Hiccups when running BVE

[John Hughes]

After getting tired of slow frame-rates, I finally upgraded my PC to a 64 Meg Geforce, and the results have been excellent - all that detail I'd been missing!

Howver, I notice that when fairly complex screens are being displayed there's still a noticeable 'hiccup' every few seconds when movement (though not sound) stops dead for perhaps a tenth of a second.

Any suggestions on the best way to avoid or reduce this? The machine is a 1300 MHz Pentium running Win98 Second Edition, and has 128 Meg of RAM; cutting the view distance and reducing the colour depth to 16 bits seem to have no effect.

Do I need a faster machine, 256 Meg of memory, or just to apply some tweak that I've missed?

TIA!

[call2]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

I think that most people will suffer this problem, John. Unless you go for the new graphics cards like a GeForce 5700 or 5900 series and a faster PC, complex BVE routes generally have little stutters. If you run BVE straight after a reboot of the operating system it usually runs more smoothly. And if you can run without too many background jobs running it helps.

Tony H
Midlands 25Kv

[SteveGreen]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

The weakest link there seems to be the amount of ram. 128Mb is about minimum for BVE. When I increased the ram a while ago from 256 to 512 , on my previous PC (1 Ghz/GF2 64Mb) the pausing stopped completely.

Cheers
Steve

https://www.trainsimcentral.co.uk

https://www.bvetrains.co.uk

[Stooopid_person]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

>The weakest link there seems to be the amount of ram. 128Mb
>is about minimum for BVE. When I increased the ram a while
>ago from 256 to 512 , on my previous PC (1 Ghz/GF2 64Mb) the
>pausing stopped completely.

I seldom had pausing on routes on my PIII 667Mhz 128MB RAM 16MB video card Win 98SE at 300m! The only places I get pausing was X-City's New Street, Piccadilly Line. And some parts of the Circle Line where the frame rates drops to 20-25fps. X-city's frame rate drops to about 12-15fps! Other places, it is usually 30-31fps!

[call2]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

I've just built a really quick PC for a friend and during the build I "experimented" with some of the components that were better/faster than mine in one of my PCs that I run BVE on. The graphics card was a GeForce 5950ultra 256Mb and BVE still had the occasional stutter. I increased the memory from 1Gb to 1.5Gb (Windows XP) and it still didn't make any difference, (in my PC). So over what already have it didn't seem to be much better. I suppose if you have a lot lower spec then it will. When I ran BVE on the new PC, which has a Abit NF7-S motherboard, it did run without any stuttering. So I can only conclude from that that the chipset/motherboard throughput is much better than mine. When you look at it logically I guess that like every other piece of software it will run better the more power that you give it. Generally, as s/ware gets more complex the hardware needed to run it needs to be faster to cope...but I'm not telling anybody something that they don't already know.

[Anthony_B]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

John,

I have an Athlon XP 2400, 768MB RAM and a Radeon 9600XT 128MB, and if I use BVE in Windows 98 I can get frequent but slight stuttering on detailed routes like the highest detail X-City South routes, but under Windows XP BVE runs smoothly (I found the same thing on my old 1.2GHz Athlon system as well). I gather running BVE under Windows 2000 also reduces stuttering just like XP, and some people report that Windows ME has the same effect although I'm not sure as I haven't tried ME myself. This is why I dub my most highly detailed routes 'High detail XP' as they seem to stutter when used in Windows 98. Whether your CPU is fast enough to really benefit from a change of OS I'm not sure, you'd definitely need at least 256MB of RAM if using XP or 2000 though.

However things have changed a little since BVE 2.9, in my case I've found Windows 98 seems to be at least as good as 2000/XP for BVE 2.9 apart from longer loading times and v2.9's periodic long pause problems which occur regardless of operating system, which I hope might be less of an issue in BVE v3.0.

My previous graphics card was a GeForce3 Ti200 64MB, but my new Radeon 9600XT 128MB makes little or no difference to BVE performance unfortunately (apart from being able to use high levels of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering without any loss of performance). Upgrading from a Voodoo5 to the GeForce3 did make BVE smoother on my old 1.2GHz Athlon based system though.

For BVE 2.9 (and I assume BVE 3.0), I don't think a change of operating system is necessary for smoother performance and I suspect the only really worthwhile upgrade is a faster CPU, and if it needs to run at a higher front side bus speed, faster memory too - this should improve BVE performance quite a bit. If using BVE 2.5 or below under Win 98 on a faster machine it might still stutter though, as is the case on my system with highly detailed routes.

Cheers,
Anthony.
--

https://www.railsimroutes.co.uk

https://www.bvetrains.co.uk

https://www.railsimroutes.co.uk/bvehelp/

[John Hughes]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

Thanks to everyone for their answers - very interesting and informative!

Using the Entech's handy Resource Manager (a free download from http://www.entechtaiwan.com/) has helped me to clear the memory up a surprising amount - there's a lot that doesn't show up when you do the three-fingered-salute - and the program also has an option to Compact Physical Memory which also seems to help, though neither step has eliminated the problem completely.

I guess that some routes will always be problematical, but I think I'll try a memory upgrade first and see whether that eases things. Either way, I'm having a whale of a time ;-)

[Paul Jobber]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

Hi

The Circle Line route has a number of exceptionnaly large freeobjects (for instance at Barbican which is mostly just one huge object.) The section at the end of Liverpool Street station is also just one object. This makes coding much easier and avoids loading lots of small objects which would also use up RAM. IMHO, I think 24-25fps is perfectly good, and is equivalent to TV and cinema films which are also 24fps.

The large objects may explain the pausing in the game.

Paul :-)

[John Hughes]

RE: Hiccups when running BVE

>IMHO, I think 24-25fps is perfectly
>good, and is equivalent to TV and cinema films which are
>also 24fps.
>
>The large objects may explain the pausing in the game.
>
>Paul :-)

Indeed; typically I'm getting frame-rates of around 28 / 29 per second, which is excellent, but there are times when it drops to around 5 or 6, which is when the stutter occurs.

The Circle route does have its slow moments, as you say, but I find the underground parts particularly of the excellent new Northern Line are also affected, no doubt because of the complexity of all those repeated Cylinder objects!

Certainly it doesn't spoil the fun, but I'd prefer to get rid of as much of the stutter as possible, and perhaps tomorrow's memory upgrade will do the trick.

Thanks again!