Upgrade performance report

[zlindku]

High everyone just upgraded my system here are the results
Old System
MB Intel D975XBX2
RAM 2 x I gigabyte 400 Mhz (I think)
Proc Pentium D 3.4 Ghz
Grapics Invidia 8600GTS
Sound On board


New System
MB Gigabyte P35 DS3P
Ram 2 x 1 gigabyte 800Mhz
Proc Intel E6850
Graphics Gigabyte Radeon HD3870
Sound SoundBlaster Audigy

Performance, Oxford to Paddington on free roam using yellow HST closest to camera

Old System 17 to 34 FPS most settings cut back to about half, some hesitation in both graphics and sound

New System 50 to 100 FPS all settings Maxed out, performance very good

Have only touched the HD3870 Settings a little at this time works OK on factory defaults can become a complete mess though by changing them.
No smoke or steam effects on black 5 on bath green park route. No updated driver from ATI/gigabyte as yet.
Probably would like a driver upgrade I assume?
Note: MSTS does not work on this card, graphics are OK but no text in selection boxes. Still have old system though!!!
Cost MB, proc and RAM 650 dollars AUS aprox
Graphics card 380 dollars AUS

what do i think of the result?
very good actually, driver upgrades will certainly help but current performance definetly makes RS better to use and was at least
200 to 300 dollars AUS cheaper than 8800 GT option and I am on a limited budget. Well worth it for me.

Lindsay

[adam3544]

The problem is not 17-45 FPS or 50-100FPS.
The problem with KRS is not smooth, constant performance.
I've installed GeForce 8800GT 520 MB (G92). On the Paddington line I obtain 14-58 FPS with Core2Duo E6600 CPU. Those drops in framerate are the problem and for me are very annoying. On the same machine, under Windows XP Pro SP2 with Test Drive or Need For Speed I obtain a smooth gameplay, so the frame rate does mean nothing.
Rightnow, I've installed Trainz 2006 and FRAPS. Well, it run with constant 58-60 FPS, which is very smooth indeed. So, you don't need 100 FPS, as I said, you need an efficient game engine.

Adam

[zlindku]

The problem is not 17-45 FPS or 50-100FPS.
The problem with KRS is not smooth, constant performance.
I've installed GeForce 8800GT 520 MB (G92). On the Paddington line I obtain 14-58 FPS with Core2Duo E6600 CPU. Those drops in framerate are the problem and for me are very annoying. On the same machine, under Windows XP Pro SP2 with Test Drive or Need For Speed I obtain a smooth gameplay, so the frame rate does mean nothing.
Rightnow, I've installed Trainz 2006 and FRAPS. Well, it run with constant 58-60 FPS, which is very smooth indeed. So, you don't need 100 FPS, as I said, you need an efficient game engine.

Adam

I too find the drops in frame rates annoying and one of the points I was trying to make in my report as they did not really occur. I must admit I have some doubts as to the accuracy
of the frame rates displayed by RS so I go by how smooth it looks rather than frame rate alone.

A point i will make at this stage is........ I have done a fair bit of work in OpenGL particularly in terrain rendering as applied to train sims and i believe the reason for these
drops is the really massive amounts of data the CPU has to push at the GPU to describe a frame. The terrain is represented by a height field, an example that 256 by 256
which would at an element pitch of 8 metres would be needed to describe a distance of 2 kilometres comes to 3/4 megabyte WITHOUT texture maps. When you come to track,trees,grass.fences signals etc, a single frame could easily come to 10 megabytes and this has to pushed into the GPU in less than 3 milliseconds. There is significant
evidence to suggest the memory bandwidth is being pushed to the limits. I have noticed both with RS and MSTS will drop frames when the hardisk is being accessed this
is because the HD controller stopping the CPU and GPU from getting at the RAM. One of the reasons I selected the P35 MB was the front side bus/memory bandwidth was
very good, and i believe this has paid off. While RS is not perfect on this system I have it is a great improvement.
I hope this explantion is understandable?

