Nec: New York - Trenton Is A Performance Nightmare, Even On High-end Pcs

I played a Cardinal service run on the full timetable for New York Trenton and have observed a notable improvement versus before. It's great to see the route in a playable state again. There is still the occasional micro stutter here and there but overall, from Trenton to Newark-Penn Station, with increased traffic, I have 55-60fps on ultra settings at 1080p. I notice, now it seems the interior lights are on for the Multilevels, but some of the ALP-46 and Multilevels have their marker lights turned off.

 

I had put in a ticket a month ago about the tail lights . they responded back with not sure what action was taken and ticket was closed out

 

The ticket should not have been closed. Someone on the dev side should have escalated this request for further troubleshooting. For that kind of response "not sure what action was taken" followed by them closing the ticket out is unacceptable. They should know how to fix this and not respond like that if not sure. Why did they close out the request if they don't know how to solve the issue? It is unacceptable that a small issue such as tail lights not working properly on a train consist persists almost a year after the route was released. Meanwhile, the German/European content do not have issues like this.

 

German/European 100% have minor bugs that have been there for years and not fixed.

Brighton Mainline, one of the most popular UK routes has had a bug where the play driven 377 has it's rear gangway door stuck open, and impossible to close for over a year. It's not an American Route thing, it's just a DTG thing.

 

but wait there's more. below are some of the tickets I have opened against NYT. Some are still opened, others were closed but with no fix

 

I'm also happy to report much improved performance as of today as well. I posted earlier in the thread, but my system is an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, RTX 4090 etc and I was getting absolutely awful stutters and hitching before like everyone else. Frame rates when smooth have never been an issue for me, but now worst case I dropped to around 45fps in NY Penn at 17:00 and was locked at 60-62fps pretty much everywhere else. Only the occasional micro stutter of a fraction of a second here and there, as opposed to stutters that lasted 1-2 seconds previously. Also, another poster mentioned updating their NVidia drivers as well. I haven't touched my drivers in quite a while since I'm lazy so it doesn't seem to be the drivers.

DTG Matt I didn't see any mention of NYT in the patch notes from yesterday but whatever you guys did, even unintentionally, seems to have been an immense improvement.

Cab Signalling is still as frustrating as before, and I passed at least one AI train with the alerter going off on both ends, and saw some missing markers lights, but at least its playable now.

 

Could you please take a look at passengers on NYT as well? They don't spawn at platforms, or get on/off trains. That and the alerter and the two big remaining issues for that route from my end.

Really happy the stuttering is improved though, great work to all the team!

 

Matt, i really thought i was going crazy or was in a fever dream or something. to wake up and this route run like butter with almost no performance issues didn’t feel real after what was a rough past month or so but thank you, thank you!!

It’s like christmas morning lol.

I really hope to see more improvements moving forward especially with the focus shifting to the AI alerter beeping since that is a big annoyance haha.

 

I can confirm that I saw a major improvement in performance as a PC user since the near constant stuttering is mostly gone on my side too. Glad that this was addressed, but those who are familiar with my other postings in this forum know that I am still advocating for improvements to the cab signal behavior for NYT. Having to cut out the safety systems because certain parts of the route have nonsensical or ridiculously early cab signal progressions is not ideal…
I hope we see further improvements in that regard in addition to the other things like AI alerter behavior and lack of passengers on platforms.

 

it was mentioned previously that a fix for this had already been done, but I'm surprised it wasn't in yesterday's patch unless they plan to hold it for other NYT fixes they plan to push out later on...

 

Ran a 141 Amtrak service on full timetable; no issues in NY Penn Station. A little stuttering outside the tunnel and crossing into Jersey.

 

I just completed the Amtrak Cardinal Timetable Service #97 without any issues. I also noticed between Newark and NY-Penn Station, the frames dip down to about 40-45fps, not a problem as it was smooth to play. I did notice between the Hackensack River Portal Bridge and NY-Penn Station, there are a string of trains back to back being held due to signals or delays. I know this is not prototypical. I am sure this will get resolved as we see further updates with the route.

