PC Tsw4 Enhancement | Lighting & Graphic Enhancement V4.7 (inc Lossless Scaling Guide)

Can I also ask, how do people find the performance on Niddertalbahn, with and without this mod?

With the game setting at Ultra, and even with a RTX 3090 FTW3, I have found the performance to be really awful at times, regularly maxing out my GPU with the fps dropping as low as 20 in certain areas. It’s been baffling me for a long time and this mod has almost only contained lighting changes for that route as I felt it was the mod itself causing the problem. It turns out, however, that the route has much higher graphics settings than is standard and our old friend, Cascaded Shadows, are set to a very high resolution by default. The effect, particularly with Volumetric Fog enabled, was the same as I was seeing on ECML with fps being crippled by the unnecessarily enormous number of 3D Speedtrees, many that the player will never see, all of which are cascading shadows. When the cascade resolution is high, and with the right combination of time of day, weather and volumetric fog, it will bring all but the latest and greatest GPU to its knees. I believe that the route builders are not setting this stuff up correctly, but that’s just a hunch.

Anyway, having had that lightbulb moment I’ve been able to put the full gambit of changes on to the route and overridden the default shadow behaviour with the similar settings to those used on other routes. The end result is significantly better performance and graphics, all at the negligible expense of a slightly lower number of cascaded shadows that cascade at a lower resolution.

This will come in the next update.

 

Yeah Niddertalbahn gives me some pretty dire performance in the forested sections. Both with and without ini changes.

In regards to your manual for your ini changes, is there any chance you could put some default numbers when explaining the command? Some of them just have "command=" but no number after them. I'm trying to mess around with some settings, and I'm not sure what the value ranges should be, like the gamma settings for example.

 

That makes sense, and corroborates what I had seen. On Niddertalbahn the cascaded shadows and their default resolution have an immense effect on the forested sections because all the branches and leaves are casting shadows. Far from removing bits of the mod thinking it was overloading the game, it turns out the mod makes it much better! Who knew?

I’ll have a think about the manual. For every person like you that will use them as a baseline, there will be another who goes through altering the presets to match what’s in the manual. That was, in part, why I removed them. Let me figure out what’s best to do on that one.

 

Maybe just do like a Minimum-Maximum range for the values? Just so people know what kind of values each command is looking for?

 

The difference on Niddertalbahn with this new pre-set is unbelievable. I've just driven it end-to-end with everything turned up to 11 and the only time it dropped below my capped 60fps was in the very dense forested areas and even then only to 57fps. Without any mod I've have been lucky to see 25fps in the same places! It looked amazing!

 

High JetWash. I really appreciate your mod, but I have some situations where the contrast between light and dark is too extreme to such an extent that I can't read lineside signs in shadows from the cab even in the middle of the day. I've fiddled with my screen brightness, contrast and HDR settings and seen some improvement, but what is your suggestion for this within your mod settings?

 

That’s strange, there should certainly be no extreme contrast and this doesn’t sound like anything I’ve seen myself. Can I have a route, weather, season and service to look at please? I’m possibly looking to put out 3.9 today so this morning would be really helpful if you’re able. Thanks.

 

Thanks for your prompt response, but I've found a solution. My monitor was not calibrated correctly. I've done a calibration and everything looks good now!

 

Excellent! Makes my life easier too

 

v3.9 now available on TSC. This contains some nice changes and will be the last update until a new DLC or the West Somerset ToDv4 update appears

TSW4 | Lighting & Graphic Enhancement v3.9 - Train Sim Community

• Added a line to alter passenger spawning behaviour which should mean no more ghost stations whilst maintaining sensible passenger numbers. Unfortunately passenger pathing appears to be largely broken on Niddertalbahn as well as at Huddersfield station on Northern Trans-Pennine, so there may still be an occasion where you see no passengers. There’s nothing can be done about that
• Further fine tuning of lighting balance and detail levels on many of the pre-sets (there are an awful lot of routes!)
• A complete re-vamp of Niddertalbahn which significantly improves performance as well as the visuals. A longer explanation as to how can be found on the DTG forums (link in the manual)
• Added further links, instructions to enable DX12, corrected errors and tidied up the manual. Also added more information as to doing your own set-up in the Appendix

 

Amazing work as all ways Jetwash, thank you for the updated manual as well!

 

I know this is not mod related but is it a known issue that performance during the sunrise hours is pretty terrible? Constant lagging and FPS spikes? Once the sun comes up more, performance returns to normal. I tested this theory with GodMode and it appears that this is the case. Bad performance during early morning/sunrise and then fine during the day.

