Railworks Poor Performance

[sdark2]

Steve,

It is important to remember that Railworks, even in the recent update, only just uses more than 1 CPU on the main game tasks. So whether you have a dual core or hex core cpu is irrelevant: both (given other things equal) will play the game as well. We all hope that RS are improving this, but given DX9's inability to multithread, it is a hard problem without moving to DX10.

The thing RW likes is a good fast CPU core, lots of memory, and a good-enough GPU. A fast (10Krpm) disk doesn't hurt either.

Re the AMD/Intel CPU comparison: most reviews end up saying Intel cores are faster clock for clock, and they clock a bit higher too. I'd agree that comparing processors processing ability on price is somewhat suspect... the i7 is high-priced mainly because they can (Most ordinary (e.g. office) users will get by just fine with an i3 or i5) but the i7 is currently the top of the tree for those who must have the fastest cpu (for some types of work).

Your system should however be doing better than it is at running RW. I'd say it should be capable of 20fps on a demanding route like WCML-N and better than 40 on the provided routes. Something is wrong: you just have to find out what.

Ruth

Hi Ruth, thanks for your further input.

I thought I had all of the requirements for reasonable performance from Railworks, nice fast cpu, lots of ram, fast gpu(s) and I even have 10k raptors for hdds - I agree though, it should be doing much better than it is - I'll keep digging and testing, see what I can find. Posting here was a means really to point out things I may be overlooking.

I totally agree with the performance capabilities of the top Intel vs AMD - believe me, if I had that kind of money to blow on a cpu, I'd not think twice lol. My point was that how can someone possibly compare two products based entirely on price and totally ignore the capability? Furthermore, how can it be said that something isn't up to a particular job when clearly there has been no attempt to understand the capabilities vs the requirements?

Kr, Steve

[sdark2]

Yeah, I knew it wasn't really related to your problem and I could be wrong, but I just thought I'd share my experiences which I made seeing the CPUs offered by AMD and Intel. I always saw that even eight core processors (like AMD FX CPUs) are still much cheaper than Intel's i7, i5 or i3's. By that I mean that AMD's processors are still not "very well made" - I don't want to say that I know how to make a good CPU - but they're still not that good as Intel's ones on the technical level. That's why I never liked AMD's processors and always thought about getting a PC with an Intel CPU inside and an ATI/AMD GPU. AMD's processors might have a lot of cores inside, but they don't unfold the entire e.g. six core power as the Intel CPUs do.
That's why I said that your six cores of the AMD CPU are not "the six cores", I didn't mean to insult your CPU.

I'm quite satisfied with my system, but it should be replaced in summer by a newer system. I'm somehow used to the lag I sometimes get in RW. Additionally, Railworks doesn't even use all of the six cores as far as I know (even not with the Multicore option enabled in the launcher) but only a maximum of four...

Ok thanks Matt, I get what you mean. I do disagree with you about the "very well made" comment. I've stuck with AMD since they first started manufacturing CPUs and never had even the slightest inclination that they were problematic or poorly made. My systems have always consistently outperformed the equivalent Intel machines on particular tasks (as Ruth said above). Sure, Intels do beat AMDs on particular tasks - however, just because something is cheap is not an implication that they are poorly made. It's more a case that they're aiming for a specific market - the very same market that Intel are alienating. I don't know many that would be able to fund the purchase of a top end Intel CPU, us working class people have to make do with the poorman's CPU

But anyways, back on topic...

I have been working through my diagnostic list, there's really only one thing on it that I cannot be sure isn't causing the problem - the Operating System. So I'm going to completely re-install and start from scratch, at least if it doesn't solve the problem, I can at least cross it off the list of possibles.

Kr, Steve

[Acorncomputer]

One thing that made a big difference for me was to set the NVIDIA 3D Manager so that the program managed the 3D settings and not the NVIDIA card. Trying to set the card manually caused me a great deal of grief.

I also had two cards in a laptop but using them together produced a worse performance that one on its own. I disabled one card and all was then OK.

[sdark2]

Thank's Geoff, I had played around with those settings but none of them seemed to have any effect other than with the SLI Rendering Mode as mentioned above.

Tried various configurations of the GPUs, one card only, tried with the other card on its own, etc. All in all, the best performance so far has been achieved with the two cards and SLI enabled - the same as with the three GPUs I was using before the upgrade.

Kr, Steve

[alexedwin]

Have you tried disabling EAX.
This has solved problems for others in the past.

[sdark2]

Thanks Alex, I haven't tried that but I'll give it a go.

