As the scene loads the frame rate will drop. I end up at 32FPS with a video card load of 20% at 1607MHz on my 1070TI. 1080TI should be able to do this no sweat.
I'm curious what you get with the 9900K and ~35% more video card. Thank you for doing this.
-Mike
For the record doing the things asked for above:
13.5% cpu usage (if it were single threaded it would be <10 like superpi, 100%/16 threads= 6.25% per thread)
15-16% GPU usage
30-31 FPS in fraps using the same setup
...
I also ran the game off the nvme (per sig) - disk usage was negligible
2600K -> 9900K got no improvement $$$$
DDR3 -> DDR4 got no improvement $$$$
MIVE -> Swanky new MB got no improvement $$$$
1070TI -> 1080TI got no improvement, but the 1080TI has a chance to run at higher AA settings.
^^^^^ Pretty much what SPI32 predicted, if I may
My Loop 24 32M SPI at 4.7G 1866 CAS 9 memory: 411.077s. My TS12 Test Result: 32FPS
Your Loop 24 32M SPI at 5.0G and your memory: 424.57s. Your TS12 Test Result: 30-31FPS
As pretty well expected, AVX settings didn't do squat. Perhaps they will matter when the video card is cranked up.
For reference:
9900k
Total time 7m 6.744s - I do note my memory isn't the fastest on the planet, but I need quantity over speed for what I do. (3200CL16 CR2) and memory makes a big difference to pi
So the previous two were
6m 51.077s (24)
6m 36.085s (23)
Note I changed settings to -2 AVX offset from 0, and ramped up all cores to 5.0ghz
The above does not mean the 9900K "sucks" in any way other than as an upgrade from the 2600K to specifically play TS12, it has very little bang for the buck. Perhaps that will change when we crank the video up, as I'm curious about that.
Now let's change things up a bit, shall we...
I went into my bios and only changed the multipliers from 47/47/47/47 to 35/35/35/35. Turns out the MIVE is a bit funny here and with that setting the core frequency was 3.6G ish - it looked like the 2600K was running stock. Doesn't really matter because...
32MSPI with 35x multipliers: 537.628s, TS12 Test Result: 25 FPS with 16% video card load.
Recall
32MSPI with 47x multipliers: 411.077s, TS12 Test Result: 32 FPS with 20% video card load.
The % change in 32M SPI scores is 25.9%.
25 FPS + 25 FPS * 0.259 = 25 FPS + 6.475 FPS = 31.475 FPS.
Not a bad prediction, not bad at all. You can do the same test with your rig, or if you have another machine. Just SPI32M them both and compare the same TS12 test.
Based on what I see on the screen, I think what is happening is that it is trying to continuously, serially decompress textures/objects and that is locked to some kind of cycle in the game loop which limits the performance. Whether it does this on purpose is another thing, it may be that it's locking the frame rate to 30~ FPS on purpose for game mechanic reasons- Eg physics
It is highly possible that the draw distance or some other feature is limiting it also..
I don’t believe that this is actually cpu limited, at least no more than I believe UT3 was at release where it had a leak which pegged as many threads as it could at 100% but most of that was engine waiting on things to happen, this was fixed by later versions.
Based on my many years of game/programming knowledge, I truly believe the issue here is bad coding and/or lack of optimisation due to locking code - not lack of cpu power.
If, in the extremely unlikely event I am incorrect, it is possible that a Ryzen chip of decent clock (say 4.4-4.6ghz single thread) would beat out the intel equivalent for this, being that they do have more execution pipelines/resources per core, and therefore potentially fewer opportunities to stall. This does rely on what the compiler did when it compiled the program though.
I've been working as an electrical design engineer professionally since the late 1980s - so I'm not new at this either. From a practical point of view I would suggest backing off a bit on the detail thinking and be more general - how does the game engine react when I change out CPUs, alter clock rates, change out GPUs? The underlying cause does not matter as I cannot fix it and Auran never would either. Look at it completely from the customer's point of view. Pretend you want to play TS12 the [H]ard way.
I just happened to notice years ago that this little PI benchmark that was readily available in reviews tracked differences in CPU limited performance of TS12. Nobody who knows what they are doing puts Trainz results of any kind in CPU reviews, it's just too obscure. This stand in benchmark accurately predicted how things would improve going from a 3.8G Prescott -> 4.25G C2D and from that 4.25G C2D to the 4.7-5.0G Sandy. The primary driver for the need for increased performance was not the game engine itself, but the content which is the spot that makes the platform viable. User content in Trainz is second to none for the genre.
The Ryzen question is interesting, as all the SPI32 predicting I've been doing has been Intel to Intel to Intel. One would have to try it and find out.
I've got to get to work. I hope you are game to trying upping the video settings tonight. Thanks for collecting the data.
-Mike
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