[Lindsayts]

 cyrail, on 26 May 2014 - 10:29 AM, said:

Let us know how it works as I am having similar issues using a NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 635 and a 450 Watt power supply. The GPU has worked ok till I run trains on foliage dense Stevens Pass when FPS goes into the basement. The only relief I can get is turning off dynamic shadows and moving Performance\Quality slider for the GPU to a more moderate setting to get my FPS back into the mid 20s

I have done a good deal of testing on various cards with OR and I found a real high end card is not required, I currently have three systems that will run OR. The GPU's in these are an NVidia GTX 570 super overclocked, NVidia GTX 680 4gig and a Radeon 7870 with 3 gig of ram. I found the latter two give little improvement over the 570soc, mind you this is still a fast card, the Gigabyte Super overclocked series usually being excellent value.

Lindsay

[Mike B]

OK, here's the report:

With the new card (MSI "Twin Frozer" Nvidea GTX 750ti), the frame rate using the same train and route segment as before is now 150-160 with both dynamic shadows and glass on (over 200 with glass off). GPU-Z reports core & memory clocks near but not at maximum with OR running, and GPU load is in the 90s but fairly constant - not 100%. Power consumption gets up to 50-60% of rated TDP (rated electrical power is about 65 watts - it runs entirely from the PCI-e bus with no extra power connection). In the sim, render process sits in the 89-95 range (but no waits), updater in the 50-60% range, and the others are as before (near 0, or for the loader occasional bursts at 100).

Downside from a system standpoint - power consumption is way up when the sim is running - about 225 watts as reported by the UPS' power meter application (maximum with the old card was around 185). That includes both the computer itself and the monitor (an old 17" Trinitron that just won't die), which are connected to the battery-backed outlets. Of course, exiting the sim and going back to a few tools and the browser running drops the UPS load back to 130 watts or less, which is about 5 more than with the old card, at near-idle. Yes, one reason I chose the MSI card is that it is the only one with a modern GPU and the D-Sub VGA output so I can use the old monitor. And yes, it does work so much better.

The upgrade took essentially all day. I had a major no-start problem that traced down to some new RAM that I also installed. Defective. Reinstalling some of the old sticks cured that, but then Windows took about 2 hours to repair the damage I did during the boot problems. Moral: change one thing at a time! But it was open so ... at least now I have a fresh CMOS battery ...

The other issue is with Really Slow Nvidea driver updates :rtfm: . The ones on the CD were naturally quite old, but doing the update via the GeForce application (which you're almost forced to do) was taking hours. Eventually, I downloaded the driver package by itself from the web site (about a 5 minute download), terminated the other stuff (had to do it from Task Manager), and got things installed that way (still took about 1/2 hour to go through the actual driver package installation).

Anyway, now that it's all working, if you have 160-170 US$ to spare and need better video I can recommend this card. Especially considering the relatively low power requirement (for those without monster power supplies). You could cheap out a little - the plain 750 is commonly available for around $110, but I decided to go with the better version for futureproofing; and because it has better fans/heatsink than the cheaper cards (a plus in my warm area).

Cheers! And thanks for the help/advice along the line. :thumbup3: :dance:

-Mike B