Stuttering not fixed from MSTS days

[PaulH2]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply Paul. I will Defrag the drive and see if this helps. Would there be any point in upgrading to a better Video Card as all my other Programs run fine on this one? Any recomendations ??. I will eventually get a separate Creative Sound Card. Even MSTS has issues with the Realtek Sound. I have to turn Acceleration off or my AI Trains can be heard miles before and after they appear and the sound stays at the same level for in cab, exterior and exterior back end of coaches. It's just time and money stopping me ATM.
There are so many Video Cards on the market that is it difficult to sort out the differences between them and I know some of my FlightSim buddies have been buying cards round the £200+ mark to run FSX. To spend that much on one Card + the cost of a good Sound Card could run up a bill of around £300. Some of them have even built a second machine just to run FSX on. The only people who are making money on this are the companies concerned. It does seem a little unfair for the average Simmer who just wants to enjoy running the Trains or Planes on a machine that does'nt cost an arm and a leg.
Regards James

You're welcome, I hope defragmenting your drives works!

For a video card, personally I'd reccomend an ATi Radeon 1950PRO as its about the best "bang for the buck" card at the moment (unless you need DirectX 10). If you prefer nVidia (or are palnning on upgrading to Vista and want DirectX 10, for example for FSX) the new Geforce 8800GT looks like a good bet. On the other hand, if you're not desperate, I'd wait a couple of months as the next generation of nVidia and ATi cards are due late this year or early 2008 and at the very least that should drop the prices of the current cards. Either way, it isn't really clear yet how much benefit you'll see in KRS with a better video card, so if everything else you are running is working fine, I'd probably wait and think about a sound card first.

For sound, you should be able to pick up a Creative X-Fi for under £100 (I know in the US the basic X-Fi cards are running at less than $75 now so I'd think £50 or so should get you one, but I'm not up to date on UK prices).

Good luck!

Paul

[Retro]

Hi Paul,
Not had time for defrag yet. Have been looking at the Creative X-Fi card today in P.C. World when I popped in for some CD-R's. I presume it is EAX although it does not seem to say on the box the only other one they had was an Audigy SE £50 and £30 respectively. The Audigy had the EAX logo on the box. Decided not to get one yet but if you recommend the Creative X-Fi I will look into this one. Will MSTS work O.K with it or will I still have to turn off acceleration. As for the Video card I am going to hold off for a while as you suggest. ATM I am sticking with FS 2004 as my machine will not run FSX according to the guy's in the know and a number of them are still using FS 2004 more than FSX. If Microsoft are using the FSX Engine on MSTS 2 it is going to mean huge upgrades to get it running properly.
Thanks for the help and advice.
Regards James

[PaulH2]

Hi Paul,
Not had time for defrag yet. Have been looking at the Creative X-Fi card today in P.C. World when I popped in for some CD-R's. I presume it is EAX although it does not seem to say on the box the only other one they had was an Audigy SE £50 and £30 respectively. The Audigy had the EAX logo on the box. Decided not to get one yet but if you recommend the Creative X-Fi I will look into this one. Will MSTS work O.K with it or will I still have to turn off acceleration. As for the Video card I am going to hold off for a while as you suggest. ATM I am sticking with FS 2004 as my machine will not run FSX according to the guy's in the know and a number of them are still using FS 2004 more than FSX. If Microsoft are using the FSX Engine on MSTS 2 it is going to mean huge upgrades to get it running properly.
Thanks for the help and advice.
Regards James

Both the Audigy series (I'm not sure about an Audigy SE specifically) and the X-Fi support EAX. The original Augigy series was EAX 2, the Audigy 2 series EAX 4 and I think the X-Fi is EAX 5 (also called EAX-HD I think). I think, based on some of the dev comments that KRS was written to take advantage of EAX-HD so the X-Fi is probably your best bet and has the added advantage of better support in Vista should you decide to go that route (additional software is required to use EAX in Vista due to changes in DirectX 10's audio support which is free for the X-Fi but you have to buy a copy for the Audigys).

