Best Graphics Settings

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by helderbrincolas, Aug 23, 2021.

  1. helderbrincolas

    helderbrincolas Well-Known Member

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    Being new on TS, i find very confusing the graphics settings options, and i would like your help on how to get the max graphics settings possible. I´m not using RW Enhancer.
    Thanks in advance!
    My current graphics settings:
     
    Last edited: Aug 23, 2021
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  2. 749006

    749006 Well-Known Member

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    What about your Graphics Card Settings?
    What type of card is it?
     
  3. helderbrincolas

    helderbrincolas Well-Known Member

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    GTX 1660 TI
     
  4. 749006

    749006 Well-Known Member

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    If that is a Nvidia you can change the settings in the Nvidia Control Panel
    Peter Hayes or Pookeyhead would know better than me.

    Peter
     
  5. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    It would also be useful to know what resolution you are running at? What resolution is your display/Desktop set to? This will have a big influence on the best settings with a 1660.

    [edit] Ignore this question, as I just saw you are at 1080p.

    I'd say you are running perhaps a little too much anti-aliasing. Try FXAA+4xMSAA and see if you can live with it, as you'll gain frames doing that.

    Sliders are all OK, and pretty much I would do myself ( I use a GTX980Ti, which is not quite as fast as your 1660). There's nothing to gain by taking water quality to max, and it is a frame rate hit for no good reason.

    I'd turn procedural flora off. It tends to put grass in random places like the middle of roads, and doesn't add much to the experience.

    I'd definitely turn ambient occlusion on (unless you have something else like RWEnhancer Pro taking care of that, but I don't think you are). It adds depth to shadows and adds realism. It does hit your FPS though, but if you reduced your AA to 4x, you will probably make up that deficit.

    Contrast, brightness etc, are obviously subjective depending upon your display and do not affect frame rate, so that's a personal choice. Do not take sunlight intensity too high though, as you may well get burned out highlights on summer days at noon.

    It's all down to what you are willing to accept as a decent FPS. Personally, anything over 25 in TS is fine for me. If you need more FPS, I'd lower aniso to 4x. If you want more, play with scenery quality and draw distance. I'd not reduce scenery density, as the game can start to look a little sparse in open countryside.

    Be careful with shadow quality as shadows start to look very coarse and blocky as you reduce this. It woudl be a last resort for me.
     
    Last edited: Aug 23, 2021
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  6. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    I edited my reply again. refresh and see if you missed anything.
     
  7. helderbrincolas

    helderbrincolas Well-Known Member

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    Many thanks for the help!
    I have no issues with FPS with my current settings displayed above, so i was looking for the max graphics settings possible
     
  8. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    If you have no issues currently, switch on ambient occlusion and select a setting that suits. See if it hits FPS too much. If it does, lower AA to FXAA+4x to make up any shortfall. Ambient Occlusion makes things look so much better.

    Consider searching some of my other posts on RWEnhancer and ReShade. if you like eye candy.
     
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  9. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    Just don't put water quality to max... barely noticable difference, but a noticable FPS hit.
     
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  10. helderbrincolas

    helderbrincolas Well-Known Member

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    Got it!
    I´ll look into it, and thaks for the help much appreciated!
     
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  11. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    You're welcome.
     
  12. trev123

    trev123 Active Member

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    What are your computer specs as that makes a lot of difference to what graphics settings you can run not just your graphic card type. I went from an Intel i5 2500K CPU to an Intel i5 10600K CPU both running the same graphics card a GTX 1060 6 GB card and going from the middle of the range settings with the 2500K to nearly maximin settings on most routes with the 10600K. I don't bother with the Nvidia Control Panel settings as I couldn't see much difference in running TS with them no matter what settings that I used in it so just rely on the TS settings.
     