Kr, Steve

[stevee630]

I just skimmed through this thread, most of the "techno speak" went over my head lol, but i had a similar problem and it was my gpu that was overheating. You've probably checked for this i would imagine, just thought i'd mention it.
I never get below 15fps on WCML with TSX on with this rubbish system.
Intel Core2 Duo cpu E6550 @ 2.33GHz(2CPUs)
4gb DDR2 Ram
Graphics card HD Radeon 6670 1gig
Direct X 9.0c
Windows xp 32bit home edition sp3

2.7fps Hope you get it sorted mate.

[sdark2]

Hi Stephen, thanks for your input. Yeah I monitor everything, particularly temperature on overclocked cards. Both cards only seem to run 2C higher while running Railworks than at rest. Clearly the cards aren't even being used to their capacity, if at all.

Just out of interest, what are your Railworks settings?

Kr, Steve

[stevee630]

Here they are. I don't have a large monitor, so any higher resolution and i can't read the writing.
P.S. Steve, i also have the frame rate limiter set to 20fps.

[sdark2]

Been running some more tests this morning... this time, completely cleaned every single driver from my pc and forced a clean re-install.

Ran a simple scenario, here's the results:

SLI Mode > Disabled (Single GPU operation only)

CPU > Max Recorded Load > 12% (Core 2 of 6 is running at 90% most of the time, the other cores barely register) <<< I suspect this is the cause of the problem
GPU1 > Max Recorded Load > 20% (Average > 18%)
GPU2 > Max Recorded Load > 1% (Average > 0%)

Frame Rate > 20fps (Average > 14fps)

With SLI enabled, performance drops by approx 4fps but the total load on both cards never gets above 12%.

Interesting results don't you think? Seems that the graphics cards aren't being utilised except while the game is paused or sitting in the menu screen lol. In fact, increasing any of the graphic quality settings only serves to max out Core2 of the CPU - I find this totally bizarre. Surely the GPU should be handling anything to do with graphic quality, no?

Kr, Steve

[USRailFan]

It seems it isn't really making use of dual-/multi-cores either, with one core taking almost all the load?

[sdark2]

Some results of game performance on my system (max recorded frame rate):

Deferred Lighting:
Crysis 2 > 60fps (appears to be locked)
Dead Space 2 > 124fps
Grand Theft Auto 4 > 92fps
Shift 2 > 60fps (appears to be locked)
Starcraft 2 > N/A (Couldn't get a recording for some strange reason but perceived performance was fantastic)

Deferred Shading:
Metro 2033 > 64fps
Mafia 2 > 60fps (appears to be locked)
Railworks 3 > 2.1fps (3145fps at main menu, 1430fps while paused)

All games had been configured with the maximum possible resolution and quality available.

EDIT: Thought I should mention that I managed to get the CPU loading balanced over all the cores by checking the Multicore option in the Railworks launcher - no noticeable/recordable improvement in performance.

[shanyiqua]

Some results of game performance on my system (max recorded frame rate):

Probably everyone's results (in ratios roughly) would be like yours.
Railworks runs much worse than other games on same system, so the problem isn't with the PC... Sometimes runs even worse on some configurations, but no one managed to find out why.

I have a weaker PC, but nearly the same happens i usually switch off only the antialiasing other than that everything is at high/max:
-mafia2, 30+ fps
-Skyrim, 30+fps
-bf3, 30+ fps
-tropico 4, 30+ fps
-Arma2 25+ fps
-GTA4 20+ fps (while it is usually criticized for badly optimized code)
-railworks, is max 30 fps, 15-25 on default routes, max 15 on high detailed routes like wcml with shadows on medium, which looking very badly according to the games above+ microlags, always.

[AndyM77]

-Arma2 25+ fps
-GTA4 20+ fps (while it is usually criticized for badly optimized code)

Patches from 1.0.0.3 greatly improved the performance IIRC. So whilst the original vanilla game was bad (not as bad as TS2012 IMHO), at least R* managed to improve things greatly and fairly quickly too. Whilst RSC have patched and improved TS2012 (by an average of 6 -8fps depending on the situation) it's really still not good enough. So much so that I've ditched the game until I hear of another "Improvement" to the game code

[shanyiqua]

Whilst RSC have patched and improved TS2012 (by an average of 6 -8fps depending on the situation) it's really still not good enough. So much so that I've ditched the game until I hear of another "Improvement" to the game code

Patched the Anti Aliasing which wasn't hard work since the AA shader codes for AA methods are pretty universal, no need to write a new one, just download it from nvidia or other sites, and put it in the game. But it was patched already before the last update by the "AA patch", so not a big change. Without using AA the improvement is a big zero, just the loading stuttering improved.

Same happened with me after TSX patch, if've not playing much with rw, i'm just finishing the addons what i've started to make, then i'll wait for OpenRails, or a really big improvement on TS2012.