I personally run MSTS using an Audigy 2 series sound card, but I see no reason why it shouldn't run just fine with a X-Fi and should you decide to upgrade for FSX (or MSTS2) in the future the X-Fi will still be a decent sound card so you'll be able to reuse it.

Paul

[thegoonden]

I categorically refuse to accept that this is a new program from the ground up, too many of MSTS's quirks are duplicated, what are the chances of two programs usung the same broken routines if they are coded from the ground up? And if it IS likely, then why these two programs and no others, including TRS and BVE.

Obviously Kuju cannot admit re-using old code because MS would get the lawyers in.

If it IS new code, then I siggest they have managed to write the WORST performing game engine on the planet...TWICE I accepted MSTS pathetic performance because it was old and did not use modern features, KRS is without this excuse.


Seriously, my machine runs Bioshock, Supreme Commander, Live For Speed, Colin McRae Dirt, you name it...all at flat 60FPS 1630x1050 FULL detail options, 16xAnisotropy 16Xantialiasing and every single quality tweak in rivatuner maxed out. KRS? detail half way, reduced resolution, and all the "polish" turned off and it is struggling to get 20+ FPS stable.

Even THAT wouldn't bother me if it would just hold itself steady but it can't....it's just horrible, perfect animation for a few frames and then it chokes up again, then goes again and so on. It is NOT loading things from the hard disc, so fragmentation (not that there IS any) is not an issue. There are some HD reads like in MSTS (how odd they both handle loading in exactly the same way if they are totally unrelated programs), where it loads up the next bit of scenery, but these are to be expected.


I am annoyed that this program defeats my machine, when not one other thing has even caused it stress (OK Supreme Commander with 8 AI's and 1000 units each gives the CPU some work).


I once wrote with some passion that train sims ask the most of video hardware, that they cause a full recalculation of each and every visible object on every frame due to forward motion. While this is true, it's also true for driving games, and all mine run fine on this machine thanks,



Question: What machine did Kuju use to get 60FPS at maximum settings (ie correct performance, tho 24 fps is acceptable) ? Presumably the "recommended" spec they published? If so, I call bovine waste products on their claims, as my machine pummels their spec and chokes on it.

[PaulH2]

I categorically refuse to accept that this is a new program from the ground up, too many of MSTS's quirks are duplicated, what are the chances of two programs usung the same broken routines if they are coded from the ground up? And if it IS likely, then why these two programs and no others, including TRS and BVE.

My guess is that it is new code, but that the memory management routine was written by the same guy for both MSTS and KRS (we do know that some programmers who worked for Kuju on MSTS also worked on KRS). Same guy, same technique, same end result!

Paul

[Shadders]

Hi there,

I've got a lowly Pentium 4 3Ghz 2Gb RAM on a Intel BZ875 motherboard with a 256Mb nVidea 6800 GS AGP graphics card and a PCI Sonic Fury (re badged Turtle Beach Santa Cruz I think) using XP (latest patches). I get about 24 to 30 FPS in RS with the Driver's Guide off or set to anything but the track view in 1280x1024 32bit AA level 2 on a CRT @ 85Htz refresh.

Here's some things that may help.

1. When I installed, I zipped the Rail Simulator folder and saved to another drive, you could burn it to a DVD instead. Next I deleted the contents of the Rail Simulator folder and defraged the hard drive. I then unzipped back into the Rail Simulator folder. This can help, but is depends on the drive and how the files are distributed across the platters.

2. I used a third party defragmenter, Diskeeper V8 (old), rather than the in built one as it's not too great. Good because it offers both a defragment in Windows and at boot time, boot time allows some of those files locked while Windows is running to be defragmented.

A slight aside, I run two accounts, my main account, with administrator privileges (should not really do this, but if you play games, it's almost unavoidable because games programmers tend to forget about getting games to work in a reduced privilege account). And the Administrator account. I installed Rail Sim using my account and had very little stutter, after logging in as administrator and defragging, I found I had more stutter, god knows why.

3. I spent a while understanding what Windows Services I required for a stable system and disabled or set to manual those services I don't require or don't mind a pause while they load. Theres a good website called http://www.blackviper.com/ that detail the Windows Services on Vista, XP and Win2000. I strongly suggest looking there for help should you want to try this.

