I ran some tests to check framerates, and used the following settings for both routes (openBVE v1.2.7.3 and Windows 7 64-bit):
Viewing distance: 600m
Resolution: 1920x1200 fullscreen
Graphics card settings: 16xQ antialiasing / 16x anisotropic filtering
openBVE graphics settings: Smooth transparency enabled
Train used: 220 Voyager for openBVE from TSC
In both the cab and external view, framerates on Watford Junction to Rugby range from 45 to 150 fps (except tunnels where it's much higher), but a range of of 60 to 80 or 90 fps is fairly typical on the four track sections (framerates on the double track Weedon line are higher). Using the same train and settings on NWM (15.20 [220] Maybank-Ludgate Hill SuO STP 2007.csv), framerates range from 200 to 300 fps. The Voyager has fairly geometrically simple exterior car objects however; if something like the new 323 exterior car objects I'm working on are used, then framerates are rather lower. On WJ-R, typically 40 - 60 fps is seen in the cab instead, or 30 to 40 fps in the external view. On NWM with the new 323, in-cab framerates remain high at over 200 fps, but in the external view, typically 70-80 fps is seen. The class 86/87 and Mk2 coach exterior objects I've also been working on, are deliberately less complex than the 323's exterior car objects, so the framerate reduction when these are used is not as drastic as that seen with the 323 exterior objects.
To put the framerate differences between the two routes into perspective, WJ-R is around 22 km longer than the NWM route mentioned above, it has over 124000 static 3D objects placed compared to around 47500 in this particular NWM route, some of which are more geometrically complex than equivalent objects in NWM, and WJ-R has over 600000 faces in total, compared to around 146000 in the aforementioned NWM route.
The framerates sound fine, although my computer has a 3GHz Core 2 Quad CPU and a Geforce GTX 260 graphics card. This is a fairly fast computer, so slower machines aren't going to cope so well with all the bells and whistles, although if framerates in the region of 20 fps are acceptable, then some fun can still be had with the route as shown in my screenshots on slower computers (like my 2.2GHz Athlon64 X2 4200 and Radeon 2600 Pro machine for example). This is why, if I release the route for openBVE 1, I'll want to create a low detail variant, and I would also want to release low detail versions of any exterior car objects I create too, so people can have some flexibility depending upon their hardware and what is important to them when they drive a route.
The faster renderer of openBVE 2 means that there should be less of a need to worry about such things though.
