You should try London Waterloo on the Portsmouth route. 25fps if you are lucky. Over the years I've gone from a gtx 1660 up to a 4080 and gained 1fps!
Yes, I can quite believe that, that is also in line with it being severely CPU-limited due to the nature of the program itself.
You may have been building computers for 30 years or so but you have not been playing TSC for very long. TSC dates from the mid 2000 and the core program has been updated as much as possible without breaking the older DLC. Which is why I suggested you look at the settings in the post above - you are not the first to miss them and won't be the last. But as you already know everything about computers there is no point in trying to help you.
You have made an incorrect assumption, I'm afraid. I have been playing Train Sim since the original Microsoft version and every iteration since. I simply had quite a few years away from Train Sim Classic and TSW. That was mentioned in my first post. Sorry you missed it. Nevermind. Neither do I claim to know everything about computers. Perhaps you would have preferred that I had responded to your previous attempt to help in a more indirect and dishonest fashion or something? I prefer to respect others' time. I even put in some smiley jokey faces to make clear that I'm being quite light-hearted and jovial about it all, and expressed appreciation for you taking the time to offer some assistance. Which was sincere. I fail to see what I wrote there to warrant such a catty reply. But hey, you do you, fella.
That's right ididntdoit, you're very transparent about this game's performance, at least you won't create illusions for those who want the exact frame rate on screen. A friend and I have already done several tests with various hardware and none of them managed to maintain a solid 60 frames per second on whether on any route, not just some, which would be more sensible for this simulator. I've also debugged several areas of the game to try and find a possible solution. I've stopped for now, but I have everything noted and saved, however, I don't believe I'll find what causes these drops to be so drastic. For me, this is very bad, being at "1000" frames per second and suddenly dropping to 30 frames per second, it's like eating something without seasoning, that's not funny.
For what it's worth. I tried Chatham Mainline, leaving Victoria Station, I was getting about 27 fps, and as I was passing the Battersea Powerstation, it slowly crept up to about 35 fps until I got to less dense scenery, it got to 45/47 fps.
Thank you for coming back with that info. I'm grateful. It's useful in helping me to form a clear picture of expectations, and it's quite clear that my expectations were off by quite a way. The sim just is what it is.
Jazz What some of us do is cap at 30fps and then use LosslessScaling to double up the framerates. Works really well.
As others have said, CML3 in London runs badly all the time. I believe it’s because of how many lofts there are packed together, which is very taxing for some reason. Check the performance further out from London. If you’re getting decent framerates between (let’s say) Margate and Farningham Road, then it’s just TS’ normal performance. The lack of GPU usage is still odd though - in the 5Z72 scenario for CML3 the game was running at between 25-30fps at Victoria. It was using 10% of my CPU (Ryzen 7 7800X3D) and 50% of my GPU (RTX 5070 12GB). As others have suggested, make sure your Windows graphics settings are set so that TS runs in high performance mode, and check your graphics card settings too. There are other possible factors too, but I want to narrow down the issue first.
Forgive me, but frame generation doesn't work really well at that low of a frame rate and it was never designed to. I believe I have mentioned this before. Perhaps it was another thread, can't remember I have Lossless Scaling, but I rarely use it now because AMD's Fluid Motion Frames 2.1 is so good these days. (I avoid using this tech if I possibly can) I use it with TSW, but I will never use it in any game if the base frame rate can't stay at a locked 60 fps without drops. Firstly, it's the input lag this generates. When playing FPS games, this is an absolute no and would be less of an issue with sims like Train Sim if it were not for those of us who use TrackIR, where input lag is literally nauseating. Secondly, below 60 fps, the image quality suffers, and you end up with visual artifacting. Thirdly, the fluidity is terrible as it really doesn't exist, which is the entire point of the technology. It's meant to increase fluidity of movement. It's not meant to make up for low frame rates. In fact, it needs as many frames as it can get to create the illusion of its purpose. Couple those things with TrackIR, and the result is something akin to seasickness. It's quite an unpleasant and ugly experience, which leaves one's head spinning. The image quality of Lossless Scaling and AMD's Fluid Motions Frames 2.1 are kind of comparable in my experience, but the input latency is superior with AMD, and so, I opt for that. Of course, an old title like TSC doesn't support FSR or DLSS, so Lossless Scaling and Fluid Motion Frames 2.1 are the only options really, but because the sim can't maintain a 60 base, there are no options to increase frames at all as far as I'm concerned. It's worth mentioning here that they have not even bothered to add FSR or DLSS to TSW, which is inexcusable, to be honest. Leaving Lossless Scaling and AMD FMF 2.1 as the only options there as well. There is a reason Nvidia suggest not using Frame Gen at base rates less than 100, with absolute minimums of 70 (although I have found 60 to be acceptable with Nvidia), and AMD suggest no less than a base of 60, and from my testing, this is clearly a suggestion for good reasons. Simply put. Frame gen isn't meant or engineered for 30 fps. I'm afraid this sim just has severe limitations that have no workarounds. There is nothing wrong with that. It's a product of its time, and there seem to be many people who are perfectly happy with it. Unfortunately, with the way I enjoy playing and with hardware like TrackIR, it just doesn't work for me. It is a shame, though, as it offers some wonderful sim opportunities that I would otherwise really enjoy.