4. I have very little loaded in the system tray (icons next to the time on the far right of the task bar). All those little programs tend to be there for convenience, often you can do without by knowing where the program is and running it directly. I have: Anti Virus, Sound Card control panel and Intel Active monitor.

5. Internet. I don't have a router, I access the internet with a little Speedtouch 330 ADSL modem. This works like a dial-up modem, so I can disconnect my internet connection while playing games that don't require internet access. It also means that I can shut down my software firewall (Zone Alarm Pro).

6. Antivirus: I chose Eset's NOD32 antivirus for three reasons: one, it regularly passes Anti Virus Bulletin's tests with 100% rating. Two, it's fast! Three, it's got a small memory footprint. The sacrifice is that it's not the best looking bit of software in the world and it requires a bit more effort to learn.

7. Sound. A separate sound card tends to be better than sound provided by the motherboard, although this changed a bit with the release of Vista. Note that I'm not talking about quality, I'm talking about offloading sound processing to a dedicated card. My card supports 64 notes in hardware and an additional 1024 in software. By disabling notes in software, I found I had less sound problems in RS.

Vista, I'm not going to be much help here, but I'll try. When Vista was in beta, I'm sure I remember reading about a feature where you could switch it into a 'games' mode. This did something like unloading a bunch of services from memory while the game ran.

Vista also has the ability to use a usb flash drive as a cache, ReadyBoost I think it's called. You could try one of those, but make sure you plug the drive into a usb 2 connection!

Thats it for now, I hope my suggestions help.

Shadders.

[jbilton]

I categorically refuse to accept that this is a new program from the ground up, too many of MSTS's quirks are duplicated, what are the chances of two programs usung the same broken routines if they are coded from the ground up? And if it IS likely, then why these two programs and no others, including TRS and BVE.

My guess is that it is new code, but that the memory management routine was written by the same guy for both MSTS and KRS (we do know that some programmers who worked for Kuju on MSTS also worked on KRS). Same guy, same technique, same end result!

Paul

They could do with a programmer like George (Bin patch)
He has certainly sorted out the MSTS1 memory management problem out.
Cheers
Jon

[thegoonden]

I've posted my spec a lot, so much I think I look like I'm showing off (maybe I should post the specs of my Linux box instead, much less impressive), But one more time with feeling for a man who clearly knows his machines.....

Athlon 5600-64X2 on Asus M2N32-WS-pro board.
Nvidia 8800GTS
4 GB of PC6400 Cl4 Geil RAM
1x320GB SATA-II system drive.
2X500GB SATA-II in Raid0 configuration for data/games storage.
Onboard waste of silicon sound, but also mucho expensivo M-Audio Delta pro-audio, full external breakout box, the full montgomery.

At the risk of seeming like a subaru owner, it's a bit of a weapon of mass computation.

Your points are wise and worthy of addressing one at a time, because, frankly you're 100% right, BBBbbbbuuuuutt....


1/2. The partition railsim is on, is virgin drive with 50% free. Nonetheless it's had perfectdisk (same engine as diskeeper's defrag I believe, works like Norton speed disk used to until it lost it;s balls about ripping file handles away from windows, but I digress). Also, while the PC arch' is notorious for hard drive access stalling all and sundry, there's none going on coresponding to the "surging" peformance, mostly just the annoying NTFS ping ping ping, with ocassional bulk loads, which do cause some additional choking, but those are normal in my view.

3. I used to obsess over services until I read an article in SoundOnSound where they did exhaustive testing, batter something like 48 services to death, and saved 0% cpu overhead and about 8MB of RAM, and made windows even crazier and less stable for their trouble. There's obviously a few of the more odious ones that are politely escorted to a darkened field and handed a spade while I unload the quicklime, the moment I install windows, but it's only those that compromise my machine's safety (ie those that will cause it to get it's grill kicked in).

4. My systray is an exclusive club. No media players' silly "agents", no clever wizard software for hardware that uses standard functionality anyway (like external hard drives coming with a CD, COME ON!!!). I have my two sound mixers, sometime the nvidia control panel, if i've forgotten to clobber it since I last updated the drivers, and an obsessive "safely remove hardware" button that stands ready should I wish to rip open my case and tear out my C: drive, cos it's SATA, and that's what you DO with SATA, bonkers!


