A Small Apology To Dtg And Just Trains...

...in that I might have done the game and its content - the Class 87 in particular - a slight dis-service by carrying on about juddering and sound squelching. While there's no doubt the core does have issues, nevertheless experience this evening has educated me that the hardware does play a part. After trying various measures to get WCMLoS (and other routes) running at more than 14 FPS without success I took the nuclear option and reduced resolution from 4K (3840 x 2160) to 1440p (2560 x 1440). The difference was startling - FPS immediately jumped to between 35 and 40, which I have now capped at 30. There is still the occasional judder which is probably endemic but everything is running far smoother and the sound distortion, obviously linked to erratic and low FPS, is largely gone.

Just because the GTX1650 is a 4K capable card, doesn't mean it can keep up with the data flow needed. 1440p might not be nearly as pretty but think it's an acceptable trade off to get things running better, pending either a new PC or a substantial upgrade.

 

The 1650 is stretching the definition of a 2.5k capable card let alone a 4k one.

 

I pretty much run everything at 1440p personally, I'll only go for 4k if the game will do it comfortably

 

I can run the game comfortably at 4k ( 3840x2160 ) but fps is capped at 60. So I prefer to run at 3440 x 1440 with unlimited fps.

As far as graphics is concerned, I really don't think I'm missing much at the lower resolution and I like the ultra wide view of the game.

 

Running 4K on your setup wasn't the smartest choice you've made, for perspective I run 1440p on my 4080 Super/7800x3D, and even then more demanding areas like AI filled stations still dip rather noticeably. From what I gathered building that PC 4080's pretty much considered the bare minimum for running demanding games (Think Cyberpunk, or MSFS) at 4K. Even things like the 30 series and the 4060/70 are preferred as 1440p cards, so I can't even begin to comprehend where the 1650 would be placed in that conversation.

 

Maybe in the sense of "Watching a 4k blu-ray disc".

 

My monitor is only 1080 anyway so there's no point going higher than that

 

Would you say the 'sound squelching' you often mentioned (never understood what you meant btw) is now completely gone? Or is it still an issue?

 

Oh it’s still there when the game does its little stutter, but I guess around 10% of what it was running at 4K. So somehow linked either to graphics performance or the game hitching while it tries to load something in. Still more frequent the faster the train is travelling which again is probably linked to the data being streamed in to draw the route around the train and plot where AI services are.

By squelching, I meant sound distortion, a rapid shift in pitch particularly noticeable on “smooth” electric traction, akin to someone smacking their lips.

And the newer routes are definitely more performance intensive as said GTX1650 was running RSN at 30 FPS in 4K.

Anyhow I’m reasonably pleased with the performance I’m now getting at 1440p/2.5K and means I can feel more confident about buying the Class 86 pack when it releases.

 

If you combine what your running now with https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/ u can have butter smooth 60fps, with almost no visual artifacts, i use this on my living room computer running a gtx 1080 hooked upto a 4k 65" TV, all i can say its the best £5 ive ever spent on software, https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/m...tsw-5-lighting-visual-quality-enhancement-v22 download the manual from here, and use the setting at the end, works like a charm.

 

Certainly worth investigating. As I said, dropping the graphics as is has brought considerable improvement but there is still work for DTG to do. Watching the Frankfurt S-Bahn stream just now, Matt’s PC which is a high end 5 number I7 and RTX 4080 was still doing the odd hitch or stutter.

Further to my previous post, watching a bit more of the clip now and the sound “squelch” is quite noticeable just as the train is approaching the underground Flughafen station around 58 or 59 minutes into the clip.

 

TBH mate TSW will never stop hitching to an extent due to UE4 and how it handles world geometry, Matt explained it better in another post on here, u can minimise to a certain extent via game settings and .ini tweaks, the main culprit seems to be shader caching, that can be mitigated to a point using a fast SSD, i also tend to delete windows DX shader cache about once a month, and run the routes as a passenger a couple of times, I've found this helps also, but my main play platform is a fairly high end system and i still get stuttering a sound glitches, also on a side note be careful with some creators club liveries, some of the very detailed re-paints out there can really aggravate this issues a lot.

 

Not seen it mentioned, but if you were running on a 4k screen, 1440p won’t look as clean since it won’t produce 1:1 pixels, you’d be better off at 1080p.

Of course if you’re on a 1440p compatible screen then disregard.

 

I will have to see if I can dig out the tech spec of my monitor on that one.