I might be wrong but I get the impression that you have come on here to berate TSC. From your first post.- in Bold I just bought Train Sim Classic - I bought it because it's been so many years since I played the original Train Sim The bit I don't understand is you had TSC in the past but you bought it again - Why? Anything you buy on Steam you keep - but you should know that. This sim is not testing my hardware at all but yet the frame rate is pitiful. What on earth am I missing here? This simply cannot be correct. I had thought that I would be willing to take a step back in graphics to have high frame rates and better routes but I'm getting way worse performance than in TSW. You have built computers but you are surprised that a game introduced in 2007 does not run as well as a game introduced in 2024/2025 - why is that? When people have suggested try this or that and you tell us why its a bad idea or you ignore the suggestion.
It's not at all odd, bud. The percentage of use of the GPU is irrelevant as a measure of total stress in many cases. It can read in a wide range of percentage use all whilst at a low clock speed, low power draw and/or require the use of cooling fans. It depends on what work it is being asked to do and how it's being asked to do it. It also depends on how the monitoring software is measuring these stats and how the hardware is set up to measure them. I noticed AMD changed the way they approached some of this when I switched from a 6900XT to a 9070XT, just as a single example. I fully expected this sim to not test a 9070XT at all, and indeed it doesn't unless one removes the frame limit and tries to push for as many frames as it can generate. In the scenario that I tested, the card didn't begin to show that it was really having to work until I got into the 180 fps range, when the clock speed was really having to ramp up and draw some real watts and trigger the cooling as the hotspot temp rose accordingly. But this is just a silly waste of power, of course. When locking the frame rate where I preferred at 100 fps, the card had nothing to do as far as it was concerned, so it throttled back its clock speed, drew as little power as it required, shut the fans off and put its feet up. If the card didn't need to break a sweat at 100 fps, it sure wasn't going to need to when the frame rate it was being asked to produce by the CPU is less than 50. I perhaps didn't expect to see it make quite such easy work of this old software, but it wasn't far off. This is absolutely normal behaviour, and there is nothing wrong with the card or those fundamental Windows settings people keep bringing up. Which, by the way, Windows does a pretty good job of assigning itself these days. Though I must say, I agree with checking these things yourself after updates, as Microsoft is partial to bowling a googly at a fairly regular rate. My initial area of confusion was caused by the low frame rate when starting a scenario in London and the related FPS drop. Since taking the time to understand the fundamentals of the software, I now understand exactly why I saw what I saw and have come to realise that the performance I was seeing where I was seeing it was actually exceptional. Relatively speaking. The only way to improve upon it is to get a 9800X3d to replace my 5800X3d, and even then, the performance would be only marginally better while still looking like the CPU and GPU were doing nothing. The conclusions I have been forced to come to during this is that graphically, you can run this on very underpowered GPU's. Old GPU's serve it just fine, and modern ones scoff at its demands. However, even modern CPU's can't fix this software. It is profoundly single-core, single-thread limited. Short of having something absurd, such as 25Ghz CPU, the performance of this will always be poor. It's the most dreadfully CPU-bottlenecked program I have ever seen. It just is what it is.