5. All net-routing-firewalling functionality is handled by "guzunda" (cos she gozunda the table ), our trusty linux server, who's uptime is measured not in days, weeks or months, but in hard disc lifespans, ) My windows machine browses UKTS, end of story. All other internet is handled on the Linux desktop machine in blissful safety.

6. Avg free, only ever run when needed. Regular scans and autoprotect running when handling "unsafe" files (no, not pron) only, and off at other times.

7. The onboard's OK, I mean it has the signal to noise ratio of a crystal set, but it's fairly stable, and handles most things, though no EAX. The Delta is a 0-latency beast for multichannel in and out work, whether it has EAX or not is unclear, it certainly doesn't sound MUCH different, but alos doesn't complain.


Vista is just tiresome. I really wish Railsim ran in XP for me (still can't fathom this one out and only about 3 other people have the same trouble and no fix), I would love to be sure that the surging is the game and not that rancid OS.


One interesting note, I followed some advice on here and set my anisotropy level to "application controlled" and the game ran APALLINGLY slowly, about 12 fps. Set it back to 4 and it ran "as usual" again. Otherwise there was no great performance difference between low Ai and AA settings, and cranking them right up (in the case of AA, the 8800 has a dedicated processor so it does not affect performance).

Thanks for your input mate. It will prove invaluable to others, but for myself, this may be a new bogey game that never quite plays right.

Speaking of which, to my horror I found today that Grand Prix Legends no longer runs properly on my XP, I am very upset as all other driving games are for small girls. I am now wondering if it was the latest Dx or the latest NV drivers, and if the problem is related to the no-go nature of RS.

[thegoonden]

I categorically refuse to accept that this is a new program from the ground up, too many of MSTS's quirks are duplicated, what are the chances of two programs usung the same broken routines if they are coded from the ground up? And if it IS likely, then why these two programs and no others, including TRS and BVE.

My guess is that it is new code, but that the memory management routine was written by the same guy for both MSTS and KRS (we do know that some programmers who worked for Kuju on MSTS also worked on KRS). Same guy, same technique, same end result!

Paul

They could do with a programmer like George (Bin patch)
He has certainly sorted out the MSTS1 memory management problem out.
Cheers
Jon

Agreed, wisest thing I've seen written about this game

To answer Paul's post however, you are proposing the following happened.....

A Kuju boardroom.....

Bod1: "who do we get to do the memory managment engine"

Bod2:"what about Dave?"

Bod3:"Didn't Dave make a bit of a pig's entrails of it the last time, so bad in fact it took 3rd party coders and 6 years of computer development to make it properly usable? why don't you do it"

Bod2:"yeah, but I wanna do the choo choos"

Bod1:"OK, Dave can do it"

Which is all too plausible, HOWEVER, it then requires that "Dave" not only hasn't learned a thing from his earlier efforts, but also that he knows little of how to use more modern features, AND that he then recodes almost the exact same routines from scratch, none of which seems at all likely, especially the last one. I program music, synths, samplers, and sequencers, I am fairly good at it, and from that I know that you never repeat yourself with any complex thing, my bro, the family codemonkey concurs.

EDIT: Just to make it clear that "Dave" is a notional character in no way related to any real Kuju Bod. The name was chosen purely because Dave is a good name for people who have trouble with computers.

[CaptScarlet]

Did you try turning off "threaded optimization"in the nvidia control panel ? When I first installed Railsim I had the surging problem as well, but after turning the threaded optimization off it went away though it was replaced by a slight stutter. The only other thing I have turned off in the game is procedural flora, all other options are at the max.
My screen resolution is the same as yours and as is the graphics card (8800GTS 640 ) and the fps is quite high most of the time ( though that depends on where you are measuring it ). My cpu is a intel E6600 on a Asus commando motherboard, 2GB ram all at stock settings using Vista 32bit fully updated.

John

[peteworsley]

Morning everyone

Perhaps someone explain something which has mystified me for years - what is the "Need for Speed" as far as frame-rates are concerned?

