Xbox Dovetail, Please For The Love Of All Fix Performance On Xbox Sx

...specifically München - Augsburg. My goodness, the pop in and stuttering leaving the station was the worst i've ever seen. This HAS to be optimised. Whenever the sun is low, the game cant handle the shadows, I had rows of tracks shadows constantly popping in, stuttering, low fps and at one point whole swathes of casted shadow just appearing almost on top of the train. At one point I thought my xbox would lock up.

This is the most powerful console on earth, it should be able to handle this easily.

Please, please, pleas make the time to improve this as some of the other routes are great and in general XBX is great and the game can look great.

 

I had an Xbox SX not long ago and I found performance rather good to be honest. It had a lot less stuttering than the PS5 (which I also had) but suffered from the usual TSW pop in.

 

There's a lot of assets and tracks and possibly trains which is going to affect performance. Really depends on how it was built

 

If this was your first run on the route, the stutter is a result of Unreal compiling shaders. It happens on every route because DTG don't precompile them for consoles.

It will happen less as you play more services and encounter more stock, then all come back next time the route updates.

They increased overall shadow draw distance with the SX/S update for TSW2, but the shadow draw distance on the track IS atrocious, and unfortunately seems to be where DTG decided to put it for performance reasons. It is super distracting though and I'd take a "track shadows off" toggle over it to not have my attention drawn to them popping in so close.

 

Same boat here. I have it on PS5 and recently got it on XSX and find it generally runs noticeably better on XSX. Rarely stutters and has better overall FPS than PS5. Noticeable on routes like BML. I’ve even rebought some of the DLC just because it’s more enjoyable on XSX. Load times also much better.

The one thing on XSX that is worse is the flickering of some of the in cab switches and labels when train is moving.

 

I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, but could DTG precompile routes and simply choose not to? Seems rather strange that they would present their routes in such a poor state without declaring anywhere in their game that it is to be expected and will become smoother over time. I've also noticed issues in every one of their life streams. You'd think they'd have everything compiled before showing it off to the public?

 

It takes a special kind of developer to consistently bring the most powerful console to its knees.

 

Is this true on Xbox? So you have to run the same timetable over or just the same route?

 

So if you run a timetable service that goes end to end it should load most scenery assets. It will only load things like rolling stock assets that are present at that time of day. So you will continue to get stutter every time you see something new for the first time.

 

Sounds like a nightmare trying to get a whole route working correctly then under this solution. If this is a proper solution then it would be nice if DTG posted this in the game somewhere. Something along the lines of "run these routes end to end and endure the awful stuttering and after that things should smooth out".

 

Yeah this game is touted as Next gen optimised so they really need to work on updating this.

 

Well try PlayStation 5 it's terrible dtg are not bothered. Optimization is bottom of the list. I can't get why they spend hours apon hours putting all this detail in to the trains and the lovely stations and all the scenery to then start playing it and it just stutters. If I was putting in all that hard work I would want to see it run as smooth as possible. It makes me laugh when dtg are showing routes on the live stream and you get these 1 second stop and start stutters do they think this is good. And while I think of it what happened to this new software JD was going on about the other month which is supposed to check the performance of a route. And now with more new routes on the horizon they are all just going to be a stutter fest like the previous ones. I can't get excited about the new steam route when I know it will play like a dog on ps5.

 

I mean, if you think this is a nightmare, consider how many single player story focused Unreal Engine games expect players to either die to the stutter and reload, whereupon it runs smoothly up to the point where they died then begins stuttering again, or expect you to have a stutter filled playthrough and then get to experience the game smoothly in NG+

 

I have to play the Ps4 version on my ps5 just because it plays a lot smoother but of course I then loose a lot of things but would take smooth gameplay over a extra train on the track anyday.

 

Part of the problem on next-gen consoles is they’re running TSW at 4k resolution. Even most AAA games use some sort of upscaling solution to try to keep the frames at a consistent 60 per second, but DTG took the easy route and just slapped on native 4k which looks good, but doesn’t do overall performance any favours. This is why scenery draw distance is partly compromised, but does not explain why the PS5 suffers the most. This year they really ought to give another look at console optimisation and implement 1440p with checkerboard rendering for example, to improve smoothness. Oh, and sort out the dreadful Xbox sound quality issue once and for all.

