15 Fps With Recommended Specs...getting Kinda Sick Of This Game

I've adored the TSW franchise for a while, played like hundreds of hours of it. Every new release the quality does increase of routes which is great to see. Some real great third party routes aswell but oh my god the lag is getting unbearable. I shouldn't be getting such bad FPS in these routes. Played the new B2C route and get hit with 10 fps at crewe. Even with 32gb of ram, a 2060 with I7 processor. It shouldn't be this bad. Something has to be done with optimization.

Could also just be my system but if so i have no clue how to solve it and its getting on my nerves.

 

Could you upgrade that graphics card, maybe to a 30xx?

 

How have you got it set up? What is your resolution, screen percentage, graphics settings etc?

I think you’re system is pretty underpowered by modern standards but you might be able to tune it to get an acceptable performance.

 

Your CPU is probably struggling as the GPU cannot draw without CPU processing first. You may try to turn off the layer for static stock around Crewe.

 

The first i7 was released in 2008, the last in 2022, exactly which i7 would be helpful in figuring out if you are asking too much or not.

Although my 5800X3D will chug hard in a number of places (Carleton crossing is a weirdly low performance area) so you can't just throw money at TSW and expect things to be fixed, the issues are deeper than that.

 

You guys are on PC and are struggling. I’m on PS5 and getting 15fps at Hoboken and NY Penn when there’s a lot of trains around. Borderline slideshow. It’s just disappointing and frankly frustrating since I can’t do anything about it.

 

If you are trying to run Ultra settings in 4k, your machine isn't up to the challenge

 

The computer isn't a flagship and it's already 8 years old. What could have gone wrong?

 

Even though the 2060 isn't the best graphics card its still the recommended one on the steam page so it should work. Plus 32 GB of RAM is huge so that really shouldn't be happening.

The game is just really badly optimised and looking at the recommended specs for Metro Rivals on UE5....yeah good luck

 

The biggest problem on PC as well as on console is not RAM, not CPU but the VRAM and PCI Express bottleneck. I have done some researach into this after running into huge drops in Frankfurt HBf. and only there (at the time).

The 2060 is a 6GB GPU which is painfully little for todays standard, and probably is bordering the allocation of the consoles in the amount of capacity. I am running a 3050 with 8GB and my situation is just as bad. As soon as VRAM usage climbs above 7.5GB it starts to use system RAM to cache textures and the PCI Express bus to stream them to the GPU. This places a huge bottleneck compared to the VRAM speed and tanks your FPS.

If you had a console, in the same scenario you would probably have the "blurry textures" at first, an attempt of the system to mitigate it followed by a hard crash. On PC it just tanks the FPS to 20 or below. Best way you can monitor is using the Steam overlay in its most verbose setting, as it shows the VRAM used/total besides the FPS. The PCI-E bus usage I managed to confirm monitoring with HWInfo.

Sadly probably the best option for PC users is to have a 16GB GPU for TSW it seems with the new routes being more and more filled and the core getting more more overwhelmed and whatever optimizations are being done cannot catch this up. Unless you want to drop the texture detail to Medium or Low and have even worse graphics detail.

 

Nowhere on the Steam page does it say how much FPS it will give. The game doesn't care about RAM—it rarely uses more than 6GB. Unlike VRAM, which easily reaches 15GB.

 

Its poorly optimised. Its fallen into that development trap of instead of tightening up the performance they just develop it on high spec machines and expect the customers to keep pace.

I wouldnt mind but its not exactly a cutting edge looking game beyond the first 100 yards at the side of the tracks.

 

Unless you are going to drop £2,000+ on an RTX5090 (which is a workstation GPU not even intended for gaming), to brute-force a steady 60fps, it's normal to get awful performance.

DTG live streams on their own hardware are using fog to reduce draw distance now, and the stream still freezes and stutters like crazy.

