Since I have only tried this on 3 routes so far, LIRR, Peninsular Corridor and East Coastway, this will require more testing to see how much, if any, it really helps. It was so simple once I saw it, the game is throttled at 62 fps in the settings. I just went into advanced settings and bumped it up to 102. Now, though, still get drops in frame rate as game play progresses, these drops are like from 95 down to maybe 65, which are not as noticeable as say 60 to 40. Your results are dependent on your machine and I do hope some other player will check this out. Since my frame rate limit is now set at 102, every game I play will be a test of this. All I can say is, hope this helps some.
...that is interesting- even with some frame drop using the higher setting, the lowest frame rate you now get masks the stuttering. Is all of that right? Good that you posted this info... and I guess this would be a workaround for PC only, and would not be possible on console?
It´s not an option on consoles. All you can do on TSW 2 is choose between 4k and HD, which is a different thing.
thought I would throw in my experience as I have been running at a capped at 102 Frames per second in the options and am on a 100Hz display since day one. I am also running off an NVMe drive so admittedly the stutters have never been a huge issue but there still without a doubt they are present, however they are vastly better for me on TSW2 than they where on TSW. So from my experience id say no capping the framerate at 102 does not solve the issue. The benefit you are describing sounds more like it would be related to the way Vsync works I would guess, as you did not mention if you run with Vsync on or off its just a guess but for reference if you are running with Vsync on a non adaptive display like GSYNC or FreeSync then any frame rate drop below the target refresh rate will result in exaggerated stutter. This is due to Vsync targeting the next available refresh rate, for example 45 or 30hz. While Assets are streamed in you will often find a small CPU usage hit an this will often result in a brief loss of performance hence the small but sudden loss of frame rate, however with Vsync enabled you will feel the impacts and visually see the impacts of these drops far more. If you don't own an adaptive refresh display you can always try settings like Adaptive Vsync if running Nvidia cards and see if that also helps reduce the impact of stutters as Adaptive Sync will simply disable Vsync when your frame rate falls below the target refresh rate. This is honestly not an issue isolated to TSW2 or DTG most if not all UE based games suffer stuttering and hitching form the way the engine handles asset streaming but also simply a limit to how getting data from your hdd to the gpu is currently achieved, this is why such a big deal is been made around new tech like DirectStorage that will allow for far more IO requests per second but also allows for smarter functions like been able to bundle requests to storage and will allow engines and developers better control over handling IO requests. However this would also require a move to DX12 from memory so is not magic cure in of its self and does require development overhead to implement but is defiantly one way to solve the assets streaming stutter that is probably currently capped to something like 50MBs that may sound fast but its really not when your streaming tons of smaller items ect you can saturate that very fast. Example rather than streaming one large texture file and cause major slow downs in game a trick used is to split the texture into smaller chunks that can be loaded as required per section, This is far more efficient and reduces the stuttering felt in game however its also generating more IO workloads and you will saturate that 50MB/s limit used in my example very fast. so really its a bandaid not a cure. Given a modern NVMe can put out far more data and handle far more IO intensive work flows tech like DirectStorage should see an end or at least the beginning of the end of these problems at least i hope so. And with new Console cycle now all sporting ultra fast direct storage methods it wont be long before most games make the change to support it. Anyway interested to hear if you tested this with or without vsync. and apologies for the semi info rant dump lol.
ARSGT thanks and no not a rant. I am running at GeoForce GTX 1080 video card with 8.1 gb GDDR5X. As far as what I found, by running at the high frame rate cap when I do get the reductions in fps it is not as far down as it was so visually it is not as noticeable as you are playing. So I guess one could say, did I find a cure for the stutters, NO, but I did enable myself to play without seeing it as much. I am running vsync off for now.
Thank you, ARSGT. I thought i read something about the streaming issue of the UE, but couldn´t find it anymore. It will be interesting to see if the new consoles will improve performance, because they will be using NVMe drives. Can´t wait till November 19th to try it out.
I’m running TSW2 with vsync on and with DX12 enabled and found the stutters on Tees Valley Line to be much worse than for example ECW which only produces occasional micro stutters. I was finding TVL very disappointing yesterday so today I tried increasing the max frame rate from 62 to around 103. There are still stutters but they are now much more like the ones I was experiencing in ECW and don’t spoil the gameplay nearly so much as before.
Thanks, this is my finding. Now I wonder what will happen if I go up. Well, won't know till I try. Ran the frame rate limit to unlimited and again ran the Peninsular Corridor. This time peak fps was 115 with low point 85. With these numbers there was no decriable stutter or other visual issues.
Not sure DX12 v DX11 is the cause of the stuttering. Obviously don't know for sure and DTG is mum on the entire subject, but the old Train Simulator games have always had the same frame drop stuttering which is caused by the next part of the route loading in. The route is made of a series of scenery tiles and one those in front of and behind the train a certain distance are loaded and rendered at any time. In the TS series there has always been stutter when the new tile/s load/s in. Wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar reason in TSW.
It is likely that the stuttering is related to loading data. If that assumption is true, the only thing that may help is to have very fast disk access. I do not see any reason why changing the fps cap would change anything, because I think this relates more to the speed the GPU can render images. Performance tuning is a complex topic and requires careful setting up experiments. If you want to do this, change one parameter at a time and make sure to keep everything else constant. Even then doing relevant measurements is hard.
I run TSW on an NVME. Makes little difference. My suspicion is that has more to do with both how DX11 handles CPU threads and iffy CPU optimization from DTG. Train Simulator still runs on DX9 and the big limit there is poor support for multi-core CPUs, so the game maxes out one core and the rest sit there twiddling their thumbs and throwing a fast SSD at it makes no difference. Microsoft Flight Simulator from Asobo (a similarly sized company to DTG surprisingly) has a similar issue to TSW. The devs chose to build it on DX11 and it isn't handling the most modern multi-core hyperthreaded CPUs very well making the heavily CPU bound.