 

For what it’s worth, none of the AI trains on Antelope Valley have their marker lights working either. Some trains go by with the headlights on when the locomotive/cab car is trailing.

 

Yup that happens on NYT with the ALP46 trailing

 

sadly still an issue with trains eventually getting infinitely stuck at reds (at New York Penn), but I've noticed it happens after about 2-3 hours in free roam, whereas on Boston Sprinter it starts happening after 30-40 minutes Maybe that can be improved over time with dispatcher improvements.

 

I can also confirmed on PC steam that the performance on NYT new time table was much, much better. I had noticed and improvement from the previous patch but with this latest patch NYT performance is comparable with the other routes. Below I capture a video of the beginning of a service from Penn station to Trenton during AM rush hour. I've included the timelapse videos from another post, videos captures services from 8am to 9am around Penn station, Sunnyside, and undeneath the 1-95 overpass

 

So aside from the passengers and alerters. Would you say you're happy with the route now?

 

I'm happy that Joe was able to bring life to this route with the new timetable (around 2,000 services) and that players can now enjoy it on both Consoles and PC. Still lots of issues that needs to be fixed. But looks like we are finally making progress.

 

i’m honestly very curious as to what they changed at the core level (and didn’t write about in the patch notes) that made THIS MUCH of an improvement for some/a lot of us in terms of hitching/freezing. I know it’s likely they won’t reveal the details of that to us, but i can’t help the curiosity. I truly wanna know was it was that made THIS MUCH of a difference.

 

this really came at such a perfect time for me. the new PC arrives on Friday and the main reason i wanted to upgrade was to get a better overall experience in the game with higher graphics settings, more modifications, higher frame rates, etc. and with most of this stuttering gone that removes a lot of the worry that the hitching would continue on the new machine. phew. this weekend can’t come soon enough!

Spoiler: new pc specs

AMD Ryzen™ 9 Processor 7950X3D 16-core/32-thread 4.2GHz [Turbo 5.7GHz]

HDD: 2TB WD Blue SN580 Series (PCIe Gen4) NVMe M.2 SSD

HDD2: 4TB (4TBx1) SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 256MB Cache 5400RPM HDD

MEMORY: 32GB (16GBx2) DDR5/6000MHz Dual Channel Memory

MOTHERBOARD: ASUS PRIME X670-P

VIDEO: AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XTX 24GB GDDR6 Video Card

Also, i don’t think they’ve addressed this at all but in particular on NYT, i’m constantly running into an issue where track speed limits aren’t populating ahead of the train on both the pause menu track monitor and the in-game track monitor at all or if they do populate, it’s right as the speed limit decreases.

 

Glad to see some genuine improvement. I'm also curious to know a few behind the scenes insights as to how the team pulled it off. Could make for a neat story.

 

The route was running fine for me before this apparent update, so it's difficult to tell if there's any improvement.

Suffice it to say that I just completed an Acela run from NYP to Trenton which ran as smooth as butter. Passed a lot of AI on the run, sometimes 2 or 3 units simultaneously. Lots of fun.

Whatever, I'm just happy for those who are seeing a distinct improvement from this chimeric upgrade.

 

Having an issue with free roam where after you set a path and start driving it, it doesn't actually take you on your path but takes you on the path of the AI train that's supposed to be behind you (in service mode). This results in junctions not changing where they are outlined on the map and I end up somewhere completely different. The signals allow me to continue on this wrong path because it's the path for the AI service behind me. It's very strange and I've only had this issue in free roam during service mode for NYT.

 

You realize with your spoiler you now have the standard machine and we'll all be expecting regular reports haha

PC/Steam/Ryzen7/RTX3060

 

to add on to this. I spawned an ACS-64 vermonter consist in at Newark International Airport Track 1 heading towards New York. I set my path to stop at Newark Penn Track 2. I checked the map and the correct route is highlighted. I start driving and by the time i get to the junction where i’d switch to head onto the that track, i don’t. It takes me to Newark Penn Track Track 1 instead and when i notice this and open the map, the blue highlight over the route is gone. It has me on the path for whatever service is behind me. This happens all the time. Weird.

