I am going to get a trial download of Fraps to see if that is any different.

The frame rate difference of using SSAA 2x2 is massive on my system, and as I said, although it is affecting my screenshots the game when running looks good via using the nVidia Control Panel settings. Obviously this is the TSX shaders and engine at work but let's not forget how far the visual niceties have come since its introduction.

[push2play]

Additional to this, I have found, after a tip from Richard Armstrong, that running the Scenery Quality at 'Highest' can also impact the ability to run particularly complex scenarios. I have certainly found this to be true, and many of 'AP's' and 'Rosgars' complex fully featured scenarios that will not run for me with Scenery Quality of 'Highest' will run flawlessly with the Scenery Quality set to 'High'.

Interesting. Personally, I've found no discernible difference in performance between those two settings (i7 950@4.1Ghz, 3-way GTX 670 SLI). Certainly nothing that would impact my ability to run complex scenarios; if there were any differences in frame rates they were negligible and down to the usual frame variation. I agree that there doesn't seem to be any perceivable difference in visual quality either. I haven't observed anything worthy of note when running some tests just now. I guess it could be another case of hardware-related YMMV, however seeing how there are more than just a few people reporting a tangible difference, I can't help but wonder whether there are some other issues at play - perhaps driver related? Maybe whatever impacts this varies depending on driver version. Nvidia never stops tinkering around with them and each new beta and WHQL release breaks as many things as it fixes.

[GatwickSpotting]

A quick rundown of why the scenery settings 'Highest' and 'High' perform so differently:

'Highest' calls for the maximum quality textures available. This means TS2014 is using lots of largely uncompressed textures.

'High' - Most uncompressed textures will have a "_nmc" counterpart that is the same texture except compressed, and sometimes lower resolution. This greatly reduces VAS usage (the main reason you'll experience a crash in a busy scenario). 32-bit programs are limited to 4GB of Virtual Address Space, and when you've got a busy scenario with lots of stock, on a detailed route such as the GEML, you quickly fill up the VAS for TS2014. If it reaches 4GB, it WILL always crash, most often with a dump file pop-up. An example is a recent scenario I was testing on the GEML had 3.6GB of VAS usage as soon as you load, going up to 3.8GB shortly before arriving in London, then finally hit 4GB about 2 miles before the end of the line. By removing 200MB of VAS usage the scenario became playable.

There are ways to improve it, like this 'fix' from Microsoft, but unfortunately without TS ever going 64-bit, we'll be limited in how much detail we can put into routes and trains. Anyone who knows FSX will be familiar with the OOM errors plaguing the community about a year ago, after a few very high detail add-ons were released. The same issue is slowly creeping its way into Train Simulator, as routes and locos become more detailed and constantly push the envelope.

Nvidia Inspector:

I'm a little bit skeptical of this actually working without a compatibility bit available for RailWorks.exe, personally I'd like to see SGSSAA working on the sim. If anyone actually gets it working without any AA settings on in the game, I'll be extremely surprised as I spent a good few weeks trying everything under the sun to make it work (dll injectors, similar game engine compatibility bits, combination of settings etc).

Screenshots:

The best way to take screenshots of 'how the eye sees it', is with TS in windowed mode, and a simple alt + printscreen button, pasted into Photoshop, or MS Paint and saved as a .png.

[Trev123]

Yes I use the Print Scrn button and use MS Paint and save as a jpeg. Doing it this way you also get the hud if you need it to point out something. Doing it through TS as far as I know you don't get the hud.

[peterfhayes]

Gatwick etc

You can see this being applied by NVI:

Nvidia Inspector:

I'm a little bit skeptical of this actually working without a compatibility bit available for RailWorks.exe, personally I'd like to see SGSSAA working on the sim. If anyone actually gets it working without any AA settings on in the game, I'll be extremely surprised as I spent a good few weeks trying everything under the sun to make it work (dll injectors, similar game engine compatibility bits, combination of settings etc).

If you choose override in NVI then set the AA setting to 32xs, AA transparency Multisampling enable and SGSS to 4x or 8x and you will see displayed when TS 2014 opens 4 or 8 mini screens. Even using SGSS x8 with enhancing the application I still saw shimmering in fences, points and OHW.
Over the course of testing I have found setting in MV control panel "let the 3D application decide" and then use a 1.25 Downsampling setting gives me the best results, plus on some routes I add in SweetFX and set FSAA and SMAA to the highest settings and that seems to help. But the clearest crispest image that I see is using a GTX 560TI with TSX OFF plus NVI settings - no shimmers very little Moire patterns and good solid fps and frame dwell times.