And yes I'll give 1080p a shot just to compare the difference, certainly on the more demanding route (easy enough to switch back for an older less intensive one). Plus if I can get that Lossless Scaling up and running. On that, I presume when it says running in windowed mode that also includes borderless window?

 

yes mate borderless window mode works aswell

 

I can definately see where VRAM is king with modern GPU. I run in 4K with everything maxed out, and when I upgraded from an RTX 3070 to an AMD 7900XTX the experience is night and day.

 

What would everyone’s dream graphics card be for running 4K?

 

OldVern - if you have an Nvidia card and don't want to use the Lossless Scaling app, you might want to try setting graphics for TSW in Nvidia to 1440p, but using Nvidia upscaling to 4k, with screen set at 80% in TSW. I have a 1660ti with 6Gb and switching from 4k to the NIS upscaling made a huge difference in frame rates. Works brilliantly with TSC also.
Here is a link to Nvidia guidance:
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5280/~/how-to-enable-nvidia-image-scaling

 

Oh I might give that a try. I presume I leave TSW itself set at 1440p?

I did just buy the Lossless Scaling App but despite searching the forum not sure if I can get my head round how to set it up to get my 4K upscale back.

Edit: Well I can't find an option in my Nvidia CP after adding TSW5 to it to actually change the resolution. Maybe I'm doing something wrong or does it need the Geforce Experience programme installed?

 

I don't use Geforce experience. Nvidia CP set to image scaling, desktop to 4k. TSW is added to image scaling in CP, TSW is set to 2560x1440 full screen and Nvidia will automatically scale to 4k and by default sharpen the display - if you check the 'overlay indicator' box in CP you should see 'NIS' in green in the top left of your screen (if it is blue, then CP is only sharpening). In addition, I have screen resolution in TSW to 87% and fps limit at 60. When the game loads, you will see a system warning that game screen resolution is set to 1440p.

 

RTX 4080. Doesn't eliminate the UE hitching. WCML Preston to Carlisle averages 80-100fps on 4K Ultra.
Only time I get significant frame drops is around Frankfurt when the yard is busy, sometimes as low as 20fps.

 

Good grief, were you really trying to run the game at 4K on a GTX1650?!? I wouldn't consider anything above 1080p on that generation of card. No wonder you've been having so many issues.

I don't know what monitor you've paired that with, but if it's anything higher than 1080p then it's seriously above what your GPU can put out.

 

It’s an ASUS 28’ 4K monitor. In fairness, the 1650 has been fairly sturdy and actually gives acceptable 4K results in most games, including Snowrunner and TSC. But it has fallen behind now, both in terms of what DTG have done to the TSW core code and the much more detail intensive content. The new Roadcraft won’t run on it and believe me, no one understands more than I that it’s coming to the end of its useful life.

 

Your main bottleneck is that gpu mate, primarily the VRAM, may be worth looking into some .ini tweaks specifically the VRAM Pool, i run a 12gb 3080 and even my card can run out of VRAM especially if I'm playing across all 3 monitors which gives me a res of 7680x1440 (when at this res i play locked at 30fps and use frame gen to hit 60fps),
have a look into Jetwashs work here https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/m...tsw-5-lighting-visual-quality-enhancement-v22 there should be a setting you can find that gives you a good middle ground. Also dont be afraid to play around yourself, just make a backup of your original .ini file 1st

 

Preston to Carlisle is a great route and nothing wrong with it that I can detect. Mind you my gaming laptop is state of the art. The advantages of cobbling two systems together into one!

 

Vern, go to Steam and download Lossless Scaling right now. The best app ever devised for owners of older hardware. With a GPU almost as old as yours (RX 580) I'm getting almost-constant locked 60 in 1080 with screen percentage at 200..

 

Graphics cards do not age gracefully. I have an RTX 3080 10 GB from late 2021 and, although it can still do OK with TSW at 4k I've dropped down to 1440p to get a better frame rate and smoother gameplay.

Although I know I've lost some screen quality, I really don't notice it that much when playing TSW, especially on an ultra wide display.

 

I tried that Bill but couldn’t get TSW to run at less than the 4K native resolution in Borderless Window mode. So for now I’ll settle for running at1440p at least on the newer more intensive routes.

 

Believe me, once you've been playing at 1440p for a while, you won't notice that much degradation, if any, from 4k.

I'm actually surprised you haven't tried this before.

 

If you dropped the native resolution of your monitor in Windows to 1440p it would work.

 

Change to regular windowed mode. If TSW is in the background it will appear in a window at whatever size you've set, but as soon as it becomes the active app. LS will blow it up to fullscreen.

