Is this the reason for crashings in TS

[gptech]

One thing we do know is the graphics card; Radeon R7 260x . Nothing particularly amiss there, it's certainly in nVidia 550/750 territory and whilst it's not the most powerful card on the market it isn't one that we'd immediately scream "Get rid!!" at. Many would claim that AMD cards are no good for the game, but personally I've seen no hard evidence to point to a flaw in AMD's offerings, even though I agree that nVidia cards do seem to be less *troublesome*.

I've just tried a very quick test(s) on WCML-N with the Handover scenario--turning V-Sync off gives a frame rate of 28-31 (as reported by the in game counter), rising slightly to 36 at the Bridge Street marker, a big drop to 15 at the start of Polmadie---a very brief one though, almost immediately back up to 26, rising to 34 at the end of the depot.
The same run but using the "Maximum Power" option as recommended by Peter (I usually use the default of "Optimal Power") gave the same figures--give or take a couple of points either way.
Dropping back to my usual configuration thankfully got rid of the screen tearing when panning the view in the cab , and as you'd expect 'locked' the frame rate to tie in with the monitor refresh rate. Oddly enough though the initial 28 FPS seen without V-Sync on both runs was now 30, not the 20 I expected; nor did the very brief drop to 15 occur at the approach to Polmadie.
Maybe more by luck than judgement I've found the optimal in game settings for the graphics to suit my hardware, now on a 970, but other than being able to run happily with 3x3 SSAA they're no different to what I used with a 960 (2x2 SSAA) nor with the settings used with a 550 (2x1 or 1x2 SSAA---I could never decide which worked/looked best)

In addition to the PC specs Pete, could you post what your in gane graphics settings are?

[Bradforth]

Hi all,
First let me make it clear it was only after a Steam update and the frame rate limiter stopped working that I started having these crashes and that was only on JT's Western Mainline route as yet I haven't tried any other routes.
Now that I have the frame rate limiter working again everything is working fine even on the Western Mainline but the stutter is a little worse on this route than my other routes, I only get the occasional micro stutter on my other routes.
With the frame rate limiter off the frame rate fluctuated between the low eighties and the high twenties, it was the rate at which the fluctuations which I think was causing the problem.
When I get the time I will switch off the limiter and try other routes, if this causes crashes then I will have proved my point, if no crashes occur then the problem may be the Western Mainline route.

My PC Specs
Windows 7 HP 64 Bit. Memory 16Gb of ram running at 1865 MHz. Hard Drives, Drive C Kingston 240Gb SSD with 183.7Gb of free space op system plus a few other programs installed. Drive E 500Gb Mechanical drive with 390.87 free space this is where TS 2014 lives plus a few other programs installed. Drive F Kingston 240Gb SSD with 108.26 free space this is where TS 2016 lives (just TS 2016). Drive G 500Gb mechanical drive with 454.76 free space just a few other small games plus a few other programs.
Adaptor type AMD Radeon Processor (0x66583) Advanced Micro Devices, Adaptor description AMD Radeon R7 200 series (R7 260x) slightly overclocked,
Adaptor ram 2Gb, Driver version 16.200.1035.1001.
CPU Intel 4670k overclocked to 4.2 GHz. MB Asus Z97-k. PSU OCZ 550W 80 plus bronze certification.

PC house keeping taken care of by Auslogics BootSpeed 8, hard drives taken care of by PerfectDisk.
All none essential programs and services disabled (to many to list) and I have been careful which to disable.

I can't think of anything else to say except that I don't get the crashes now I have the frame rate limiter set, but I will try some other routes with the limiter unlocked when I feel a little better to see if I can replicate the problem.
Regards,
Pete.

[gptech]

All none essential programs and services disabled (to many to list) and I have been careful which to disable.

Nothing really to do with the issue, but this intrigues me.
There aren't that many services that are set to run Automatically at start up, and these tend to be the ones that are needed. Some even start with the Automatic setting and if they determine they're not needed turn themselves off. The other services have a Manual start, meaning that they don't run until they're called for.
How careful is careful?...which source of information/advice did you trust most when deciding what to turn off? How did you turn them off?

Getting back to the topic of the discussion...

With the frame rate limiter off the frame rate fluctuated between the low eighties and the high twenties

Quite a swing, but setting a limiter doesn't prevent the processing of the frames but just the displaying of them. With the limit set at 60 the game ran OK, and that's still a fair swing. You say you haven't tested other routes, only experienced crashing on a single route and imply that other routes seem to run OK--so are we really answering the question

"Is this the reason for JT's Western Mainlines crashing in TS?"

rather than dealing with a system-wide problem?

[Bradforth]

In addition to the PC specs Pete, could you post what your in gane graphics settings are?

Hi again Gary,
Here are my game settings, Dynamic Lighting off. Dynamic Clouds off. AA FXAA+4xMSAA. Texture Filtering Anisotropic 4.
Scenery Quality Max. Scenery Density Max. View Distance Max. Shadow Quality off. Water Quality 30%. Procedural Flora off.
Adaptive Bloom off. Depth of Field off. Headlight Flares off.

I got my info of which programs and services to turn off from an article in a magazine and through forums on the internet.
I will as I said in my previous post try some other routes with the frame rate limiter off to see if the problem is just this route or there is some correlation between frame rate fluctuations and crashes.
Its difficult to explain but the frame rates were fluctuating very rapidly from one value to another with the limiter off, now that I have set the limiter to 25 fps everything is now fine including JT's Western Main Line.
If I don't get any crashes from other routes with the limiter off and left to itself, then we can say that it must be JT Western Main Line that is just sensitive to frame rate settings, I will let you know how I get on when I have tried other routes.
Regards,
Pete.

