Railworks Poor Performance

[ihavenonamenoreallyidont]

Um, do what?

Maybe I misunderstood but I was told a while back that RW used a similar process for rendering graphics as Metro 2033...? Irrespective, my point was that other game companies seem to be capable of coding their software to utilise hardware components, what's the story with Railworks...?

Kr, Steve

Metro 2033 has about as much in common with RW as it does Minecraft in terms of modern rendering techniques (exaggerated a little for effect!). I can't imagine, other than utilising D3D and Direct X (although you'll be playing Metro in DX11 mode, naturally), that they have much in common at all.

As for why RW's performance is so poor on good hardware, that's the $64 billion question and one we've discussed over the last couple of years. The general consensus appears to be that it's poorly optimised and fails to take advantage of modern hardware quite spectacularly.

[sdark2]

Some more developments...

Completely reinstalled the OS and the only thing now running on my machine is Steam and Railworks (obviously alongside the required drivers, as well as the overclocking tools for my motherboard and graphics cards - these used purely to monitor loads).

Without playing with any settings at all, I launched railworks with its default configuration and with the default GPU and CPU configurations (no overclocking), just to see what happened. One thing I noticed immediately was the Physx indicator - which appeared to be dedicated to CPU (later checked that according to the drivers, physx was dedicated to one of my two GPUs, and it seemed apparent that it made no difference to Railworks what was selected in the drivers - am I missing something here?).

Started the Chasing Yellows scenario on OxPad (this being the scenario I've stuck with for benchmarking) and, via the in-game frame rate counter, noted the frame rate at 14fps (felt a little lower than this though, probably around the 10fps mark). At this stage, cpu usage was below 10% (nicely balanced over all the cores) and gpu loading was hovering around the 4% mark. Continued with the scenario up to the point where you increase to 125mph and waited until my HST did in fact reach that speed before exiting. Frame rate did increase slightly to 16fps but CPU load showed no more than 25% load over all the cores, except core1 which was firmly planted at 60%. GPU1 load remained at 6% and GPU2 load remained at 0% throughout the entirety of the test.

Although the frame rate recorded was poor, it was very clear that the whole sim was running much smoother than previously (if you can call the continuous frame stuttering smooth). There was no more severe hanging of the sim while it loaded in the tiles.

Now I had a play around with the settings - the default with TSX > On was: AA > MSAAx8, Texture Filtering > Aniso x4, all in-game settings were at Highest. Driver settings all at application controlled default still, SLI > off. Changed the settings to AA > Off, Texture Filtering > Aniso x8, all in-game settings down to medium. Frame rate throughout the entire test was 16fps (sometimes bottoming out to 14fps particularly around Old Oak Common) - CPU load was 25% over all cores except core1 and core4 at 60%. Strangely, I appear to get more fps when sitting in the external camera view (approx 5fps more) than in the cab.

All in all, installing a clean operating system was a fruitless effort as performance actually appears to be much worse now. The bit that bothers me the most here is physx being locked to the CPU by the sim. I've had problems with this with other games, in that they always perform just like Railworks is doing here - really badly.

So, I'm at a loss as to explain what's going on here. CPU and GPUs barely appear to be doing much work at all... I guess I need to accept that my recent upgrade was a complete and utter waste of money and I'm now resigned to legacy mode. To say I'm disappointed is an understatement - RSC have at this point just lost another customer.

Kr, Steve

[AndyM77]

All in all, installing a clean operating system was a fruitless effort as performance actually appears to be much worse now. The bit that bothers me the most here is physx being locked to the CPU by the sim. I've had problems with this with other games, in that they always perform just like Railworks is doing here - really badly.

If the CPU based PhysX is used by the developers (which was the case with the original game and appears to have followed through to the latest version) then the only way for the GPU implementation of PhysX to work has to be patched in by the very same people.

The latest PhysX runtime has much improved performance (9.12.0213), however this only comes if the game has been specifically updated to work with the latest version(s).

I'm not sure how many hours implementing the GPU based PhysX with CPU fallback for ATi (AMD) users would take, but if RSC found the time to do so then things would improve for a vast majority of users.

[Acorncomputer]

Hi Steve

I am somewhat bemused by your experiences. Whilst I have had my own problems with getting the best set up, I have not had the same experience as you.