 

Good suggestion but I don't really want to do that just for one game.

Noted!

 

Doe

Does this work on newer GPUs? I have a 3050, and I don't go past 70fps on 4K with multiple shutters. I had to downgrade to 1440p

Also I play on Epic, would this work either?

 

All this faffing about with screen resolutions and what not, TSW5 now stubbornly refuses to start and after a black screen crashing to the UE problem box. Got a couple more things to try then it looks like it might be file verify time, unless there's a way to change the graphics resolution without starting the game, in a config file or somewhere.

Forget that, seems to be working...

 

4K is brutal on video performance; to get a reliable 60 in 4K I am told you would need something like a 4090.... or use Lossless Scaling.
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No reason why it wouldn't work with the Epic version; it's just a Windows app, that happens to be available from the Steam store.

 

4090 owner here, and I play in 1440p. The higher fps means FAR fewer TAA artifacts, which in a game with no DLAA option is just preferable to the fuzziness of FXAA.

 

Alright thanks. I am think of getting something from the 50XX generation soon. Soon like months, not weeks.... thanks for the insight

 

Nice suggestion here, so it's better downgrade TSW a little and use, for example, a resolution upgrade from Nvidia app?
I'm having some sitters in 4K wit my old 2080Super and with this last 2 routes with Frankfurt the game isn't the best with the "old ultra setting"

 

As noted earlier in the thread, I have encountered mixed success using the Nvidia scaling rather than the Lossless Scaling app. It seems TSW or rather Unreal Engine gets into a conflict if it starts at less than your native screen resolution but Nvidia then tries to upscale as the programme launches. It was simply going to black screen then crashing with a UE error box ‘failed to render”. So I am now using the LS app, just need to find the sweet spot to output from TSW (thinking 1080p with 150 screen percentage) then set scaling to 2x in LS. Very much a WIP ongoing and a complete faff as TSW is the only game I have to take these measures with, just to get the thing running acceptably!

 

Do be aware as an aside, that getting a 50xx card over a 40xx card will mess up any older game that uses PhysX, as the 50-series lack 32-bit PhysX support, requiring a dedicated secondary GPU to support that.

 

I could run it comfortably on a 3090 for what it’s worth. Something in either TSW or UE4 (or both) is comically demanding though, much more so than in other games.

 

Thanks for letting me know, although I don't play older games.

 

This is exactly what is so confounding about the 4K discussion. It has been an available resolution in games for many years, long before the RTX series of cards was born, let alone the high end 40xx which still seem to be struggling with TSW.

Anyhow as regards Frankfurt S-Bahn, I would have to say now the shaders have largely finished compiling, in 1440p without either Nvidia or Lossless Scaling it is running no worse in fact maybe slightly better than WCML over Shap. Not bad for my antique PC, eh!

 

Just out of curiosity Vern, do you play any other games which run on Unreal 4, and if so, how do those compare performance-wise?

 

Funnily enough, I can’t see any that do. Certainly not titles like Forza 4, Snowrunner, the X space games, WRC, Elite Dangerous, Dirt 2.0.

 

I have a fair few, but as a matter of course I mostly play Unreal Engine games on console due to the smoother performance and lack of the stutter issues seen with the engine on PC.

Somewhere that TSW of course is an outlier.

Unfortunately, when it comes to finding points of comparison, the ones I do have on PC, they tend to be more the kinds of games the engine was designed around, with segmented environments that can neatly mask any traversal-related issues as new blocks load.


[Edit] Well, after going through the full list, I own 72 UE4 games. 10% of which I have on PC

 

I run everything in 4k including TSC. I have a 6700XT with 64gb RAM with an i7 10th gen processor. There is a little stutter in busy areas but I'm happy to put up with that.

Once you go 4k, there's no going back.

 

Could you set the monitor to run at the closest resolution to 1440p that'll be 1:1

 

Well, I was playing at 4k but the refresh was capped at 60Hz. Then I got hold of an ultra wide curved monitor with a native resolution of 1440p and I much prefer it to my 4k.

I may have lost something graphically but I have much smoother gameplay, less stuttering/hitching and, of course, that terrific wider view and double the fps.

 

if you have a 4k screen, you would go to 1080p.

Agreed, I have both a 4k as a daily driver & an UW 1440p on my sim rig. I quite happily go between the crispness of the 4k for the fluidity of 1440p (and vice versa). Whole lot of games out there that just aren’t optimised enough for a consistent 4k experience.