Better performance

Open takes up a LOT of system resources - and as such when there are a lot of objects around, it slows down - even on reasonably quick machines.

I think the future open-source BVE simulator ideally needs to be able to process all of the b3d and csv files more smoothly - there has to be a means of doing this somehow - it's not as though the files are so big that it should be causing the sluggish performance we've gradually become accustomed to...

openBVE processes and loads all objects to RAM when loading, i.e. BEFORE the simulation. So the processing is not a problem at all.

Then how come FPS gets sluggish where there is a lot of scenery?

Because the graphics card has to render the faces. Faces are rendered only in the viewing distance, although loaded into memory, not all objects are actually "displayed".

And I forgot to add, that there is an option in openBVE to whether load all textures into RAM or load when needed. If it loads textures when needed, depending on the HDD's access time it may take some time to load the textures.

It isn't OpenBVE taking up system resources- it's the route.
A route with high definition graphics will run more slowly than a route with less pixels.
Personally, I prefer to see better graphics on my half-reasonable computer, but really the choice is down to the developer. If a route runs too slowly, download a different one.

Solution is to lower the viewing distance - mine's at 500 metres for NWM and I'm getting an average of 25-30 fps on a bog standard laptop with no fancy graphics card. Question of trial and error, I'm afraid. Hope this is of use.

Cheers,

John

Something often overlooked...

Yes, disabling DWM will reduce load on GPU.
Perhaps running in fullscreen mode will reduce more.

Also lowering viewing distance, reduce texture size manually, disabling anit-aliasing...

.....and disable the vertical sync and reduce motion blur to medium. Every little helps..................!

...........and I forgot to add - reduce the bits per pixel by 50% - in my case 32 down to 16. My 59 year old eyes can't spot any difference in quality at all, and the fps increases by 3-4 fps

I'm on a faster PC now - but I'll try Joey's suggestion of disabling desktop composition. Also how BVE loads via RAM or graphics card is interesting to know as well.

joeyfjj wrote:Something often overlooked...

What does that option actually do? Does it help improve performance in most programs?

buckysam wrote:

joeyfjj wrote:Something often overlooked...

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What does that option actually do? Does it help improve performance in most programs?

Desktop Window Manager uses graphics card resource to draw the windows forms as well as the Windows Aero visual effect. If your graphics card is not that powerful (i.e. not fast enough and not much RAM resource), it might be too "rich" to run the openBVE gameplay whilst Desktop Window Manager + Windows Aero is enabled. In this case, you should consider to tick that checkbox to give more graphical resource to openBVE.

hkmtrhah wrote:Desktop Window Manager uses graphics card resource to draw the windows forms as well as the Windows Aero visual effect. If your graphics card is not that powerful (i.e. not fast enough and not much RAM resource), it might be too "rich" to run the openBVE gameplay whilst Desktop Window Manager + Windows Aero is enabled. In this case, you should consider to tick that checkbox to give more graphical resource to openBVE.

I don't have problems running openBVE, but I will try this with several other programs I want to speed up.