 

That is 100% down to the way DTG set up the foliage and cascaded shadows. I’m by no means an expert, but you simply have to look at the literally thousands of 3D trees that are put in each route, many of which the player never sees. I have my own suspicions as to why this is the case, but each one of those trees has cascaded shadows for every branch and leaf and obviously given the nature of sunrise and sunset the cascaded shadows are at their very worst. Some routes are particularly bad for it; ECML, Niddertalbahn and Maintalbahn being recent examples.

The flipside is that the cascaded shadow resolution also has one of the biggest effects on the look of the game. I don’t understand why or how, but the resolution is also tied in to how far in front of the player the track shadow is rendered. Why that is is beyond me, but you can see that there is a definite balance to hit between visual fidelity and performance. It is why I’ve been able to improve performance on Niddertalbahn for what it’s worth as the cascaded shadow resolution on that route is set to a much higher resolution by default than other routes. With all the great foliage it can really hurt performance at the wrong time of day. Unfortunately, and again for reasons I don’t understand, that route is particularly bad in winter when the trees are bare. In their stripped state the tree models used seem to cascade more shadows than they do when they’re in leaf. I don’t know why that should be, but suspect that’s why DTG themselves steer clear of utilising a wider variety of trees. I have to say, a lot of those trees also look great when in leaf but leave a lot to be desired in their stripped state. Again though, this is why by default performance on Niddertalbahn is absolutely horrific at dawn / dusk in Winter at Ultra graphics settings, particularly when driving through the forested areas. Cascaded shadows and their resolution are the reason why.

As the manual says, it is the cascade resolution that can almost exclusively make or break your performance. By extension, if your performance is really poor it is likely that specific setting that is too much for your GPU. Therefore, if you find that you’re are struggling in this regard, particularly at those times of day, you need to reduce the resolution of the cascaded shadows. The manual explains how and what resolution(s) to use, but I’d hazard a guess that on lower end GPU’s you’re looking at 1024 or 2048 as the best settings for performance. A word of caution though, you’ll notice that in the Ultra preset I’ve set some routes to use 2048 (ECML, Niddertalbahn) because any more than that is bringing a 3090 to its knees, ludicrous as that sounds. Undoubtedly there is a proper issue with the number of 3D trees, the way they’re set up and their cascaded shadows. With that, if you’re on a lesser card a setting of 2048 is likely going to be too much.

Hopefully that helps explain a bit where I’m confident the problem lies and what is causing it.

 

Hey everyone. After reading some more UE4 documentation I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting with the skies & clouds and have made a couple of improvements, particularly around the sky lighting at night. In addition, I’ve added a couple of lines that either add new, or improve on existing features. More to do but things already look much better.

I’m intending to wait until there is a new route or the WSR update is released to include these changes but if you’ve found the skies a bit hard work at night, particularly the clouds, then an improvement is on the way

 

This was certainly very helpful, thanks!

 

Is there any way to combat the "transparent trees" problem?

 

I recently installed god mode and thought I´ll give this a try. Looks great and makes frames a little smoother. Duo to deleting the shader cache, I guess all routes have been to be driven once before working smooth? Also my laptop fans are going absolutly nuts since I installed the mod. Kind of annoying, but might just be my laptop.

 

yeah drive once to get smoother

 

I have a question : I installed the "high' version but it was too much for my hardware so I deleted the file. Is that a bad thing ? Because there were already another file before.

 

Which preset are you using, and what is your foliage setting in the game itself? This should, in conjunction with the vegetation EP, get rid of almost all of it.

 

Yes, drive the route to smooth it out. Your laptop fans are likely going nuts because you’re pushing it too hard. Maybe try a lower preset.

 

No problem to delete at all. If High is too much I’d obviously suggest trying Medium or Low. Low contains only the lighting changes so you should see the same performance as the default game with that installed.

 

Medium preset, with Ultra in-game foliage setting. (note- I've downgraded shadows in the dynamic .ini to 1024)

Hmm- This happened on ECML (and apparently only there). I may not be reading the file abbreviations correctly, but the UK EP zip doesn't appear to include that route?

 

Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. ECML is a royal pain in the arse in this regard. IIRC the view distance is set to 1 and foliage draw to 2 in the Medium preset. I’d suggest stepping the view distance up to match the foliage draw and foliage dithered LOD (so 2 - 2 - 2) and see how that is. If that’s no good try 1 - 3 - 3 then 2 - 3 - 3 and see how it looks. I think Ultra is set to 1 - 3 - 3 so all things being equal that should fix it.

If you find a satisfactory setting let me know and I’ll make that the standard for that route and preset going forward.

Thanks

 

I used "high". I thought my brand new laptop could handle that. Might have to go a step lower.