  13. helderbrincolas

    helderbrincolas Well-Known Member

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    My specs are:
    - I7 9700
    - 16GB Ram 2666mhz
    - GTX 1660TI
    - SSD m2 nvme 512GB
     
  14. trev123

    trev123 Active Member

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    Your i7 which is one generation older than my i5 has similar specs and your graphics card is slightly better than mine so essentially you should be able to run TS at maximum settings on most routes. Sometimes it is a bit of trial and error and after a while, you should get to know which routes run good and ones that don't. On the ones that don't just knock back the graphic settings a bit.
     
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  15. helderbrincolas

    helderbrincolas Well-Known Member

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    I run TS with no issues. Just on PDL i have to turn down a notch of the scenery quality to not lose so much fps, and who says PDL says others heavy and dense routes.
     
  16. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    WCML South around Wembley will never run fast no matter what hardware you have and neither will Woodhead in BR Blue. Some routes are just demanding in some places.
     
  17. PhÜnKî_Rø0sTā

    PhÜnKî_Rø0sTā Well-Known Member

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    Anyone having this issue?

    So I'm driving along, getting around 45-50fps on average with everything maxed out, then out of nowhere a game drops to single digit fps for about 4 seconds, then goes back to normal. What's the optimal settings that can stop this from happening without sacrificing a heap of graphics quality? Will running the game in borderless mode compared to full screen make a difference?
     
  18. Smokebox

    Smokebox Active Member

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    The sudden drop is because of tile-loading. The faster you're going, the sooner (or more often) you'll reach a point where it needs to load the terrain, scenery, etc. for an adjacent tile. It's very CPU-intensive, so if your system suffers CPU bottlenecks - that's when the CPU can't generate frames and send them to the graphics card quickly enough, so that the graphics card is, in effect, kept waiting for more frames to arrive - you'll get those drops. In simple terms, it's because the CPU momentarily has too much to do (loading the tile, generating frames, and goodness knows what else in the background). It's most noticeable when you get into hilly or mountainous terrain, and I believe that's because the problem is exacerbated by the shadows cast by the terrain itself (these aren't the same as the shadows that you can adjust with the slider, because the mountain shadows can't be adjusted at all - they're always there), and I assume that those shadows are also computed by the CPU.

    Another thing to watch out for is the hard drive speed. I have reasonably good SSDs in my PC, but unfortunately they're in RAID configuration, which means the disk read speed is only about half what it would have been if they'd been configured in AHCI mode. To change that, I'd have to re-install Windows, which I can't be bothered doing, so I have to put up with it taking a relatively long time to read tile data from the SSDs when it loads a new tile.

    Incidentally, my PC has a decent graphics card (mine's a GTX 1650 Super) but a relatively slow CPU (mine was great in 2009, but not so good now). I can pump up the AA to the maximum, 3x3 SSAA and on dense, mountainous routes (such as the B&O Mountain Subdivision) it makes absolutely no difference to the framerate compared with simple FXAA. That's because the framerate is dictated by the CPU. Even on 3x3 SSAA, my graphics card spends a lot of time waiting to receive (from the CPU) frames to process. Personally, I prefer to maximise AA because I really hate "jaggies".

    I've tried Borderless and Full Screen and haven't noticed any difference in framerate. I use Borderless because it means tabbing between the game and other applications is much less prone to causing a crash.

    Regarding the fake ambient occlusion in TS, I keep it turned off completely. Personally, I don't like it at all, because (a) the fuzzy black edge it puts around all geometry can obliterate intricate detail in my models, and (b) it must consume a lot of CPU, because the higher up I turn the fake AO, the worse the framerates get.
     
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  19. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead Well-Known Member

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    Nope. It's a loading issue as the previous poster said. A fast ssd and a processor with fast single core performance is the only way to mitigate against this. Even on the fastest hardware, there will be brief periods of slowdown as assets are loaded.
     
  20. PhÜnKî_Rø0sTā

    PhÜnKî_Rø0sTā Well-Known Member

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    Interesting. I might turn off the AO and see if it makes a difference. I'm running a 9600k i5 and a 2070 super l
     

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