Lindsay

[steampsi]

The drops in frame rate are likely disk access from my observations. When assets are loaded dynamically the read has to jump from directory to directory, rather than just loading one game big data file. Eg in each scenery directory there is a 'textures' directory so when reading in data there is a significant penalty in time for random access. I assume defrag should help here, but still a problem with this data loading design.

From the book 'game programming Gems 5' there is an article showing how loading from one data file vice random access can make load times decrease by a factor or 10-100 or more.

I tried installing RS to a flash drive thinking the random access times should be faster than a hard drive, although there is still the file system in the way of speedup. Couldn't get it to work unfortunately so can't compare.

Unfortunately fixing the problem would probably be a big redesign. Who knows, hope I'm wrong or off the mark.

Flash ram drives are coming with much much quicker random access than a mechanical disk. I hope that will help, but they are scarce and exorbidantly priced so far.

[adam3544]

Unfortunately fixing the problem would probably be a big redesign. Who knows, hope I'm wrong or off the mark.

I've the same pesimistic feeling that this is "post factum" case.
All your explanations don't catch if we are compairing this game to Trainz 2006. I don't enter the intricates of programming but I judge by the final results.
How come Test Drive Unlimited or Need For Speed, both are simulation with very rich and dense scenery, fast moving objects and all eye candy effects, exhibiting a fluid smooth gameplay, not even the smallest drop in frame rate as opposite to KRS. The graphics in KRS are beautiful, but not something outstanding when compairing to other car racing simulations.
I'm very pesimistic about possibiltity to correct the above issue. Right now, I don't think that the problem can be resolved by hardware upgrade only.

Adam

[djt01]

Unfortunately fixing the problem would probably be a big redesign. Who knows, hope I'm wrong or off the mark.

How come Test Drive Unlimited or Need For Speed, both are simulation with very rich and dense scenery, fast moving objects and all eye candy effects, exhibiting a fluid smooth gameplay, not even the smallest drop in frame rate as opposite to KRS. The graphics in KRS are beautiful, but not something outstanding when compairing to other car racing simulations.
I'm very pesimistic about possibiltity to correct the above issue. Right now, I don't think that the problem can be resolved by hardware upgrade only.

Adam

Most likely they are pre-rendering the scenes before you even drive around in them. Pre-rendering scenes in a train sim is a little difficult when you’re talking about a 100 miles of track.

The problem could be minimized with better use of a multi-core processor.

[djt01]

Note: MSTS does not work on this card, graphics are OK but no text in selection boxes. Still have old system though!!!

The problem was fixed with the ATI Catalyst 7.12’s back in December.

[Shadders]

Hi,

An interesting read, here’s my take:

Some games like first person shooters and possibly car racing games have an advantage over a train sim in that the environment is split into small levels or tracks. The advantage lies in that data that describes the level/track is relatively small so it can be processed during the build to include all kinds of performance enhancing techniques.

For instance: In a first person shooter, the level designer adds ‘nodes’ to the level, these give the ‘AI’ characters choices for routes. A relatively simple algorithm can be used by ‘AI’ characters when playing the game to navigate around the level. I believe its called the A* algorithm. So you get ‘AI’ characters that seem to know how to get to you across a complex level when all they are doing is following predefined paths. Of course other variables enter the mix, depending on how the developer wants the ‘AI’ to behave, such as distance to the player before stopping and shooting and line of sight to the player.
Compiling levels also allows the level to be viewed from all the angles a player would see and cull the polygons that the player would not see from some position in the level. This gives the graphics card and the cpu less work as a level with a million polygons can be broken down into chunks data that are smaller than the whole.

With a game like Rail Sim a lot of those performance increases cannot be applied. For instance, would you want to create your own route if it meant that you had to compile it for three days before you could test it? Add to that the dynamic nature of the environment; The player’s actions directly affect the ‘AI’ trains ability to travel at the speed they are meant to, use the correct track, arrive at the correct time and you’ll start to see what a different beast a train sim is to a FPS/Racing game. Include physics and it gets even more complex.

As a small aside, has anyone here got a AGEIA card? Did you see an improvement?