It strikes me that the Shift-Z display of frame rate is an anoraks delight.

Television and cinema work perfectly well on 25fps - it is the reliability of the delivery of the frame rate which is important - it would be totally unacceptable if your favourite TV programme stuttered every few seconds - it is no use displaying 50fps or more if the system has to go away and think about every few seconds.

Perhaps the solution is to limit the frame rate to a reasonable level and maintain it better -it equates to the old chestnut about driving a Ferrari on the M25 - if everyone else is doing 60mph, you do 60mph - which is better than repeatedly accelerating up to 150mph and then slamming the brakes on.

Best wishes

Pete W

[Lad491]

Seriously, my machine runs Bioshock, Supreme Commander, Live For Speed, Colin McRae Dirt, you name it...all at flat 60FPS 1630x1050 FULL detail options, 16xAnisotropy 16Xantialiasing and every single quality tweak in rivatuner maxed out. KRS? detail half way, reduced resolution, and all the "polish" turned off and it is struggling to get 20+ FPS stable.

Im really surprised by this. Im not a lover of KRS at the moment, but one thing it does do is run completely smoothly. I have a fairly new Core2Duo machine with 2GB RAM and a 256GB hard disk, ATi Radeon 1300Pro 256mb Graphics and Soundblaster Audigy card factory fitted.

I have anti aliasing and aniscropic filtering set as "Let the program decide" Im running at 1024x768 resolution in 32 bit colour. Frame rates never go above 60fps but also never drop much below 40 fps either. Im running the sim right out of the box with all the settings as installed. The only change ive made is to select expert controls and add the A to D swap patch by Matt. It runs completely and totally smoothly, both in built up areas and open countryside with not a stutter anywhere near.

On msts I still get some stutter in heavily built up areas, even with settings turned down.

It certainly sounds like its a graphics card issue not a game issue.
Lack of stutter is about the only good thing with this game

[PaulH2]

To answer Paul's post however, you are proposing the following happened.....

A Kuju boardroom.....

Bod1: "who do we get to do the memory managment engine"

Bod2:"what about Dave?"

Bod3:"Didn't Dave make a bit of a pig's entrails of it the last time, so bad in fact it took 3rd party coders and 6 years of computer development to make it properly usable? why don't you do it"

Bod2:"yeah, but I wanna do the choo choos"

Bod1:"OK, Dave can do it"

Which is all too plausible, HOWEVER, it then requires that "Dave" not only hasn't learned a thing from his earlier efforts, but also that he knows little of how to use more modern features, AND that he then recodes almost the exact same routines from scratch, none of which seems at all likely, especially the last one. I program music, synths, samplers, and sequencers, I am fairly good at it, and from that I know that you never repeat yourself with any complex thing, my bro, the family codemonkey concurs.

EDIT: Just to make it clear that "Dave" is a notional character in no way related to any real Kuju Bod. The name was chosen purely because Dave is a good name for people who have trouble with computers.

Oh I don't know. I don't work in the software industry myself, but am a programmer on the side to support other aspects of my job (essentially writing custom scientific data analysis software) but I've worked with software engineers within several companies (from small to very large) and I'm afraid the situation is all too familiar. I've often seen senior software engineers whose ideas and technique stagnated years ago and do exactly what you say, they regurgitate the same (or very similar) code time and time again because it is what they know. The code won't be identical of course, but the basic design premise is, so the end result will be very similar with essentially the same issues. This most often happens in my experience in small software teams with few if any outside interactions as they can become very set in their ways. And as I've said before, at the time it was written (i.e. when the software guys cared) the memory management in MSTS was perfectly fine, being designed around computers with little available memory (system or video) so it isn't entirely fair to say they made a complete mess of it, it did what it was supposed to do at the time and did it well enough.