 

I guess that's the thing. I've played many games using the Unreal 4 engine and have not once seen a game stutter like this on the Series X. Everything has been butter smooth. Although not an Unreal 4 game, I do consider in this bucket Microsoft Flight Simulator which is both physics heavy AND scenery heavy. Something just feels off with TSW3 since even TSW2 played so much better. Hence why I feel people are paying full price for and using what would normally be considered a bug heavy early access type game where developers are trying to figure out the process as they go along.

 

I believe there is a 1080P option in the game. I remember trying that out and the stutters were still the same. Something overall just isn't right. The scenery doesn't look too detailed, but maybe coupled with detailed trains even what we see now is too much and needs to be scaled back? Or maybe it's just the new eye candy that I could certainly do without that is causing the problems? Who knows.

 

It shouldn't be this poor though. I mean its a few trains with straightforward AI? ACC has 20+ highly detailed cars all with their own customisable AI, on highly detailed tracks with dynamic weather and lighting at a solid 60fps.

 

You're not wrong here. There are many examples of games of far higher complexity in terms of physics and visual fidelity that play vastly better than TSW3. I feel this version number change should have been used for a wholesale back to basics built from the ground up followed by re-importing if possible the older routes. Yes this would be a multi year effort, but in the end far better for the franchise than the harm they've caused to the brand with this one.

 

Switching from 4k to HD on PlayStation 5 makes no difference all it does is make it look worse

 

Yep I don't get that setting at all. Don't know what it is supposed to do?

I would expect HD to draw shadows better and have no stuttering but poorer visuals. It does nothing except make the visuals poorer.

 

I believe that running a PS5 with the output set to 1080p mode is still 4k but downscaled, so there will be no difference in performance. Please correct me if I am wrong.

 

You should see my XBOX Series S on Rush Hour London Commuter, It nearly catches fire. Another reason I swapped to PC and Playstation...

 

Basically it lags like hell lol so much that the GPU is not working right now on everything.

 

I'd say that a GPU not working is the cause of lag, rather than a symptom of playing TSW

 

Well it was working fine before so what else could be the cause, When I first started playing it a grey square came up on the screen and I had to restart.

 

lol

 

While its not impossible that a game could brick a console (happened with some buggy PS3 games I think), its extremely rare and I've certainly seen no posts about any console having a grey square instead of the game display. Most crashes users have reported on the forums that I have seen are crashes with out of memory errors specifically on XSS

My personal opinion is that your XSS has/had some problem with cooling/GPU, whether that be a hardware fault (faulty fan or GPU) or inadequate ventilation (tucked in a cupboard, obstructions near the fans etc.), but not enough to be triggered by other games. TSW isn't as optimised as perhaps it could be, in that it can tax high end PCs. If there was a fault/ventilation issue, maybe TSW pushed it that bit too hard and as a result has tipped the console over the edge, metaphorically speaking

 

Yeah

 

It's more of a problem on PC, where there isn't a single hardware specification to compile the shaders for in advance.
Many developers choose to implement a one-time shader compilation the first time you run the game, and any time your graphics drivers have updated after that, where it can take up to 15 minutes compiling the shaders prior to running the game, but averts the stutter.
Some don't, and the problem for the Series X comes when a developer chooses to have the PC version compile them on the fly and keeps the same choice for the console port, even though they know the hardware configuration will always be the same.

It's been particularly noticeable of late as more games get dedicated Steam Deck configurations where in some cases the Steam Deck config, even though it is the PC version of the game, will have precompiled shaders exclusively for the Deck hardware, and therefore it runs smoother on first run than it will on a top of the line gaming PC.

 

It's what happens on XBox when the OS tries to bring up an error message window but is unable to load the text of the window, usually due to a system crash as a knock on result from the application crashing. This can happen when a game does something which triggers an overheat of the console, like not capping FPS in the menus, for example.

 

My XBOX did get a grey and ever since its stopped working properly.

 

That's helpful. Hopefully the software engineers at DTG peruse the forums and can take your advice for when they bring TSW3 out of its beta stage.

 

Interesting. Very surprised that it can even happen since the Xbox OS runs in a sandboxed hypervisor, so in theory the hypervisor should be terminated before it can even impact the host

 

It's definitely happened to me multiple times, but with no permanent impact on my Series X or S. Usually after the resulting crash it boots fine, sometimes with an error message about overheating, which seems to be the system's default crash recovery message regardless of the actual cause, since it has happened within minutes of my XBox cold-booting before, when it hadn't had more than 15 seconds from powering on to heat up, but I found a glitch in a game upon loading a save that triggered it.