(Don't give me that BS about "it's the streaming software causing performance issues on live streams" ... we aren't stupid, DTG)

 

Thats what I was thinking, You shouldnt have this kind of performance with "recommended" specs right? Its kind of ridiculous. I know my setup isnt great and im definitely upgrading but other games do not have this at all. Even other UE games. and if i do get bad frames I can atleast change graphic settings but in TSW that just does nothing at all for me

 

Not all PCs are created equal and that is why there are so many graphics configuration options on a PC version of a game as opposed to a console. You can try.
Settings -> Screen. Here you can try changing the Graphics pre-sets from low to Ultra. You can also alter the resolution.
Settings -> Advanced settings. I leave these alone mostly. You can look at Screen percentage and max FPS. Larger screen percentage = better looking and worse performance

 

I've tried alot of these but it doesn't really work. FPS is good when there are basically no trains around but when I get to a big station it just tanks it. Also depends on the route ofcourse

 

I have a RTX 4060 8GB and Ryzen 5 5600x, and even in Birmingham New Street I have this problem of a drastic drop in FPS, where in the tunnel I'm at 40-50 and when entering the station I'm at 9. It's true that my video card wouldn't be ideal, but I believe that in this area and others there is a lack of optimization...

 

Besides, I found some strange things about Steam's recommended specs.

TSW 3 Recommended Spec :
- Intel Core i5-11600K @ 3.9 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X @ 3.7 GHz
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 with 8 GB VRAM or more
TSW 4-6 :
- Intel Core i5-9600K @ 3.7 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 @ 3.6 GHz
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB or AMD Radeon RX 5700 with 8 GB VRAM or more

I find that doesn't make sense, it shouldn't be the other way around?

 

It depends on what dtg define as recommended specs. I mean if you was playing the game at 1080 with all the settings on low then you should get 60fps or more. 1440 or higher with ultra settings then the recommended specs should be classed as minimum, probably lower than minimum.
I have a 4080 and a fairly decent CPU and I never dip below 60fps with all settings ultra and toaster style ini settings.
Up that to 4k and I'm down to 30fps in certain areas.

 

It's a difficult balance for sure. Yeah it's true that busy hubs get pretty tough performance and i accept that to some degree but it feels like TSW6 has made it worse somehow. I understand that I would get 15-20 fps at frankfurt main on FSN but to get 7-12 fps on crewe seems a bit ridiculous. Especially since that station is nowhere near as big as frankfurt is.

The trouble here mostly is that I have the recommended specs. (I have an Intel Core i7-9700 for reference) I do indeed get 60 fps on alot of routes ( not all, some like FSN and morristown i mostly get 45) Just dissapointing to me as the only recourse seems to be updating my setup but judging from what others have said here will that even help? spending thousands of dollars just to get 20 fps at crewe isnt really what I want to do. Maybe there should be more clear recommendations on what the best system is for this game.

Again I love to play this game but getting such bad frames when other games run fine is dissapointing to me and makes me not wanna buy anymore DLC tbh. its just all gonna be laggy at the most interesting places. Not to mention the frame drops I get from passing trains and just sometimes randomly like in freidrichstadt/dresden mitte or the middle of nowhere B2C.

I also have all my graphics set to medium for reference. Here are some screenshots i took of my FPS on a random B2C journey

 

My honest opinion right now, is that DTG are intentionally crippling TSW6, so that when their new UE5 game drops people will buy the new game. They have already pulled staff off TSW6 with the current "Metro Rivals" project.

"Hey, look how great this new UE5 game runs, you'd better buy it now!"

TSW core bugs will go unfixed and the game will remain unoptimized as development time and resources are pumped into UE5. Wouldn't suprise me if TSW is running with a skeleton dev team at this point.

 

A lot of people will however see "minimum" specs and assume a computer with that can just about run the game with every slider fully to the left, while seeing "recommended" and their assumption being everything can be set to the right of the midpoint. Even though a developer's definition of "recommended" might be "this is the hardware config that can get a stable 60fps on all low settings".

 

Luckily mine is running on medium graphics at 1280x720 and still has bad fps