I do not have my home computer and laptop computer specifications handy but they both behave in a similar way. My approach -

a) Set the NVIDA control panel so that the games manages the 3D Settings
b) I have no idea about overclocking so I do no tweaking of any kind to my installations
c) When the computers were set up they were optimised to the video drivers available at the time. I therefore never update video drivers.
d) I have never had to re-install Windows on any computer ever and I have never had to re-install Railworks since it first came out other than to transfer the whole Steam file from an old computer to a new one and then verify.
e) 99.9% of the time I am offline from Steam

My settings for TS2012 are -

a) Slider set to FXAA and anisotropic at 8
b) Resolution at 1920 x 1080 for full screen and slightly less for route building windowed mode.
c) All gameplay options set to highest except Water (high) Shadows (Low).
d) Procedural Flora - ON, Adaptive Bloom - ON and Depth of Field -ON

I get very good frame rates with only very rare occasions dipping down below 14 fps on any route and when frame rates are low, the action is still quite smooth. The effect is even less noticeable on the laptop display.

I can crank up the AA to 2x2 and the program will still run quite happily but I prefer to put up with the less than perfect AA if that means getting a much better overall performance.

I had a laptop with two video cards some time ago and it was very clear that running the two together made absolutely no difference to the performance of the program. One card is quite sufficient.

I know next to nothing about tweaking a computer for best performance but perhaps that is to my advantage. I am sure that the game is designed (or aims to be designed) for the average computer user like me and the less I do to try and improve the game the better it works for me.

There is clearly a need for modern hardware to get the best from this game, and that cannot be denied, but more than that seems unnecessary.

I cannot help but think that there is something wrong with your particular computer that is causing you problems Steve, but what do I know

[holzroller]

Sorry to see you have so many problems. I am using an AMD black edition quad core, slightly overclocked with a single gtx560ti, & 8gb of ram. I can run at almost max settings on every route under win7 64 bit, under XP it was a disaster. I have noticed when running Koeln - Dusseldorf I am using around 40% Ram, with a mega route like Northern Europe I am using 80% Ram. CPU never gets near 100%. This is measured using the windows 7 cpu gadget, no idea how accurate it is, but suggests that way more ram is being used than should be available. I would agree that RS towers need to batten down the hatches and sort out a few of the core issues, otherwise they are going to waste their biggest asset, customers. Suggest their next appointment is a programmer with the necessary experience and skills to help sort this out. Might not bring in money straight away, but in the long run would be their best investment ever.

[sdark2]

Thanks for your input Geoff.

With regard to your comment about the possibility of something being wrong with my computer... note my original post where I stated that all I've done is upgrade my graphic's cards to newer tech and put more ram in. Performance went from an average of 30fps with the old components to <14fps with the new components. If there was a fault with any of the new components, then surely I would have considerable issues running other games and applications, not to mention reaching the dizzying frame rates far in excess of 120fps that I've experienced thus far - or have I got it wrong, 120+fps is what you get when components don't work properly?

As for the overclocking, I rarely go down the route of overclocking - most of the time it isn't needed. In fact, the only time I've ever had to overclock my machine was for squeezing out more frames out of Railworks. Recently, I was only overclocking my cpu to see what effect, if any, it had on Railworks - seeing as everyone was intent on blaming that for the lack of performance. The results of the testing showed that I could push my CPU to its limits and it had absolutely no effect on performance at all.

You're more than welcome to review the reams upon reams of technical diagnostic data I've accumulated to rule out such a possible hardware problem. Just let me know and I'll be happy to forward it to you for your analysis.

Kr, Steve

[sdark2]

Sorry to see you have so many problems. I am using an AMD black edition quad core, slightly overclocked with a single gtx560ti, & 8gb of ram. I can run at almost max settings on every route under win7 64 bit, under XP it was a disaster. I have noticed when running Koeln - Dusseldorf I am using around 40% Ram, with a mega route like Northern Europe I am using 80% Ram. CPU never gets near 100%. This is measured using the windows 7 cpu gadget, no idea how accurate it is, but suggests that way more ram is being used than should be available. I would agree that RS towers need to batten down the hatches and sort out a few of the core issues, otherwise they are going to waste their biggest asset, customers. Suggest their next appointment is a programmer with the necessary experience and skills to help sort this out. Might not bring in money straight away, but in the long run would be their best investment ever.

Thanks for your input Holzroller, find it very interesting that you can get great performance from Railworks. Are you running the latest drivers for your hardware?

