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How Do I Optimize My PC for the Best Performance?

Updated

This article to designed to help players optimize their PC for gaming. Ultimately, the hardware in your PC will determine your in-game performance, but the following tweaks may provide a small boost to frame rates and help reduce stuttering.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In-Game Settings

For a comprehensive look at Train Sim World's in-game graphical settings, please check out :

How do I optimise Train Sim World's graphics for my PC?

 

Reducing Memory & CPU Demands

You can reduce the complexity of services in timetable mode if you are experience performance issues. The first thing you can do is reduce the number of activate layers, which will reduce the variety of AI traffic. This can be accessed from the LAYERS button in timetable mode.

Under Advanced Settings you have 3 more options for disabling different types of substitution, further reducing the complexity and demands of a service.

Hardware Demands

Train Sim World is a very demanding game due to the underlying physics and AI simulation which makes a game like this possible. A lot of this demand is put on your CPU, in a way you won't see in many other games.

The performance of your CPU will often be the limiting factor of your PC. This can be referred to as a "CPU Bottleneck" meaning that the GPU is waiting on the CPU to finish its job before the next frame can be rendered. Therefore, it can take longer to render a frame, so you get fewer frames per second (FPS). It is important to remeber that you do not need 100% CPU usage to have a bottleneck. It only takes a single thread/core to max out, to have everything else waiting for it to finish a task.

Intel's PresentMon tool is a performance analysis tool that can help you identify bottlenecks. By comparing the total Frame Time (time to render one frame) with the GPU Busy metric you can see how much longer it takes to complete the frame after the GPU has finished it's part. The remaining time represents the time the GPU is waiting for the CPU to finish its job.

Operating Temperatures

CPUs have a maximum operating temperature, often referred to as "TJmax". Once your CPU reaches this temperature, it will begin to "throttle" by reducing the clock/memory speed. It does this to prevent overheating, and potential damage to the hardware. However, this will significantly reduce performance and cause stuttering. Pushing a CPU to its limits regularly may damage the hardware and over time may become less stable and prone to crashes.

Keeping your CPU within safe operating temperatures you will need adequate cooling. In a PC tower you may need to replace the stock cooler that came with the CPU with something more substantial. You will also want to replace the thermal paste joining the cooler with the CPU every 2-5 years with a quality compound such as Arctic MX-4. 

Keeping the ambient temperature below 21C can also make a big difference especially when you have a laptop which typically have very limited cooling solutions that cannot be upgraded. It is also important to keep your PC/laptop clean so it can bring in cool air and push hot air away from the machine.

We'd recommend that overclocking be avoided to maintain a stable system and keep temperatures down. Some motherboards can apply "boost" settings automatically, so its important to check the BIOS to see what settings are being used.

Unreal Engine 4 Shader Compilation & Traversal Stutter

Unfortunately, many games built on Unreal Engine 4 suffer from shader compilation stutter. This is most noticeable as pauses between frames, whenever something new is being rendered for the first time. This kind of stutter will occur on any PC hardware, so it cannot be eliminated with a hardware upgrade. 

What can I do about it?

However, you will find that a second run of the same content will be dramatically smoother. This is because the shader is cached when it first appears. This allows the game to reuse that data, which is much faster than compiling shaders on demand. An easy way to cache your shaders is by riding as a passenger while you are doing something else. The cache size is limited, so eventually it will be overwritten by new data. Furthermore, shaders will need to be recompiled if the game or your graphics card driver is updated.

This doesn't happen on consoles because the hardware inside a console is a known quantity and the shaders can be precompiled and shipped with the game. The different combinations of hardware inside a PC is impossible to predict, so shaders have to be compiled on demand.

What else can cause stutter?

Another type of stutter that can momentarily freeze the game is related to World Origin Rebasing. This is a Unreal Engine feature that helps keep the precision of world geometry in very large open world. World Origin Rebasing is when a player travels a certain distance from the world origin, the world origin is reset to the player’s current position. This kind of stutter cannot be eliminated using shader pre-compilation and we have yet to find a suitable solution.

What about a shader pre-compilation step?

New games built with this in mind have solved the problem by introducing a shader pre-compilation step. While this may sound like an ideal solution, we have found that it is unfortunately not feasible with Train Sim World. 

The idea of a shader pre-compilation step is to capture every asset in the game, in all possible configurations. Our use of dynamic lighting, snow, rain and other material effects make this much more difficult to achieve. A single pass of a route won't capture all possible configurations of an asset. This also means, we wouldn't be able to update routes without resetting the whole process.

Many of the games that have shader pre-compilation were shipped as one complete game, and infrequently updated. Whereas Train Sim World  is continually updated, and new DLC is added with new materials. To make shader pre-compilation work all these materials would need to exist in the base game, which would massively increase the size of the base game. All of this means that any change to the game would take up increasingly more storage space and require a significant amount of additional development time.

The code for shader pre-compilation is available in Unreal Engine 5, and has been backported to UE4 by some talented developers. While this may work for stock Unreal Engine 4 games, Train Sim World is far from standard. Based on Unreal Engine 4, the game has seen over a 1000 customisations ranging from small tweaks to complete system rewrites to deliver Train Sim World as we know it. Furthermore, shader pre-compilation requires DirectX 12 which is not fully supported at this time. After many months of investigation, we have concluded that shader pre-compilation would be a huge task to undertake and is unlikely to produce the desired results. Therefore, this won't be an appropriate solution for Train Sim World.

Note: DX12 Mode is not officially supported and may make your game prone to crashing. Our testing shows that some graphics cards may get higher peak FPS in this mode, but it has little to no impact on stuttering.

