Railworks America

Haven't really touched the sim this year after another crappy start to the year with a third recent family member passing away. My wife and kids recently surprised me with a new Alienware Aurora R16 computer for my birthday last month which I only recently had the time to setup and get up and running. Oddly Train Simulator Classic is the only program I am having an issue getting up and running properly and have spent much time reinstalling drivers, the program itself twice and other programs to see what may be causing my odd issue which I will explain further below. This is not my first Alienware system, we have several that the kids use as well who have been hovering over my shoulder recently trying to help me get the sim up and running. Everything runs fine with every other program, even installed a couple of the kid's games to see if we could replicate the issue after they played for a few hours, no issues there. I have a separate install on my ASUS TUF F15 (installed recently as well) and runs perfectly. Here's the issue, I am getting extreme stuttering / jerkiness of all engines and rolling stock, both payware and default on any route. FPS have been locked at 60FPS and 30FPS, there is no drop off of FPS when this stuttering occurs. I have altered my Nvida profiles and the program graphic settings dozens of times to see if something is amiss, nothing changes the stuttering. After reinstalling twice, reinstalling drivers, running diagnostics both windows and dell (no issues) I would have expected this to resolve itself. The system has 32GB of RAM, an i9 14900F and 4070Ti video card with 16GB, I am at a loss as to why this is occurring. Any thoughts anybody?

So I managed to somewhat solve this after a little more experimenting. I found the issue is related to the I9 14900F processor itself. It appears Train Simulator does not like something about this processor, possibly the turbo boost which requires more experimenting with the registry directly at a later date when I have more time to research and play around now that I know where the overall problem lies. As a last ditch experiment last night, I ran an older program I had called CPUCores (also off Steam) I use for my laptop with two additional program settings checked that I didn't use on my laptop, disable hyper threading and game on dedicated cores only in addition to the two defaults already set. Too my surprise it completely cured the stutter issue which left me bewildered and relieved I did not have a lemon of a system before heading off to bed. For anyone who gets a new system or upgrades their existing to a similar processor in the near future, I would be curious to know if you have similar stuttering issues.

Hey, if you post your first post on the TSC forums on Steam there is a guy who should be able to help you he goes by the name of ChickenBati or something like that and you could post your second comment there too. Some of the later Intel CPUs are having issues but I don't know whether the one you have is one of them. The person who I mentioned should be able to tell you that.

I run TSC very well on an Intel i5 10600K CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3060 TI GPU. I'm also using a Viewsonic 27/28 Gaming monitor at 1920x1080 at 180Hz refresh rate. It makes TSC look a lot better and sharper. I also have HDR turned on with this monitor and use Windows 11 auto HDR which tries to make older games that don't support HDR also look better.

trev123 wrote:Hey, if you post your first post on the TSC forums on Steam there is a guy who should be able to help you he goes by the name of ChickenBati or something like that and you could post your second comment there too. Some of the later Intel CPUs are having issues but I don't know whether the one you have is one of them. The person who I mentioned should be able to tell you that.

I run TSC very well on an Intel i5 10600K CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3060 TI GPU. I'm also using a Viewsonic 27/28 Gaming monitor at 1920x1080 at 180Hz refresh rate. It makes TSC look a lot better and sharper. I also have HDR turned on with this monitor and use Windows 11 auto HDR which tries to make older games that don't support HDR also look better.

Thanks for this. I may try a post in the other forum, not my favorite place to visit. I did previously do some research on the processor given the problems which have been in the news as of late. Fortunately my use of this computer has been limited to recently and I was able to apply the latest bios which fixes the voltage issue with these chips shortly after getting things up and running and will hopefully set me on a path to carefree use. The problem with Train Simulator I believe relates to the turbo boost with the base performance core base frequency of the chip only being at 2 GHz, too low to effectively run the program with the minimum being 3.5 GHz to run the program. This is likely why CPUCores worked with it much like one of my low end travel laptops years ago that I ran the program on. Train Simulator appears to not recognize the boost frequency of 5.8 GHz for some reason, perhaps the processor is just too new and they need add support for it with a future core update in Train Simulator itself. I much appreciate your feedback on this.

Rumor has it that you have solved your issue.

AmericanSteam wrote:Rumor has it that you have solved your issue.

I am indeed happily up and running again further to the below from a test run. While waiting for the hours / days of hardware diagnostics (wanted to make sure the I9-14900F wasn't cooked) I had a little time to do some reading and came across a post on another forum with someone having a similar problem with their Alienware system. Their solution was to the point that a complete format and reinstall of windows would be required haven given up themselves on the assistance they were getting from the manufacturer which had consumed too much of their time. After being content with the results of the hardware diagnostics on everything, I decided to follow what the other user did and formatted and then installed Windows "not" using the Alienware image. Upon reinstalling and loading TSC I was very relieved to find no problems. I am looking forward to being able to start my work again and have been reinstalling all other TSC related software I use now that I am satisfied the issue is over and done with having run the sim for a couple hours just to make sure. Thanks everyone for the suggestions provided on and off the forum.

Congratulations looking forward to see some more of your work. I had noted your postings elsewhere.