I fully agree with you on the next appointment... unless they want to face the very real possibility of losing yet more customers as older tech gets replaced with newer and the continuing saga of people suffering as a result (as is apparent with other users also).

Kr, Steve

[holzroller]

All drivers except the video card are the latest, the video card drivers are 295.73, haven't got around to downloading and updating with the newest ones yet. One thing though, my gpu seems to be running at 99% in game regardless of frame rates, something I think others have found. Hope it helps. When I first installed windows 7 it did not install all the latest drivers, had to do a bit of hunting myself. Sure you are aware of this yourself.

[sdark2]

Thanks Holzroller, yeah I actively block windows from downloading hardware drivers and fetch them from the respective manufacturer's instead. FInd it strange that your gpu runs at 99% when mine is barely even breaking a sweat - most of the time sitting around the 20% mark except when I pause the game, then it climbs to something like 54%.

One thing I've noticed while fiddling with things is that the frame rate shown doesn't seem right. Says 14fps yet, feels much faster than that - there's no stuttering as I move around (with gpu load increasing ever so slightly by 1 or 2% and settling back to 20%). Someone mentioned on another forum to check the firmware of the gpu's, so I'm looking into that at the moment - hopefully this might be the answer to the problems (finger's crossed!)

Kr, Steve

[cehidal]

Hello,

It´s not the first time I read that a person with a supercomputer have poor perfomance in a game. I think that it´s neccesary to understand the limtations of the software and not only the hardware.

Based on my personal experience and tests I think that the poor prefomance it´s caused by software limitations/implementation too:

1) RW3 is a 32 bit application: This means that the application only is capable to manage up to 4 GB of memory in total. Of those 4 GB substract those used by the RW core/libraries and the rest is the memory used to store the route, rolling material, etc. A 6 GB of System Memory RAM should be enough (1.5 GB for Operating System and 4 for application.

2) The SLI/Crossfire technology is good... if the application uses it. The application programmer has to be implemented this possibility, if not it´s useless. I think that RW3 does not use this features, then you can put 10 graphics cards in paralell mode and you will get nothing because only one is used. This applies to multicore processors too. Until the last patch, RW only used one core. An Intel i7 has only 4 cores. The rest of "cores" are multithreading technology, and like all, this technology needs to be implemented by the application programmer for use it (I think so).

For this, until the RW core is optimized as it should be, wasting huge amounts of money on high-end pc components is useless, at least for this game.
This is my opinion.

Sorry form my Googlenglish.
Regards.

[sdark2]

Ok, new firmware... same frame rates... but, I've now come to the conclusion that the frame rate counter is telling lies as I've been able to complete an entire scenario (frame rate counter fluctuating between 14 and 16fps) on wcmln, yet the whole thing was smooth and fluid - only minor stuttering, and maybe the odd couple-second freeze (while presumably loading things in), throughout.

Is it possible that perhaps the thing is running too fast for the counter to keep up (I've had this on other games, the game is running too fast for a frame count, usually showing 0fps)?

Kr, Steve

[SquidvT]

The FPS meter in RWs will only show a minimum of 14fps. Even if the real FPS is 1 it will show 14fps. I have no idea why they did this.

If you want a real idea of what your actual FPS is use fraps. You can download the trial version for free (works just the same as the full version for FPS) and it will tell you the real story.

[smarty2]

I know this may be cold comfort Steve but why not just bung your old gpu's back in? I have read this thread with interest and I too think the software isnt optimized for newer "tech", my ye olde 9550 phenom quad and old 8800 GTX runs the sim better than your rig! Mind you though, since upgrading to 8 gb's of ddr2 hyper x ram it has made things nice and relatively sbhh free! Hope you sort it, pity RSC support does not appear to give a fig? Or is it that they just do not know.

[Acorncomputer]

The update dated 8th February 2012 included - 'Fix for showing incorrect FPS with shift + z'

I am not sure what that means but I have not noticed any difference myself.

[Makeone]

I wonder if you have any fps-limit set on rw (and same to Holzroller too, gpu running flat out is not always so good, atleast because of noise...).

Tile loading problems sounds like memory issues and/or bottleneck somewhere in hard-drives and/or memory, were there lot's hdd activity when tile loading happens?

And if you need to get more reliable fps readout, fraps can be your friend... (Hmph, SquidvT was faster...)