I have a Intel core i7-860 machine with 8MB cache and 4GB ram ATI HD 5859 card purchased in 2009! It has run all versions of TS from 2010 at the high settings specification with no problems until TS2020 and now 2021 arrived. All my earlier routes worked with frame rates of around 25 to 40 except for an annoying stuttering every minute or so as the scenario updates the scenery. I have tried the many suggestions such as setting the windows 10 Graphics and the initial '-high' suggestion with no success. Despite this I decided to give WCML South a try. I can only run this with settings at the 'low' and get frame rates of around 18 to 20 which is acceptable and I didn't really expect anything better with the age of my machine. However the stuttering whilst loading the changing scenery was very annoying. I noted that a number of correspondents remarked that it may be the speed of the hard disk but this had not caused any problems up to recently. On studying the Task Manager (Control-Shift-Escape) there were many apps running. Go to your start search and type in Background Apps. You will have something like 30+ of these running (I had 38). Go through these and turn off those that you never use. (You can actually turn off the whole lot but there will be some that you need to keep on.. This has almost completely solved my problem. I can now run all my routes with just a slight micro-second stutter when the scenery updates. I can now also run the WCML South scenarios at around 20fps which is just about acceptable..
If you don't use those programs the whole time and would prefer to start them manually as required you can remove them from startup or set them as manual if a service An example is my print monitoring bloatware> I hardly ever print and scan maybe twice a month so I don't need the program or service running all the time doing background checks or listening. So I removed it from startup and closed the services. Obviously disk access and things like closing AV or malware filters can also speed up access because contrary to common opinion computers can do a lot of things quickly, but only a few things simultaneously
