Computer and OS for ORTS

[OTTODAD]

About to get a new one I would appreciate the team's advice on what hardware will be suitable to get the best from ORTS once it has been completed and will still allow MSTSBin converted to using DB-Tracks routes run alright !

O t t o

[derekmorton]

Otto,

A late Intel quad core ($300) will be fine for either.
Any $100 video card will be good for OR and MSTS will be ok as well.
Any reasonable motherboard will be ok.

Currently OR has 3 threads.

Cheers

[muskokaandtahoe]

If you can afford to buy a quad core CPU do so, speed > 2.5ghz, and a video card with at least 1gb of ram. It's best to try and match the general ranking of both cpu and video -- meaning: don't go cheap on one and splurge on the other because all you'll have in the end is a bottleneck at the cheaper product. There are very useful guides for this stuff at www.Tomshardware.com Radeon cards use a bit less power than do GeForce cards.

Win 7 is very stable and manages the multi-core cpu's and system ram better than any previous version of windows... there are plenty of posts here about install help for those few programs whose installers won't run so don't worry about that. Using the 64 bit version of Win 7 will allow you to use more than 3gb of system ram, which, IMO, is a pretty important consideration for any one who makes good quality game artwork and/or video, less important (but still something to consider) if you don't.

[OTTODAD]

Thanks, guys, I had a 64-bit Intel multi-core CPU in mind and one of the better 1 Gb nVIDIA cards.

Having to use a cheaper WIN-XP Pentium 3.00 Ghz computer at the moment painfully demonstrates the need for something a lot better !

O t t o

[longiron]

Currently OR has 3 threads.

Cheers

Open Rails has four (4) main threads in the code:

Thread 1 - Main Render Loop ( RenderProcess)
Thread 2 - Physics and Animation (UpdaterProcess)
Thread 3 - Shape and Texture Loading/Unloading (LoaderProcess)
Thread 4 – Sound

You can see them at work in the F5 HUD. We may add more in the future as the adoption of beefier systems become more widespread and the technical need arises.

[OTTODAD]

B.t.w, Chris, what WIN O/S and graphics cards do you and the team working on ORTS use ?

O t t o

[longiron]

We have a lot of different rigs - Intel & AMD and nVidia & Radeon video cards. I have a 3.0GHz Intel i7 CPU running Win7 64B with a 1.2 GB nVidia GT560 Ti, plus a 2.6GHz AMD running XP SP3 with a 512MB nVidia GTX 8600 for testing purposes.

[Nitin]

Please I am dying to use OR with my nvidia card. The readme says that I have to use the OR.exe file for game specific settings. Somehow it is not making a difference. Anything else needs to be done?
My Comp specs (Athlon X2 X64 640 quad core, RAM 3GB, inbuilt graphics card GeForce 7025, etc), I can run the default acts at about 30 FPS in MSTS but it drops down to 4-5 in OR

[derekmorton]

The inbuilt cards are only meant for HD display and very light gaming.
You will need to get a much better card if you want to get decent frame rates.

[longiron]

My Comp specs (Athlon X2 X64 640 quad core, RAM 3GB, inbuilt graphics card GeForce 7025, etc), I can run the default acts at about 30 FPS in MSTS but it drops down to 4-5 in OR

As Derek stated, you will need to upgrade your video card to get equal FPS with OR and MSTS. The reason is Open Rails uses the horsepower of the video card instead of the CPU to render the 3D scene. This allows the OR code to use CPU cycles to do advanced physics calculations and other cool stuff, instead of manipulating pixels.

Depending on your motherboard, an ungrade to your video card should be less than $50 that will run OR well.

[Nitin]

Thank you Derek and longiron. I will surely go for a better card.