Hi guys, As the title suggests I have bought an ASUS TUF A15 gaming laptop and am having problems getting the settings right for the best optimum drive experience, without stuttering. Specs are: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H Graphics: NVidia GeForce RTX3060 RAM: 16GB Windows: 11 Home Is anyone else using this laptop? If so would you be able to share your settings please as I'm getting more and more frustrated. Many thanks
Does your laptop have an integrated gpu as well? If so, you must configure your laptop to use the Nvidia for TSC 64 bit. You can do that in the Nvidia control panel
When you say stuttering, do you mean low frame rate, or stuttering? They are not the same thing, nor caused by the same thing usually.
Thanks, I should have mentioned that I checked that initially to make sure TSC was using the dedicated card.
Sorry, I meant poor frame rate. I was more intrigued in case anyone else used TSC on this model of laptop, and what settings they used. Thanks
No problem. I just wondered as stuttering, as in periodic stalls are usually an asset loading issue exacerbated by a slow SSD or drive.
I have an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS with an AMD Radeon RX 6700S and it performs roughly the same as my old i7-4790 with a GTX 970. With some assets it is faster while in other areas it is actually slower. So I just use 2K with MSAA. Could also be a laptop thing partially in that it's intentionally limited. Like GW2 and WoW run much better but not that much. Generally if you want to get deep into TSC I'd recommend nagging Blazin for his specs (or some old post by Spikee). They seem to afford 4K + SSAA, effectively 8K, with nicer settings-shaders as well. In any event, for TSC your only choice is Intel-Nvidia. Some assets - including some German pack from 2011 - are terribly expensive, so in the meanwhile you could compromise to use routes & trains which run well on your system. In some scenarios I noticed that the simulation itself was taking up significant time - I would get 60fps while paused but 28 while stationary. Be it busy UK networks or long US routes, I've casually ran most of my photoshoots without any AI and likely for this reason. It is roughly common knowledge that the game was optimized for Intel-Nvidia (some glaring errors with AMD chips) and the architecture might differ in that Intel usually has stronger single core. I also noticed a mild decrease when changing from Win8 to Win10 on my old PC.
Thanks for the tag; I’ll be able to comment sometime within the latter half of the next 24 hrs after I get home from railway volunteering to talk about my specs and what I’ve learnt from my experience of running the game with higher settings and various enhancements have been over the last few years.
Thanks for all the information so far, I was originally asking if anyone uses the same laptop as me to play TSC, however always great to hear suggestions on settings etc to get the best out of the sim.
I own a desktop based system and right off the bat no matter your specs it is important to note first of all that Laptops will handle identical components and how they run things on your computer a lot differently because it's fairly obvious to see that a desktop case can pack in a whole lot more than a thin laptop casing. For example with PCs you could fit a whole lot more cooling equipment for components that get hot like a GPU or CPU than a laptop so many laptop components may not be able to be pushed as hard as desktop contained components so you may see a difference in experience from what I will say so I just wanted to get that out of the way first. My specs for context as well: CPU: Intel Core i7-11700F GPU (Graphics): NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti RAM: 64GB OS: Windows 10 I run my game on a 4k 60hz monitor that I own as well. I understand our specs are quite different and you are inquiring on laptop performance but its also important to know what settings may impact your experience the most so you can tune it to what your laptop likes. Here my settings: I've got most of my settings at max; aside from Anti-Aliasing which I think is set at about middle of the range if I remember correctly? I honestly haven't tweaked my settings in ages but I found a good balance between the game dealing with anti-aliasing and frame rate there if I remember correctly. Anti-Aliasing is easily the thing that has affected my FPS the most when I tried tweaking it ages ago, sometimes just going one notch up from settings that were stable would completely tank my FPS and performance. Other than that honestly the other settings never had major impacts on how my computer hardware handled it. My runs are usually stable around ~30fps and without ReShade (an external third party shader software I use to make the game look better) it gets up to ~40-60fps if I am lucky but I prefer the look ReShade gives so its a sacrifice I can make since ~30fps is good enough and still looks fine to me. As expected though in very busy areas of a route filled with lots of detailed assets or AI trains it could cause more stuttering or fps drops than usual. Either way it is still bearable for me. If you want further improved performance decreasing Texture Filtering, Scenery Quality and View Distance may help. I wouldn't recommend decreasing settings like Scenery Density more than you have to since it starts to just make assets pop in and out of existence and it makes for a bad experience. Granted I am on a Windows 10 OS and haven't changed for Windows 11 but I doubt they would have removed this option but it may be a different way to access it. In the Graphics Settings of my Windows OS you can choose "Graphics performance preference" where you can choose whether to force your GPU to choose between preserving battery life while running something or running it to the best of its performance; for a laptop which run off battery life this may be more useful than it is on a desktop system so it might help you but I can't be 100% sure how effective it would be. To get TSC to be forced on a preference on high performance find whichever of the TSC builds you use to play the game in the Railworks folder and set it to high performance. I'm not sure how new you are to TSC as a whole so apologies if you are already aware but there are currently 3 builds of TSC you could choose for high performance running, or you could choose all of them if you want to be sure no matter what build you are using if you're unsure. RailWorks.exe - The 32 bit build; if you haven't already you probably don't want to be using the 32 bit build since it is more unstable to the 64 bit build that most use nowadays. RailWorks64.exe - The 64 bit build; you will be wanting to use this one as your primary TSC build. RailworksDX12_64.exe - This is the experimental DX12 build; it's very unstable and is usually only used by people who want to help out with beta testing and bug fixing for potential ports of TSC to DX12 in the future if that will ever happen. Also keep in mind either way TSC performance is limited because of modern CPUs which are excellent at multithreading since most games and programs are made that way today for efficient running but TSC is still a game from 2009 so it uses single threading which is why the game has notorious performance issues with some equipment that may be considered top of the line struggling to run it at times while running other games that are technically a whole lot more graphically intensive a lot better which might seem confusing but honestly it is normal. What I'm getting at is that GPU performance settings may not have a big effect but it's worth a shot since either way it still obviously utilises your GPU to the max extent it can. I hope this helps somewhat, please keep in mind though I am not an expert on tech though. This is simply self-taught knowledge I have picked up from my experience with TSC and others on the forums alongside general but not super in depth knowledge from about a decade of computer use now. I also recommend researching for other threads on this forum that cover performance related topics I may have not covered or mentioned as there is quite a few out there.
Hi everyone, Firstly a huge thanks to Blazin for such a detailed response, very useful. Secondly, and more importantly I have checked the display settings within Windows and also settings within the NVidia app and noticed that it was not set to force the use of the NVidia card. As a result my FPS have shot up and the overall gameplay is far more appealing (and less frustrating!). Here's to a trouble free use of TSC (however who knows what's round the corner!). Thanks again.
May i ask how we get tsc to use nvidia please. I tried opening the nvidia panel and selecting tsc64.exe in the list of games but it said the game was not optimised.
That error message only means that there isn't a preset for the game. Use the Nvidia Control Panel and add RailWorks64. Then you can change settings for it. My recommendations: Power mode: High Performance (set this in the global settings as you'll want this all the time) MFAA: on V-sync: fast