 

The route still has two main problems in my opinion, in addition to route details themselves and heavy AI trains traffic in rush hour. The same problem happens to most of the routes located inside dense urban areas:

• There are several populated highways crossing the tracks on the bridges or dense traffic roads next to tracks
• There are many detailed objects whose primitives are hidden (their bounding boxes are occluded by other objects)

The first one may appear a silly thing but it´s relevant for two reasons: every single car has a sound emitter and a collision with player character and player camera, and that starts to be monitored currently at 100m away from player. So depending on the roads layout you may find places with cars on the sides and on the bridges at the same time and close to tracks, which results in a significant amount of assets whose sounds and collisions need to be monitored in short time. This is a simple 2 lanes bridge on the route and you can see it has 10 cars on that side (so another 10 cars on the other side). This means 20 cars being monitored. Highways have 4 lanes, so they double the amount.



Take into account that just player train alone means around 100 sounds if we include the nearby ambient sounds. So a simple bridge is just a 20% extra workload just for the sounds alone for instance and a highway alone around the double. Sound streaming can still handle it but the real problem are not sounds, even if they still mean some more workload. In my opinion it has no sense that cars collisions are monitored except if player in on foot. They don´t even have sense for player camera either, at least at 100m. Disabling collisions on TrafficManager releases workload for instance. On the other hand Trenton has sometimes several highways crossing tracks inside the same tile (so in less than 1 mile more or less). Once tile is loaded and they are in range the movement of all those dozens of cars is triggered. That causes a noticeable hitching. I think that process should run async as now it appears to run on a single task thread, as basically all cars spawn and start to move at the same time.

Additionally cars mesh is not managed as the rest of static meshes (so upon tile loading) but when they become visible to player. Yes, it´s a very basic and low detailed mesh, but it´s still an asset to handle and it moves. Disabling TrafficManager onscreen check solves the problem as loads the cars meshes earlier in time (as soon as cars spawn). So basically too many things have to happen in short time and very close to player (100m around) when cars become visible: load mesh, load sounds, load movement and load collisions. That´s fine for 10 cars maybe (the typical single road next to tracks) but what if you have 100 cars around because of multiple highways, streets or random roads nearby? I think spawn distances could be increasesed so that this event is not happening on player´s face and system can have some more frames to balance and handle the newly created batch of tasks.

The second topic is a problem for texture streaming, as distant hidden objects are spawned with 1 Mip less (because they are hidden) as a performance saver trick, but as soon as they become visible they need a second iteration of streaming to load their texture at a higher resolution. That only applies to distance objects but anyway, if the object that becomes visible is a relatively complex one, the resolution upscale can be significant in short time. The perfect example of this is a new tile loading containing objects after a curve. This can happen to complex buildings hidden by trees, complete stations or groups of houses hidden by whatever. Disabling hidden primitives visibility (r.Streaming.HiddenPrimitiveScale=1) forces all objects to load with the texture resolution they need for their current distance to player without increasing workload too much and their textures are upscaled in steps as they come closer to player, as happens to the rest of visible objects, which is still performance friendly. Texture streaming works fine on dense areas as far as I have seen and still uses not so much memory. This removes the need of two texture streaming iterations on a potentially high amount of complex objects when they become visible in short time. Once more Unreal solutions for performance optimization can produce adverse results in our case.

I have been testing those things and there´s a clear benefit. I think it would be good if DTG could take a look to this. In particular sounds and collisions may be split in two different variables (now both are controlled by one), so that we can have collisions enabled at 10m for instance (so just for the cars really close to player), while sounds are triggered at 100m or 200m, as rest of ambient sounds do. That could be still efficient for sound streaming while removes the need to monitor so many distant collisions with moving objects that will never happen at such big distances, as player character and camera can´t basically move so fast.

