Stuttering Frame Rates

[MungoDesigns]

Gents.

I appear to have a bit of a bug within my installation of Railworks.

On average, TS15 clocks in at around 40fps on a vast majority of routes.

There are times however where it will level itself at 60fps, jumping to 100fps within seconds, and returning to the lower number.

I've fiddle about with settings, and it's been happening for a while now.

Any clues?

My set up isn't the most advanced in the world, but it handles TS fine with a few detailing bits scaled down

Intel Q8300 @ 2.5Ghz
2048Mb RAM
nVidia GeForce GTX 260

[DPSimulation]

Personally, I'd stick the 30 FPS limit on it, you don't need any more than that.

I believe it can be done in the Steam Launch Options, but I just have it added to the target box of my desktop shortcut for TS. Leave a space after the Railworks.exe" and add -FPSLimit=30

[AndyM77]

Not seeing too many 'jumps' here, although I've junctioned (hard symbolic link) just my "contents" folder onto my SSD (64GB so rather small with OS) and the "assets" are on a 7200rpm spinner. Usually get a small pause where a lot of assets are loaded in, and most noticable routes for this are of course WCML & ever so slightly on 'Over Shap', but that's more of the old tile boundary inefficiency that TS has always had.

On the 'other' forum a small minority have noticed that it could possibly be the slight extra overhead that the .ap files brought, i.e it's all got to be decompressed from the .ap file at loading time and if you don't have a lot of system ram then "stuttering" can be a symptom of items being paged across the memory and paging file.

As you are on only 2GB of ram (according to your signature) you could try using 7-zip / winzip / etc to unzip the .ap file that has the worst stuttering on (but don't delete it just yet!)and see if the uncompressed files improve things. If it's more fluid then you've found 'a' source of the stuttering which could potentially be easily solved by adding more system ram. If it's the same or worse then delete the uncompressed files and use the .ap file which you didn't delete (you'd need to decompress both the .ap in "contents" and .ap in "assets" to be 100% certain on this.

Alternatively try reducing graphics settings, try slightly less post-processing, AA, shadows, water quality, etc.. and see if that makes a difference. I used to run the game with a GTS250 which was pretty good if I didn't try to make it work too hard by forcing the extra post-processing goodies. Even with a 760GTX now the game still has performance issues but of course it's more fluid than it used to be for me.

Good luck