Official v128 Thread

[OTTODAD]

Another thought.

Is there something running in the background now which there was not before when you got 80 FpS in ORTS ?

O t t o

[muskokaandtahoe]

Another thought.

Is there something running in the background now which there was not before when you got 80 FpS in ORTS ?

O t t o

I'm not as well versed on this topic as I wish I were... I'll say that I have seen a few examples of unusually slow performance and in each case it appeared that all of threads were (1) being run by one core of the cpu and (2) there were a number of other software also running, tho seemingly idle and it appeared that core was overloaded with work. The best performance always appeared to be when multiple cores were being used to run OR and that no one core was overloaded. It would be ideal if there was a way to insure the later always occurred and the former could not but offhand I do not know how that might be done.

[sniper297]

Yeah, far too much of that - when having any kind of trouble, first thing to try is shut off background programs, I've been saying that for 30 years and I can't stress it enough. Worst recent example I've seen is the ATI Hotkey Poller, which installs and loads by default when you install ATI drivers. What's it for? Apparently all the kids who have the attention span of a gnat, does anyone really change their graphic settings often enough to need a hotkey for it? I tested various games, it causes severe stuttering and sound loops in MSTS, slow framerates and distorted graphics in Silent Hunter IV, and crashes Railworks and Oblivion.

For those not familiar with TSRs, "Terminate and Stay Resident", these are programs which start and then stop running, but remain in memory waiting until they're needed. not all are bad, for example mouse drivers need to be resident in memory or you would have to load the driver each time you wanted to use the mouse.

The effect on performance can best be understood by pretending you are the CPU (Central Processing Unit, that main brain of the system), and with a hotkey poller this is what you're hearing;

LOAD dash9.eng
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
LOAD dash9.s
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
LOAD dahs9 texture
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
LOAD dash9 sound
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?
DID HE PRESS THE KEY YET?

You get the idea, the CPU gets so bogged down with interruptions from TSRs that are not needed for the current program, the current program performance is gonna suffer. When you're trying to play ANY 3D video game, shut down all the fluff you don't need.

[OTTODAD]

worst recent example I've seen is the ATI Hotkey Poller, which installs and loads by default when you install ATI drivers.

Check the ATI Catalyst Control Center and make sure that these two lines shown below have no ticks !

As for other programs running in the background have a look at my Task Bar shown above. Nothing not required by the active program is running, usually the Internet having been shut down too.

O t t o

[geepster775]

This issue made me curious, so I checked this out too. I encountered the clobbered FPS as well, falling from 125 to 1.

[sniper297]

I dunno if the system properties will tell you anything, the best way is to use the task manager. Right click on a blank area of the taskbar (hint, if the taskbar has no blank areas you have too many TSRs!) and select Task Manager, or simultaneously press CTRL, ALT, and DELETE.



Click the Processes tab to see what's currently running. My son often has over a hundred processes running, since he (A) tends to allow autoinstall of everything on the internet, gets autoloading Earthlink, AOL, Realplayer, music jukebox, and every other taskbar icon all autoloading at startup, and (B) fails to shut down stuff he's not using. Once a month or so he complains that a game is crashing or running too slow and I gotta spend an hour or two cleaning all that up.

[wacampbell]

There's a good chance the next release will bring some relief on frame rates. There's some experimental dynamic shadows code in V128 that is currently unused, but still causing trouble for some video cards. We pulled the code and made some other changes that should help.

[conrail1]

I gave OpenRails a try last week and have been very impressed by how Microsoft's XNA game framework has helped MSTS. The most impressive being the fact that the old tile/texture loading issues that plagued MSTS are gone, completely gone. So far I've loaded three MSTS routes,The Feather River Route, Tehachapi II and a beta route from 3DTrains and haven't seen any stutters at all. Finally a train sim that takes proper advantage of high end hardware.

At 1920x1200 resolution with 8x super Sample AA enabled I saw frame rates as high 400+ fps. With v-sync enabled and the frame rate locked at the refresh rate of the monitor (60Hz/60FPS) OpenRails is the smoothest most fluid consumer train simulation I've seen to date. Sure the shadows haven't been enabled and routes originally developed for MSTS's hideous game engine will have to be reworked with more detail but with triple digit frame rate performance this game engine seems to have a lot of head room.

With OpenRail's fluid performance lateral and vertical (cab sway) really needs to implemented to add more of a sense of motion and add to a realistic simulation. As long as long as the OpenRails team keeps optimizing how the game engine handles routes/models in the simulation and priority is given to train handling physics, OpenRails has some serious potential.


Here are some screens from Tehachapi II in OpenRails -

[OTTODAD]

Frame rates showing 1 and 2 when the train is stationary, what are the frame rates when the train is being driven ?

At these rates it would hardly be moving ?

O t t o

[conrail1]

After testing various routes in OpenRails I've found that with my hardware train speed has little or no effect on frame rate. I even tried to see if the game engine would have problems keeping up with triple digit train speeds and OpenRails still did not stutter.

Here are some more screens that I'll put up in the screen shot section this time with one of the best routes ever created for MSTS, The Feather River Route -

[crstagg]

Hello,

For those of you, who are getting the "External component has thrown an exception" message, are you running a 32bit system or a 64bit system?

Thanks for the feedback.

32

[longiron]

32

The OR team has identified the problem, have implemented a fix and at the same time did some code optimization for improved FPS.

https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showpost.php?p=1600616&postcount=97

This has been especially true for some 6xxxx and 7xxxx series NVidia cards

We'll alert the community in the coming weeks about the next public download.

[OTTODAD]

We'll alert the community in the coming weeks about the next public download.

YIPPEE !

I am running out of Train Simulation things to do !

O t t o

[conrail1]

The OR team has identified the problem, have implemented a fix and at the same time did some code optimization for improved FPS.

https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showpost.php?p=1600616&postcount=97

This has been especially true for some 6xxxx and 7xxxx series NVidia cards

We'll alert the community in the coming weeks about the next public download.

longiron thanks for the information.

Do you have any information on how dynamic shadows will be handled in OpenRails? I’m wondering if the shadow workload could entirely be put on the GPU.

[mnjrr]

Regarding shadows

Hello,

The members of the Open Rails team have discussed the issue of rendering shadows in the software, but have not come to any definitive conclusions as of this writing. Wayne Campbell has done some experimentation with shadows.