Cheers

 

Agreed. I hope it wasn't at the cost of something significant, but something more under the hood. I haven't had much time to play the game recently, so I couldn't identify any graphical downgrades, but maybe those more familiar with the game and are perceptive of this kind of thing will chime in. Hopefully another round of bug fixes will come out soon to stamp out the signalling issues and train blockages.

 

Hey, can anyone who has the TSW4 version of NYT riddle me this? Does it get rid of the annoying sound that appears to be under "ambient" (How I finally got rid of it , by setting that to zero) that is just a looping ticking sound, which can be heard all the time in external cams on this route when driving in TSW3?

 

I have not noticed any looping sound, at least on PC, and I even have ambient sounds volume set to 250%. Have you maybe manually set AudioQualityLevel to anything different to 0 in GameUserSettings.ini? That can be a reason for ambient sounds prevailing over player´s train sounds. Increasing this variable value is not meant for improving sound quality indeed. It should stay as 0 in most platforms as that´s indeed the max possible quality.

Cheers

 

Nope, all my engine.ini tweaks are around performance and graphics overhauls. Dialling back the TOD4 supernova lighting and reducing stutter. This one sound really stood out to me on NYT because having come to TSW from XBox it was the kind of effect I had been very glad to leave behind when I picked up that super cheap TSW3 PC bundle.

 

I hear this sound too, it’s still present in TSW4. That sound isn’t a glitch, it’s the sound of a sprinkler. It’s still incredibly loud and annoying. And yes it’s almost constant while driving with an external camera especially in the Trenton/Princeton area.

 

Someone PUMPED up the volume on that sprinkler. I'll get my coat.

 

No passengers no go for me. The bare minimal standard isn't reached yet...

 

YES! That makes sense what it's supposed to be! One of those ones that clacks! WHY IS IT LOUDER THAN AN ACELA?

 

I can confirm the route is now playable. The horrendous hitches are gone and only the usual micro stutter that can be fixed with some tweaking remains
A little late, but still thank you DTG for fixing the performance issues. The route might still have some issues but it's quite enjoyable for me.
Oh and please kill that anoyng sound loop (sprinkle?) that can be heard continuously on the entire route

 

Yeah for me it works good as well! 99% better as before. Only a few bugs are there like missing passengers!

 

I have been concentrating on this route over the last week or two, and it has gone from a pain in the **** to an enjoyable drive - of course with some other issues which are a bit annoying.

 

Recorded 30 seconds of the route ambience in audacity:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmUam9bd9z-NgZcsG40LkbyhuD1lWw?e=YpeV0w

The clicking sound overlaid over the traffic noises (This was recorded at Trenton) is omnipresent the entire length of the route.

 

That really does sound like a sprinkler lol. I hadn't actually noticed it in game.

 

It says something about the XBox audio issues that coming to PC from XBox this was the thing I noticed as seeming most familiar bug-wise.

 

Sorry but I noticed nothing in this sound what is not normal?! Is this maybe the thing that's like a sound that only teenager can hear?! I'm 37 so I'm far from a teenager age....

It seems like that's the case....
I have checked it by my brother and he is noticed this sound and I don't and he has it more cases by sounds

 

The "ticktticktickttickticktticktickttickticktticktickttickticktticktickttickspurtspurtspurtspurtticktticktickttickticktticktickttickticktticktickttickticktticktickttickspurtspurtspurtspurt" sound that stands out from the engines, bird chirps, and horns by being on a constant loop and being just in that sort of white noise range that modern HGV reverser alarms use to draw your attention,

 

I'm certainly no teenager, so it's not that lol.
It sounds like this is in the background:

 

My brother is older than me so it's exemple for different sound sources and the pitch of the sound

 

As an aside, it's not so much a teenager thing, more simply a matter of how much loud noise you are exposed to in everyday life. A librarian who doesn't go to live music gigs, tends not to listen to stuff on loud headphones, etc. is going to lose the ability to perceive higher sounds a lot slower than a construction worker, or a rock musician, say.