 

What are the specs? It might be that the fps is ok but your laptop is working hard to keep itself cool. Obviously just because a laptop is ‘new’ doesn’t mean it’s high-spec.

 

13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700HX
RAM 32,0 GB
NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4070

 

Apologies if this is covered already or this is the wrong place to ask but I just wanted to ask a quick question regarding the dynamic engine.ini used by this mod.....

Is it possible to make engine.ini changes across all routes rather than having to edit or remove an entry on a route by route basis? Also is it something that can be done out of the game rather than having to load the game and have a route running etc.....

 

if you want to add ini change to all routes
put them into the base ini instead of dynamic ini

 

This isn't really what is intended by JetWash with all of his work. The current version of this is optimized for each route, for performance and also for lightning. Using some config from one of the routes as base .ini or as "engine.ini" is not as it is intended.

This is no longer the classic replace your .ini file mod.

 

there are engine.ini edits that can be used in all the routes without any problem

such as
(the camera stuff is for being allowed to move the camera further away from the train (key 3))

au.MaxConcurrentStreams=5
au.DisableParallelSourceProcessing=0
AudioCommand.FenceWaitTimeMs=0
AudioThread.BatchAsyncBatchSize=10
au.Concurrency.MinVolumeScale=0.00001
au.SoundDistanceOptimizationLength=0.5
au.VirtualLoops.PerfDistance=500
au.VirtualLoops.UpdateRate.Max=1
au.VirtualLoops.UpdateRate.Min=0.5
ts2.dbg.Camera.MaxLinearDistance=50000
ts2.dbg.Camera.MaxHorizontalDistance=50000
ts2.dbg.Camera.MaxVerticalHeight=50000
ts2.dbg.MaxFreeCameraDistance=200000
ts2.dbg.Camera.CameraBoomMaxLength=4000
ts2.dbg.SteamParticleSize=0.5
ts2.dbg.SteamParticleSpawnMultiplier=5

 

Did you have any joy in solving this? Hoping you managed to sort it out

 

TBH, I haven't loaded ECML again since; I've been in Germany

 

No problem

 

Hi!
Loving the mod, thank you.
I am getting ghosting on the overhead posts and trees when in motion, makes the textures look a little blurry. I am on ultra with a rocksteady 60fps. Any ideas?

edit far away tree's are particularly affected, they're almost 'see-through' in their appearance.

 

Hi. That’s not ghosting sadly, it’s the way DTG have started setting up the trees on some routes. I posted this a few posts back to Solictr which explains more;

https://forums.dovetailgames.com/th...hic-enhancement-v3-9.74685/page-9#post-778562

That aside, there has always been some TAA ghosting in TSW, there’s not really anything that can be done to get rid of it. It’s a UE4 TAA issue, another reason why this game desperately needs DLSS and DLAA.

 

My reasoning behind asking this question was that in TSW3 I had the medium version of the .ini files and was running fine so after upgrading to TSW4 I went for the medium version again but I'm getting massive stutters (And i mean freezing for around 4-5 seconds at a time) when using the medium dynamic .ini option. I didn't want to drop to the low dynamic .ini option with that being an extremely basic option so rather than having to find exactly what line of the .ini it is that is causing these massive stutters and then having to edit that line in every route I was wanting to just find the issue and then edit that line once for all routes........ If that is possible by adding the line into the main .ini file?

I suppose what I'm saying is does a line in the main .ini file override the same line in the dynamic .ini or does the dynamic .ini override the main .ini?

 

Hello everyone. Tell me how you can reduce the intensity of the sun's glow. In my opinion, it looks ultra bright. I use the preset "High quality"

Is it really supposed to look like this?

 

The intensity of the sun is already reduced as much as I can get away with. You have to bear in mind that your shot is taken in winter, and as such the sun is low in the sky. In Europe (and I’m sure most other places) under those conditions the sun is blindingly bright when there’s no cloud cover, and casts long shadows by virtue of it’s elevation.

Reducing the sun intensity further will mess up the lighting in other areas and make other seasons a bit of a dogs dinner.

 

There’s nothing in medium that should be causing stutters like that. If anything, certainly for medium, it should be easier on your system than it was before. FWIW Low isn’t basic, it just changes the lighting without anything else, so if you had Ultra set in-game and used the Low preset you would get the default Ultra game settings with the changes to the lighting. Can I ask what your system specs are, what settings you use in game and what route(s) you’re talking about?

Finally, to the best of my knowledge the dynamic.ini overrides anything in the main ini file. The reason I did it this way is because one size doesn’t fit all. Some routes are more demanding, some less so, some need to be brighter, some darker, some need certain foliage changes, some don’t and so on. Not only that, but when you have to separate lighting systems (TSW2 and before, and TSW3 and later) they need to be different.