To get back a little more on topic, there seem to be a couple of issues affecting stuttering in KRS. Disk fragmentation is certainly a part of it as defragmenting the KRS drive after installation made a very noticable difference (from constant stuttering to occasional). The other side seems to be connected to threading and seems to be affecting people with dual core processors and / or nVidia graphics cards more seriously than others. My personal guess is that the developers did partially implement a multi-threaded architecture into the engine with a view to multi processor support, but that it was not finished and is causing these problems (with multiple threads you have to be very careful to keep the threads synchronised, otherwise if thread A gets ahead of thread B, thread A will eventually have to stop what it is doing and wait for thread B to catch up). The good news is, if this is correct it suggests that KRS might be closer to multi processor support than we think and could be patched relatively easily so with my optimistic hat on I'd say that this could be a symptom of better performance to come. The down side is that thread optimisation is notoriously tricky, especially in a game environment where it is difficult to balance the load on each thread especially across a very broad range of hardware.

On quick comment on George and MSTSBin. Whilst I have nothing but respect for what he has done with MSTSBin (nothing short of re-vitalising the sim) he hasn't actually re-coded anything, he can't by the nature of what he can do by altering compiled code. What he has done is tweak what was already there and in one or two cases enable functionality (opening doors) that was already present but disabled. From a perspective of memory management, what George has done is increase the amount of memory available to MSTS and tweaked some of the parameters to use that memory, but he hasn't changed the memory management algorithms at all, so while he has clearly optimised MSTS to run better on modern computers, it is still the original MSTS memory management engine doing all the work. As I said, I don't intend to belittle what George has achieved in any way, but we must look at it in perspective and realise that it is still the original Kuju code doing all the work and the fact that George has been able to push the engine as far as he has is in a way a testament to the fact that the underlying MSTS code actually works pretty damn well!

Paul

[Shadders]

Hello again,

Sorry none of my suggestions helped, but I do have another suggestion:

Try disabling your on-board sound in the motherboard BIOS.

You probably don’t need me to tell you this as you seem to know your stuff, but it would be wise to create a System Restore point first, in case Vista decides to freak out when you re enable your sound!

Sadly, I can’t find a way of disabling sound in KRS, typing railsim.exe /? Or -? In a command prompt does nothing except launch the game. Perhaps turning the sound all the way down in the game options may do it.

Anyway, try running KRS without your on-board sound enabled and see if that helps with the stuttering.

You know, all this reminds me of the launch of Half-life 2. On release, loads of people reported stuttering with that game too, Valve patched the problem eventually.

Right, well that’s me all out of ideas, you’ve got a nice system there so I can understand your frustration at not getting a smooth experience with a game that your kit should be able to eat for breakfast.

By the way, thanks for the info about Windows Services. I tend to get very geeky about things like this. I seem to spend more time fiddling than I do using my PC.

Good Luck!

Shadders.

[Retro]

You're welcome, I hope defragmenting your drives works!

For a video card, personally I'd reccomend an ATi Radeon 1950PRO as its about the best "bang for the buck" card at the moment (unless you need DirectX 10). If you prefer nVidia (or are palnning on upgrading to Vista and want DirectX 10, for example for FSX) the new Geforce 8800GT looks like a good bet. On the other hand, if you're not desperate, I'd wait a couple of months as the next generation of nVidia and ATi cards are due late this year or early 2008 and at the very least that should drop the prices of the current cards. Either way, it isn't really clear yet how much benefit you'll see in KRS with a better video card, so if everything else you are running is working fine, I'd probably wait and think about a sound card first.

For sound, you should be able to pick up a Creative X-Fi for under £100 (I know in the US the basic X-Fi cards are running at less than $75 now so I'd think £50 or so should get you one, but I'm not up to date on UK prices).

Good luck!

Paul

Hi Paul,
After a defrag I see no change. I have even had all settings on low and it seems to make very little difference on the Paddington Route. I played around with the graphic options for about 2 hours and then got fed up. The drivers guide does slow things down in its route mode. I have looked at some You Tube videos and only one seems to run without any stutter. On looking at the replies the specs show a very High End Machine similar to some of my FlightSim buddies machines for FSX. So I guess I will give up for now and wait until I can afford to get a new machine that will run FSX as well. As I only have 1 PCI express slot and one PCI slot left I would not be able to fit a new soundcard and a powerful enough videocard which would require a third slot to hold the Fan Card or another PCI express to SLI with two cards.
Why do these new games always seem to require a new machine to run properly.
Regards James