[gptech]

Hi Pete,

Here are my game settings,
Dynamic Lighting off.
Dynamic Clouds off.
AA FXAA+4xMSAA.
Texture Filtering Anisotropic 4.
Scenery Quality Max.
Scenery Density Max.
View Distance Max.
Shadow Quality off.
Water Quality 30%.
Procedural Flora off.
Adaptive Bloom off.
Depth of Field off.
Headlight Flares off.

The ones that jump out as being a little *odd* are:

Dynamic Lighting off.
Dynamic Clouds off.
AA FXAA+4xMSAA.
Texture Filtering Anisotropic 4,

particularly the lighting settings.

Does your machine refuse to 'play nicely' with the dynamic lighting effects turned on?
The AA and Anisotropic settings seem a touch low, but these are related to the other settings so having one set high means the other is set low to balance things out, making them not as unusual.

[Bradforth]

Hi Pete,

Here are my game settings,
Dynamic Lighting off.
Dynamic Clouds off.
AA FXAA+4xMSAA.
Texture Filtering Anisotropic 4.
Scenery Quality Max.
Scenery Density Max.
View Distance Max.
Shadow Quality off.
Water Quality 30%.
Procedural Flora off.
Adaptive Bloom off.
Depth of Field off.
Headlight Flares off.

The ones that jump out as being a little *odd* are:

Dynamic Lighting off.
Dynamic Clouds off.
AA FXAA+4xMSAA.
Texture Filtering Anisotropic 4,

particularly the lighting settings.

Does your machine refuse to 'play nicely' with the dynamic lighting effects turned on?
The AA and Anisotropic settings seem a touch low, but these are related to the other settings so having one set high means the other is set low to balance things out, making them not as unusual.

Hi Gary,
Would please make some suggestions to my settings so I can give them a try, remember its the best visual effects that I'm after plus little or no tile load stuttering.
Regards,
Pete.

[gptech]

its the best visual effects that I'm after plus little or no tile load stuttering.

Hi Pete,
unfortunately you won't get both, as they're the opposite ends of the same sliding scale so all any of us can do is reach that compromise between quality and performance. The more powerful your hardware of course, the easier that is.

I'd certainly start by turning the dynamic lighting on, this does make a big difference.
Dynamic clouds aren't (I think) as important so I'd go to nudging up the AA a bit before trying those.
Try an AA setting of FXAA+8xMSAA and nudge the anisotropic up to x8

I'm speculating that your GPU is in the nVidia 550 ballpark, so it should handle those settings--particularly as you've had frame rates in the 80s when testing without a limiter.

You have the game on an SSD so there's very little you can do to improve the speed of tile loading (reading from disc) so if you're getting stutters from a hardware point of view you'll really need to be thinking about upgrading the GPU.

[Bradforth]

its the best visual effects that I'm after plus little or no tile load stuttering.

Hi Pete,
unfortunately you won't get both, as they're the opposite ends of the same sliding scale so all any of us can do is reach that compromise between quality and performance. The more powerful your hardware of course, the easier that is.

I'd certainly start by turning the dynamic lighting on, this does make a big difference.
Dynamic clouds aren't (I think) as important so I'd go to nudging up the AA a bit before trying those.
Try an AA setting of FXAA+8xMSAA and nudge the anisotropic up to x8

I'm speculating that your GPU is in the nVidia 550 ballpark, so it should handle those settings--particularly as you've had frame rates in the 80s when testing without a limiter.

You have the game on an SSD so there's very little you can do to improve the speed of tile loading (reading from disc) so if you're getting stutters from a hardware point of view you'll really need to be thinking about upgrading the GPU.

Thanks for the advice Gary, but I will pass on the Dynamic lighting I have tried this setting on before and I just can't live with it some how, don't no why? I have had the other settings set as you have suggested but it did increase tile load stutter but that was before SSD days so I will give them another go and see what happens.
Thanks again.
Regards,
Pete.

[ttjph]

Pete,

You mention that both your graphics card and CPU are overclocked to some degree, and the problem only seems to occur after a period of time, when you allow the system to continuously draw frames as fast as it can.

Do you have any monitoring software displaying your CPU and GPU temperatures? My suspicion is that one of them is getting too warm...

[peterfhayes]

Pete
Looking at your specs you have a very fast processor coupled to mid-range video card and that could cause "bottlenecking".
When you run TS2016 with high fps or unlimited - the processor sends a stream of data that IMO your Radeon gpu struggles to process, and over time (ie eventually) it can only just about handle the data being sent, it then overloads and because TS2016 is very prone to data being blocked (see how many crashes you get with the editor) you get a crash.

It could also be due to the gpu getting too hot as it has to process more and more data at full saturation.

On my "slow" rig NON-Gsync, using a standard Dell 24" monitor, native resolution of 1912 x 1200 running the JT WM with a long scenario, I see a peak VRAM usage of 2.8GB, fortunately the card is a GTX 960 with 4GB VRAM. Even after 3 hours there is no crash (plenty of stutters) even when running without any frame rate limiter. Monitor resolution is also critical in low VRAM cards.

What you are doing when you limit the fps to 20 is you are sending much less data to the gpu than you would if you had instructed the cpu to send as many frames as it is able to process fps unlimited to the gpu. I'm not sure what the data load would be say when running the sim at 20 fps and when running at say 60 fps, its probably not linear, but it is probably enough to cause a data block between the cpu and gpu - TS2016 throws a wobbly and crashes.

I cannot understand why any one overclocks a video card especially for TS2016 - in any SIM - it does nothing except raise the temperature of the card. Even with your rig that card can process data probably 5 x faster than your cpu with its powerful GDDR5 VRAM, but it still gets overloaded if too much data is sent to it in any given period of time.

If you changed the card to say a NVidia "70" range with 4GB VRAM IMO there would not be a problem.

Regards
PeterH