Frame Generation

There are an increasing number of ways players can inject frame generation into a game without it being officially supported. Such tools include Loseless Scaling, AMD Fluid Motion Frames, and Nvidia Smooth Motion. However, it is important to be aware of the limitations of frame generation.

  • Frame generation will make an game look smoother by inserting generated frames in between rendered frames.
  • The ideal use case of frame generation is to start with a good frame rate (e.g. 60FPS+) and improve smoothness on a high refresh rate monitor (120hz+).
  • Frame generation is not intended to to take a low frame rate and make it playable. This will result in significant latency and visual artifacts.
  • Frame generations has a performance cost. While the image may look smoother due to the increased number of frames, it may feel worse to play due to increase latency. Achieving a high frame rate without frame generation will always feel better to play as the latency is much lower.
  • Frame generation will not reduce stuttering, but may make it more noticeable if there is greater frame time variance (difference between highs and lows) because of it.

Windows Settings

Changing the following Windows settings may help reduce stuttering and increase performance in some cases.

Set the Windows graphics preferences for the app

  1. Go to Settings > System > Display from within Windows.
  2. Under the Related settings section, click on Graphics.
  3. Browse for the game executable or add it as a desktop app.
  4. Under GPU preference, select your dedicated graphics card, which will be labelled as High Performance. 

Disable Windows game mode

  1. Open Settings > Gaming from within Windows.
  2. Click on Gaming.
  3. Toggle Game Mode off.

Disable Windows GPU scheduling

  1. Go to Settings > System > Display from within Windows.
  2. Under the Related settings section, click on Graphics.
  3. Then, under Advanced graphics settings, disable Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.

Gaming Laptops

Ensure that the AC adapter is plugged in

Some laptops may defer to an integrated graphics device (e.g. Intel Iris/UHD/Xe) designed for low power usage if running on battery. To ensure that your laptop is using the dedicated graphics card (Nvidia/AMD), you will need to plug in the AC adapter.

Configure your laptop to use the dedicated graphics card

Nvidia

  1. Ensure that you have the latest GPU drivers from Nvidia’s website.
  2. Right-click on the desktop and select NVIDIA Control Panel Then click Manage 3D Settings (on the left-hand side).
  3. From the drop-down menu; Select the preferred graphics processor and choose your Nvidia processor.
  4. Once you have selected your preference, click Apply.

AMD

  • AMD graphics cards will follow the Windows settings.

Check the power plan

Windows will have several power plants to choose from, but if you intend on using the laptop for gaming, you will need to select the High Performance profile. You can find these profiles by opening the Start menu and typing "power plan". Additionally, many laptops will come with bespoke software to handle thermal and performance management (e.g ASUS Armoury Crate). Performance/Turbo profiles would be recommended for gaming, but Max/Turbo profile may also increase heat output.

Background Applications

Background applications can use up system resources and cause stuttering and even crashes if your system runs out of memory (RAM) while playing a game. However, they are not only a concern for players with a low amount of RAM, as background applications can often use the CPU as well. 

For example, your antivirus software may be using a significant amount of CPU to complete a scan. Therefore, you want to make sure you don't have anything unnecessary running in the background while gaming. This can be done by simply closing applications before you start a game (web browsers are one of the worst offenders for RAM usage). However, you can also minimise the amount of applications that start when your PC turns on.

  1. Open Task Manager by right-clicking on the Start Menu.
  2. Go to the Startup tab.
  3. Work through the list of application and disable anything you won't need when the PC turns on.
  4. Restart your PC.

Antivirus Software

Windows 10/11 both have built-in security that will be suitable for most players and has very little impact on system performance. However, you may have bought a new PC or gaming laptop that comes pre-installed with third-party antivirus software (e.g. McAfee, Norton, AVG etc...). They have their uses for keeping uninitiated users out of trouble. However, their tendency to be overprotective can come with its downsides. 

  • Third-party antivirus software can be a resource hog on CPU and RAM.
  • It may block applications and games from accessing online functionality.
  • It may delete or quarantine games files, which can cause a game to stop functioning.

Therefore, our recommendation for most players would be to either enable "game mode" (if available on your software) or remove third-party antivirus software and revert to Windows Defender, which comes with Windows 10/11.

Hardware Requirements

The primary limiting factor of your in-game performance will be the hardware in your PC.

System Requirements

Make sure your PC meets the Minimum System Requirements of the game you are trying to play. However, minimum system requirements may only mean that you can play with the minimum graphical settings, at a low resolution with poor performance. We would recommend that most players aim for the Recommend Requirements in order to enjoy the game as it was intended to be played. However, you could have a PC anywhere between Minimum and Recommend requirements and still have an enjoyable experience.

Dual Channel RAM

Gaming Laptops and Custom PC builders often include just one stick of RAM (Random Access Memory) to reduce costs. You may have the same amount of RAM as someone else, but a single stick of RAM will only work in "Single Channel" mode. Overall, this means that the performance of your RAM will be significantly reduced, and you will see more stuttering in-game.

If your laptop/PC supports dual channel RAM, it would be recommended to have matching pairs of RAM, so it can work in Dual Channel mode.

Overclocking

Overclocking would not be recommended for most players as it increases power usage, heat output and can make your computer unstable. Some motherboard manufacturer will automatically apply overclocked settings, so it is important to make sure you disable anything which would push your GPU/GPU beyond the manufacturer's stock recommended settings.

System Updates

If you have outdated drivers for your hardware, you may experience performance issue and even crashing. To ensure that your computer is up-to-date, please head over to our Troubleshooting Technical Issues Guide.

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