I'm intrigued how you measured this:

An example is a recent scenario I was testing on the GEML had 3.6GB of VAS usage as soon as you load, going up to 3.8GB shortly before arriving in London, then finally hit 4GB about 2 miles before the end of the line. By removing 200MB of VAS usage the scenario became playable.

Did you use VMMap and switch between TS 2014 and VMMap or use another sysinternals tools?

What was the physical RAM usage at the same time because although there is no direct relationship between the VAS and the Physical RAM if you had a VAS usage of 3.8GB then the majority of that would also be "sent to" the RAM (via the OS and cpu) in the working set. If it was not present in the working set then that could also trigger an SBHH/OOM type error usually via "an invalid page fault".

To be clear on FSX the issue was NOT only depletion of the VAS but also fragmentation of the VAS - in the latter case not having as little of 1MB yes 1 MEGABYTE contiguous space available in the VAS could trigger an OOM. I solved much of this fragmentation by using a registry hack: HeapDecommitFreeBlockThreshold http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315407
Although this is for server use and mainly 32-bit systems it worked OK in Win 7 64-bit.

IMHO too little attention is paid to monitor size and Video card VRAM - using an i7 2600K @ 4.8GHz I see around 20% cpu usage, around a total of 5GB physical RAM (incl OS) but on "medium" settings in TS 2014 running a 1920 x 1200 monitor at native resolution up to 1.4GB VRAM depending on route and scenario. (Downsampling to 1.25x increases that to 1.5/1.6 GB VRAM with about a 1/3 increase in frame dwell times >50ms).
It would be interesting to see what sort of performance a simmer gets using a single monitor, with fast processor coupled to a GTX 780TI or Titan.
Interesting observations.
PeterH

[GatwickSpotting]

Peter,

I used Process Explorer on a second monitor, along with monitoring my VRAM usage and RAM usage. I have 4GB of VRAM (EVGA GTX 680) and 12GB of RAM.

During my test of the GEML scenario, RAM usage never got above 2-3.5GB, and VRAM usage was about the same if a bit less. I'm aware of the fact the legacy shader (being a non deferred render engine) supports driver-forced AA settings, although TSX as you say only ever manages to do the mini-screen thing. I wish I could use downsampling, although my monitor is of 2560x1440 native resolution, and won't allow me to force higher resolutions (have tried many things). I'm wondering where I could locate a TS2014 compatibility bit for NVI.

[peterfhayes]

Gatwick
I have searched high and low for a NVI compatibility bit and have tried around 200 or so. No success yet!
I am still looking - TS 2014 uses (I forget the name) a fairly unique game model plus .NET FW and there are not too many mainstream games using that model so its not easy to predict which NVI bit to use. If you see one for FSX that would be close (I hope).
Thanks for your reply.
PeterH

[deltic009]

Okay, I've just got hold of nVidia Inspector, it gives more options for maximum pre-rendered frames and some extra options in the AA menus too. I nixed all of the AA settings in TS2014 to check it was working and it certainly is.

Because I'm into doing video I'm running in HD resolutions despite it giving me the letterbox but set it to a 1.25x of native equivalent.

Getting 60fps with the 170 running Glasgow to Edinburgh in 2100x1181 although this was a resume so can't comment on frame rates at Glasgow. Seemed very smooth, looked great and ran great. I'll experiment a bit more on some of the more intense routes so I can get a feel for the impact of certain settings - I've also followed advice and stepped off from 'Highest' for view distance and scenery quality.

So yeah, did nothing special but download and run nVidia inspector and it goes straight out of the box - or is it just the standard nVidia control panel settings? Well, next up I will drop all the global settings in that to off, then fire up the Inspector settings (this may well not be possible, see my earlier comments about lack of technical knowledge).

[ttjph]

A quick rundown of why the scenery settings 'Highest' and 'High' perform so differently:
<snip>

Great information - thank you for posting! As the owner of an 896 MB graphics card I might try turning this down and see what happens...

That little explanation needs to be copied into a sticky graphics thread somewhere - mods, if you agree, please?