 

Copied and pasted from a troubleshooting post I've just made - not sure if its an issue with ini settings or this mod, but any help would be really appreciated. I currently run the low preset settings.

Hi All,

Was wondering if this was a bug on TSW4 or if this is an issue on my end. Any help would be much appreciated.

Basically, if I do not have my external camera zoomed all the way in, I am unable to the passengers on the train. As soon as I zoom out from the maximum zoom position, they all vanish. I am running several mods (mainly Jet Wash Lighting and God Mode) however didn't think this would cause an issue unless there's an ini setting I need to tweak. I've noticed this on most locos and routes that I own. Most of my settings are on high.

Any advice? Thanks in advance!

 

Intel i7-9750H, 16gb RAM, GTX1650 4gb. Game running at 1080p and has everything set to highest settings except sky which is at medium setting Route was SEHS.

I've also now tried the Low settings option and everything performs fine again using that version/save file. I'm assuming it's maybe something that is different between the TSW3 version of medium and the new TSW4 version of medium or is something in the TSW3 medium settings that I had adjusted down in the previous TSW3 version of the medium settings which will now need adjusting in this new version hence me asking if i will have to adjust whatever it is in every route or if there was a way to edit it in one go?

 

If you wish to use this mod you’ll have to adjust it route by route I’m afraid. The only other option would be to use the low dynamic ini then add other lines to your main ini file that would then apply across all routes. I think you’ll likely find it’s simply that TSW4 is marginally more demanding than TSW3 (mainly because of the volumetric fog) and it’s probably tipped you over the edge.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I've indeed gone for a hybrid approach and used the low version of the new TSW4 mod and then used the entries/settings from my TSW3 Engine.ini and I'm running good again.

 

Hey guys. v3.9.1 is available including Bernina Line. It also contains some changes to the way this will be updated in future;

TSW4 | Lighting & Graphic Enhancement v3.9.1 - Train Sim Community

v3.9.1

Going forward I am planning to change how I update this mod for a couple of reasons. One, to compile the GodMode.sav's for each pre-set has now got to the point it's taking me half a day due to the sheer volume of routes included. Secondly, I know people are making their own tweaks to the settings which are often getting wiped out in an update. From here on I will proceed as follows;

1. There will be one final update to the GodMode.sav pre-sets. There are some worthwhile changes coming but I want to get it 100% right. I can't put a timescale on when this will be released but hopefully it will be within the next couple of weeks (it will definitely be after the West Somerset update). Once that is done I will no longer update those files.
2. Starting with Bernina Line, as and when a new route releases I will include the tweaks in a .txt file. All you need to do is simply copy your chosen pre-set and paste the lines into the dynamic.ini for the route in question. Doing it this way makes it easier for me and preserves any manual changes you may have made to other routes
3. When I release the final version of the .sav file I will include an updated version of the manual.

On that note, Bernina Line. This proved tricky for a number of reasons but I believe I've hit a trade off between performance and looks. I am getting pretty much a consistent 55-60fps heading down the hill and 50-60fps heading up. There is no doubt that this route is a performance hog but it looks fantastic, so I'm happy with that. I hope these pre-sets will improve your experience of the route.

Please note If you plan to tweak this route yourself I would strongly advise that you DO NOT change anything connected to foliage or shadow resolution. The only exception to that may be those that are lucky enough to own a 4080, 4090 or AMD equivalent

 

Amazing work Jetwash. Great dedication. I have not fired up the game for a few weeks, for lots of crappy reasons.
Looking forward to giving this a go.

 

I need to check these config files out as I get terrible performance on the Bernina Line, the worst out of any TSW route so far (there are regular framerate drops into the teens).

This is on a new PC (i7 13700KF, RTX 4070 Ti, 32GB RAM)

I may have edited the engine.ini prior which has been fine for other routes but has brought Bernina to its knees.

 

That will do it. It’s a special case this one and these should give you a decent experience. With that setup Ultra should work nicely.

 

Also, can I ask how people using medium are finding it? I’ve no way to test that preset as it’s ordinarily fine on my card which obviously misses the point

As usual I took some lines out because theoretically it should (and normally would) be better like that. It may well be that that isn’t the case on this specific route though, so I’d be interested to know how people are finding it, particularly on mid-30series cards.

Thanks

 

Hey, I like your new update procedure with the text files to copy directly into the game.
To be honest I was thinking of dropping you a message to suggest something just like that. So easy.

Thanks again for all the work you've put into this! It is truly appreciated