SickyNicky
Verified Rep - FastJP
OK - so I've made some time to try to find out why the frame rates on my core i7 laptop (with GeForce GT445M built in graphics) were so abysmal.
On my laptop the frame rates were always below the 14fps minimum, and it didn't matter what I did with the quality settings - it was still down there when everything was set to lowest, even with the TX engine turned off.
I couldn't understand because on RW2 I never went below 30fps. I know that TS2012 is supposed to use multiple cores, and it does appear to do so, so what was going on?
So - I modified the processor affinity so that only one (of the 8 logical) cores was being used by TS2012. Hey presto - frame rates jumped up to 30fps again, and stayed there even when graphics settings were pushed up (moderately!).
My guess is that there is one thread that needs serious power (and it's not related to graphics settings). When I forced TS2012 to just one processor, Intel's i7 turbo boost was automatically enabled (it won't run if more than one thread is very busy). That boosted the CPU frequency from 1.73 to 2.89Ghz. Problem solved.
If you have a processor that supports turbo boost (and it's switched on in your BIOS):
Intel® Core i7 mobile and desktop processors
Intel® Core i7 processor extreme edition
Intel® Core i7 mobile processor extreme edition
Intel® Core i5 mobile and desktop processors
AFTER TS2012 IS RUNNING you can try reducing the processors by opening task manager (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC), go to the processes tab and find the railworksproc32 thread. Right click on it and choose "set affinity". Now untick all but one processor. If you can work out if two cores are hyperthreaded, you could probably select both, but I don't know whether it would make a difference.
So it *seems* like TS2012 is not properly multithreaded yet - core functions still seem to run synchonously on one thread.
If you try this, perhaps you could report on this thread whether it not it worked for you.
On my laptop the frame rates were always below the 14fps minimum, and it didn't matter what I did with the quality settings - it was still down there when everything was set to lowest, even with the TX engine turned off.
I couldn't understand because on RW2 I never went below 30fps. I know that TS2012 is supposed to use multiple cores, and it does appear to do so, so what was going on?
So - I modified the processor affinity so that only one (of the 8 logical) cores was being used by TS2012. Hey presto - frame rates jumped up to 30fps again, and stayed there even when graphics settings were pushed up (moderately!).
My guess is that there is one thread that needs serious power (and it's not related to graphics settings). When I forced TS2012 to just one processor, Intel's i7 turbo boost was automatically enabled (it won't run if more than one thread is very busy). That boosted the CPU frequency from 1.73 to 2.89Ghz. Problem solved.
If you have a processor that supports turbo boost (and it's switched on in your BIOS):
Intel® Core i7 mobile and desktop processors
Intel® Core i7 processor extreme edition
Intel® Core i7 mobile processor extreme edition
Intel® Core i5 mobile and desktop processors
AFTER TS2012 IS RUNNING you can try reducing the processors by opening task manager (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC), go to the processes tab and find the railworksproc32 thread. Right click on it and choose "set affinity". Now untick all but one processor. If you can work out if two cores are hyperthreaded, you could probably select both, but I don't know whether it would make a difference.
So it *seems* like TS2012 is not properly multithreaded yet - core functions still seem to run synchonously on one thread.
If you try this, perhaps you could report on this thread whether it not it worked for you.