Yes, you are wrong, and I'm beginning to get the impression that you often are. Very strange and obviously disingenuous take if ever I saw one. There you are with your assumptions again. Not that I should explain myself to you, but I will entertain you one more time. Firstly, I'm not sure why it wasn't on my account, but it could be one of several reasons, I suppose. I hung on to physical media as long as I could. I always liked to have hard copies of my games and DVD's even VHS, etc. It's quite likely that I had this on disk when it first launched. Having to downsize and move several times, I have, unfortunately, had to get rid of all this stuff. Including even my DVD collection. Something that I don't even care to think about, to be honest. Even if I still had a disk the PC's I build these days don't even have optical drives, so it would be useless anyway. Secondly, I'm not even sure when I joined Steam originally, and I know I have had more than one account since I first did. Was Steam the only place you could buy these things then? I have vague memories of other places, too. Lord only knows what they were, though. Fact is, it was so long ago I simply don't remember how I had it or where I bought it. I took a fancy to it again, looked at my Steam library, and it wasn't there, so I bought it again. What's the problem? And what on earth does it have to do with you? I have explained a few times now, but if you want a clear description, you can look just above at my post there, where I have explained it. I have not ignored the suggestions. I have been appreciative of people's willingness to help, even if the suggestions were basic, they were well-intentioned, and I appreciated that, but factually, many were not applicable, and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest and a waste of everyone's time. That really would be rude. While I'm at it, I'll address something in your previous interaction with me. It's precisely because I do not know everything about computers, or more specifically, this program, an accusation you levelled at me in your previously catty reply to me, that I came here to ask for some insights on the matter. Something a 'know-all' wouldn't have done. The truth is, though, I was hoping for some more in-depth fundamental insights into the basics of the program that I was missing in the few minutes back operating it. I'm getting the picture that the average Train Sim user is of a different technical mindset than that of the average flight simmer, which is a world I'm more familiar with interacting with. That isn't a slight at all, though. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. How people go about their enjoyment of things is entirely their business. I have since gotten to the root of the issue I came here to understand, and that indeed came as a result of some of my interactions here. I was quite appreciative of your original attempt to help, even if it was not applicable. I tried to make you aware of that, but you are clearly fragile in some fashion and, for reasons beyond my comprehension, have taken it personally and have now taken it upon yourself to fill the role of "INQUISITOR" of some description. Not quite sure who you think you are, to be honest, but as I said previously, you do you, fella. Now, if you wish to engage with me further, in future, and in good faith, then I'm fine with that. I prefer not to hold grudges, and sometimes people just get on the wrong foot, but if you are going to come at me again with this strange attitude and disingenuous interpretation of intentions, then just don't bother. Life is too short.
I have a 5070, and in my post where I tested the route in question I was using around 40-50% of the GPU's resources. I was editing my own route earlier today, which runs at 70fps in its most intense areas (the route has very dense scenery) and it was happily using more than 90% of it. The 5070 is way above the GPU requirements for TS. In less intense areas my route runs at more than 120fps, so I think it's clear TS doesn't have an issue using the GPU when it needs to.
As every one has said TSC is a game with ye ancient code that probably can't utilise modern computer resources like a modern game can. IMO the major reasons for low/variable frame rates are due to several reasons: How well your Windows OS is in good shape. Video Card: Input latency ie the lag tha occurs with the input device - software - hardware (cpu/gpu) and monitor and with a 60Hz monitor this can be over 70ms. Input latency can be idiosyncratic for a particular PC setup. Refresh Rate A 60Hz monitor CANNOT display more than 60FPS it is a physical impossibility. However if you can generate say 120 fps that can reduce any input latency but the display will not have the smoothness of 120Hz fps rendering. Run a high refresh rate on a good quality monitor. Not sure about 4K as that can be limited to 60Hz. GSync (later Freesync) Monitors: This type of monitor can reduce input latency and reduce stuttering. VSync ON/OFF variable depends on game and setup. nVidia low latency mode variable. (ditto) Monior full screen or borderless (Borderless has more latency but may be insignificant(. TSC coding - this is conjecture as I do not have a copy of te source code. Hyperthreading - turn off - it can cause thread collisions and hence lower frame rates. Circa 2018 when TSC was converted from 32-bit to 64-bit we have no idea how that was achieved but it should have helped frame rates significantly???? Due to the base code being universal TSC has a tendency to generate many many soft page faults and due to the resources the cpu uses to correct them fps can drop. It also generates hard page faults which also can lower fps and may cause stuttering. Physical RAM is important for the last several years I have installed 32GB of matched RAM which reduces the usage of the paging file (when running TSC) to an absolute minimum if not zero. Note: I have run some scenarios that used a staggering 11 GB of RAM (Incl Windows OS - Avge in win 11 Pro 7-8Gb most routes/scenarios) - if I had had 16GB installed - in that case windows might want to use the PF and that could slow down TSC. In Summary, it is a complex situation - TSC is old and maybe not optimised for fast modern PC's (cpu/gpu) and it may run perfectly on one one PC but not on another PC having the exact same spec. However, TSC runs fine on the vast majority of computers. This list is not comprehensive and some items may not have a significant bearing on TSC FPS.