Cheers,

Shadders.

[CaptScarlet]

As a small aside, has anyone here got a AGEIA card? Did you see an improvement?

RS doesn't use the card, only the software engine from what I understand.

John

[djt01]

As a small aside, has anyone here got a AGEIA card? Did you see an improvement?

I purchased one last fall and tried with KRS and did not detect any improvement in performance or particle effects. It did not seem to do any processing work on the physics card at all with KRS.

[zlindku]

Note: MSTS does not work on this card, graphics are OK but no text in selection boxes. Still have old system though!!!

The problem was fixed with the ATI Catalyst 7.12’s back in December.

Thanks for the info I saw it was availible from ATI but did not download it will rectify that right now.

Lindsay

[adam3544]

Just to inform you that I've re-installed my previous video card the BFG GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB OC and surprisingly the only difference was 1 FPS drop, mostly no significant difference between 7800 GTX and 8800GT (G92).
It seems to me that KRS is much more influented by CPU power than by video card efficiency.
Rightnow I have Pentium Core2Duo E6600 CPU.

Adam

[djt01]

Just to inform you that I've re-installed my previous video card the BFG GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB OC and surprisingly the only difference was 1 FPS drop, mostly no significant difference between 7800 GTX and 8800GT (G92).
It seems to me that KRS is much more influented by CPU power than by video card efficiency.
Rightnow I have Pentium Core2Duo E6600 CPU.
Adam

The question is at what resolution and AA and AF filtering are you running KRS at?

I’ve been testing KRS on the systems listed below (the QX9650 replaced an E6850 in the first listed specs).

With the processors (all Intel Core 2’s) clocked at around the same speed, 1600x1200 resolution 4xAA and 16xAF the 8800 Ultra was the champ, in some cases by a long shot.

Here are some screens with the frame rate recorded –

http://forums.flightsim.com/vbts/showth ... p?t=267462


I do have to admit that the laptop does amazingly well with KRS. Even at the laptops native resolution of 1920x1200 with 2xAA and 16xAF the frame rates were still very good.


ASUS Striker II Formula (Nvidia 780i SLI chipset)
Core 2 Extreme QX9650
OCZ Titanium XTC 4GB (2 x 2GB) (PC2 6400/C-4)
Evga 8800 Ultra “Superclocked”
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
2x WD 10,000 RPM Raptors (74GB) (RAID 0): Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit/SP1 RC
2x WD 10,000 RPM Raptors (74GB) (RAID 0): Windows XP Pro/SP3 RC
SilverStone 1000Watt OP
SilverStone TJ-09B

Asus Maximus Formula (Intel X38 chipset)
Core 2 Extreme X6800
Corsair XMS2 Dominator 4GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400/C-4)
VisionTek Radeon HD 3870 512MB
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
2x WD 10,000 RPM Raptors (150GB) (RAID 0): Windows XP Pro/SP3
PC Power and Cooling 1000Watt SR
LIAN LI PC-A70B

Dell XPS M1710
Intel Core Duo T7600 “G” (unlocked multiplier)
Nvidia Go 7900GTX (512 MB)
2 GB DDR2 667
160 GB 7200RPM (XP Pro/SP3 RC)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook

[adam3544]

My friend,
The bottom line is how much you are ready to spend on your rig.
Unfortunately, I have some limit how much I can affort to pay for a top of the line CPU, motherboard and
video card.
But again, does KRS play a smooth , no frame rate drops on your super machine or even with two Rapptors in RAID 0 you suffer of those annoying drops.
If you say that you have absolutely fluid smooth gameplay, then it mean that this problem,can be corrected, but with LOT of computing power.

Adam

[djt01]

But again, does KRS play a smooth , no frame rate drops on your super machine or even with two Rapptors in RAID 0 you suffer of those annoying drops.
If you say that you have absolutely fluid smooth gameplay, then it mean that this problem,can be corrected, but with LOT of computing power.
Adam

Nope, when it’s loading scenery the frame rate still drops momentarily. I’m hoping that better use of multi-core CPU’s will remedy this issue in the future.