Recommended System Requirements

[expoc]

Hi,
What are the recommended System Requirements for TS2015. Only minimum System Requirements are shown on Steam.

[expoc]

I currently have an Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GHz and a Radeon HD 7750 Sapphire Low Profile 1 gig, and 8 gigs of ram, but im going to be upgrading to a GeForce GTX 660 EVGA Superclocked 2 gig memory. Some feedback would be most appreciated before i buy this card.
Thanks.

[Felix.AVMP]

It should be improvement, but the question is, how big. But It should be better, also RW/TS generally plays better with Nvidia based cards (though this rule its known to have its exceptions).

If anything, the bigger on board memory should help.

[Glenn]

TS is more reliant on a good fast CPU than the graphics card. The faster the CPU and the bigger the RAM (8 Gb plus as a minimum) the better. Thats not to say that an upgraded GPU will not see any improvement, because it will - just not so much as an upgraded CPU.

I have an AMD FX6600 @ just over 4Ghz - 8GB RAM - GTX 660. my next upgrade will be to double that RAM to 16GB

[Keeca]

Minimal memory requirement (2 GB RAM) is insufficient. As I noticed, many people had cases when game terminated and flew to desktop, with some error about saving to dump. I had this bug too, until I extended my Win32 memory-per-program to 3Gb (this is known as /3Gb option). Train Simulator definitely eats a bit more memory, than 2GB, on every second route or scenario.

[geforce474]

I have the Geforce GTX 780 Ti EVGA and I am very satisfied. Nice graphicis and I have heared some good reports about GTX 660. The Geforce Exerience (on the included disk) will keep you upto date with your Drivers, and give you the best settings for your indivdual games.
http://www.geforce.com/geforce-experience

My advise get the highest Graphicis card you can afford.
Nvidia -EVGA is a good choice
Its the quality of all yours games, so you wont regret it afterwards even if it's expensive.
Up grading your Ram To 16 GB would help a lot too, if you can.
To be perfect consider an upgrade on your CPU, would be advisible. But you don't have to upgrade all at once.

[m4rky1985]

I guess it depends on what you want to run the game at.

I'm running a Haswell i7 at 4Ghz with 16gb of DDR3 2666Mhz Memory, HIS 7950 3GB Graphics card and an SSD with windows 8.1

I'm running at max settings on a 1440p monitor but still get the odd bit of stuttering on some scenarios even though I'm pretty sure my PC's more than capable of running the game?

[Felix.AVMP]

I agree that minimum hw reqs. posted for this game are a joke and 2 GB is definitely not going to be sufficient - but let us not overdo this. This is still 32bit program, as of now. And therefore, by principle, it cannot use more than 4 GB of RAM (and even that is pretty debatable, but let us stick with 4 GB as a technical maximum).
So 8 GB is in fact enough for this title, provided, that you are not running any other memory hungry application and if you are not, adding more memory is just a waste of money and electricity (I am not saying that getting more than 8 GB is for nothing, but not for this title alone). So if you want to get more memory, that is fine, but get not only bigger RAM, but preferably, get faster RAM. In fact, even moderate amount of fast RAM will help this game more, than a large amount of slow RAM.
And get SSD, if you can afford it.

This game needs strong CPU, but it also needs powerful graphics card, if you want to use TSX effects, so these two need to be in balance – strong CPU will not help with this game when the graphics is weak and vice versa.
If I was shopping for a new system today, I would not go below Core i5, at least 8 GB of fastest DDR3 I could afford, fast and rather big SSD drive (probably Intel or Samsung) and Nvidia 7xx series (higher end) with at least 2 GB of on board memory.

[Glenn]

"..... if you want to use TSX effects......" which is no longer a part of TS.

[Dodgydruid]

Graphic memory type really helps, a lot of people see the super cheap "deals" which are reference cards hyped up to look good but however hard you polish one, it won't ever shine because the memory interface and memory itself is using up the huge backlog of gDDR3 which is creaky compared to the next line up of gDDR5 hence why my 2gb of gDDR5 whilst being a HD5xxx series will still compete simply because the 256bit interface alone allows a greater movement of "bits" and can talk to the CPU longer.

My daughter didn't believe me on this, she bought a comparable 7xxx series card but it had 3gb of gDDR3 and she was really frustrated that her more modern, bigger memoried, better cored card was seriously held back by the crap memory stuffed on it and benchmarking showed my older card was like 35% faster whichever way you turned it. I'm not going to upgrade until gDDR7 or whatever it will be called comes out.

I have been asked by a friend if anyone has any idea how a fairly new FM2 APU setup would work in this, he has pretty amazing graphics on most games and just wondered how the onchip graphics controllers would help out (or not) in a game like this?

Also, running from a SSD really helps any game, TS references a lot, thousands of files a second and SSD's make that accessing almost instant compared to spinning hard drives, I can always tell when my HDD needs defragging as TS starts to pause more often in game and it flies when I have defragged so keeping your machine in top running order inside and out makes a difference too.

[Felix.AVMP]

Originally posted by glennives60:

"..... if you want to use TSX effects......" which is no longer a part of TS.

Oh, well... "Dynamic lighting".., big difference, really big. ;-)
And last time I checked, I still had all the TSX firebox glow and raindrops effects up and running...

[Felix.AVMP]

Originally posted by Dodgydruid:

Graphic memory type really helps...

That is true, I skipped this only because my post was pretty long already.
It is the same principle like with the main memory - it needs not to be just big, it needs to be fast as well - and as long as the game fits, it does not have to be really monstrous.

Regarding those FM2 APUs... I think that in lower resolutions they might be able to pump out reasonable performance (well, A8 and A10 series, I would not hold my breath for the A4 and A6, not to mention E2), but of course, dedicated graphics card with at least 2 GB gDDR5 will be faster - and could go for a really high resolutions and/or AA.

[Dodgydruid]

Cheers, will tell him as he likes trains and stuff and had heard some stuff about APU cpus and wanted me to ask :)

[Felix.AVMP]

Well, those APUs need really, really fast main memory, as it serves as the graphics memory as well - I would not go below DDR3 1866 as a bare minimum, preferably 2133, or, in case of latest A10 even 2400...
but as I am saying, in lower resolutions it should be able to run TS2015 reasonably (but probably without AA) - provided there is no current known incompatibility between Catalyst drivers and TS2015.

[Dodgydruid]

I'm on the 2ghz memory, I upgraded from 1600 and the difference was startlingly noticeable, everything just seemed to zip through, another thing I have is I run through a dedicated nic and disabled the onboard, that makes for a nice quick internet which can help with things like Steam as I can get a fairly quick 2mbps at least download since I done that.