Computer Game – Images from Finchley

With a lot fewer posts from me over the last couple of weeks, this forum seems the best place to explain what has been going on as the root cause is my love of simulation programs on my computer. The pc I am writing this on is a Hewlett Packard Envy. It came with an Intel i7-4770 CPU, an AMD R9-270 graphics card, 16GB of RAM and a 2TB hard drive. At the time of purchase it was a high-end office and mid-range gaming pc – ideal for a casual gamer and a serious photographer with lots of processing to do. For at least three years now the Truck Simulator programs by SCS Software have been the core of my relaxation. Before that I also enjoyed Railworks Train Simulator. Each of these ‘games’ relies heavily on the ability of the hardware to create the scenery through which you pass to a good level of detail in order to achieve the illusion of travelling through the real world and maintain a high degree of immersion. And there we come to an issue, one that I’ve lived with for quite some time.

The R9-270 is now quite an old graphics card and was in the middle of AMD’s R9 range which means it was ok for most things but you might have to settle for lower quality graphics than with a top of the range card. One of the issues I have experienced in my simulator games is random graphical glitches, especially after the pc has been in use for a while. I sometimes got them in Railworks and also in the Truck Sim’s. The other issue was micro-stuttering in the movement through the environment – occasional missing frames resulting in very tiny stop-go instances that my eye would see. These issues over time can be a bit frustrating. I did read a comment on the Euro Truck forum dating to three or four years ago where another gamer complained that his R9-270 made the game unplayable! That certainly was not my experience – otherwise I would not have persevered with playing for so long. In fact it would be wrong of me to suggest that I was in any way disappointed in the HP Envy’s performance as a whole. Perhaps I’m just too pragmatic to get agitated about this sort of thing. I knew I was pushing the graphics card and possibly also the CPU beyond their realistic ‘best performance’ areas by playing heavy-duty simulation games and I accepted the resulting glitches as an understandable consequence. As I have moved into more recent games, Fishing Planet would be a good example, it has become even more apparent that the R9-270 was being asked to work beyond what was realistic.

One of the key indicators of trouble is the noise from the cooling fans in your pc – mine have been getting very loud (Hoover-like loud) and are a sure indication that something in there is getting way too warm for comfort. One fan has taken to making knocking noises as it slows down after a game has closed. I have cleaned the system thoroughly to remove dust and checked the fans over but the issue persists. But there is more to the situation – let me explain a little further. Another issue is sharing hard drive space between photography requirements (RAW files can be very large) and game code/saves (which can also be very large!). When your hard drive is close to 3 quarters full it’s time to look at your storage solutions and options. So, you see, I had a bit of a problem to resolve. It’s been rattling around my head since late last year like the pea in a referee’s whistle. So what is the solution? Replace the HP Envy with a new machine that can run those games better? That won’t really solve my other problem as even now the preferred largest size hard drive is 2TB – yes you can get bigger but that seems to be the ideal max for most systems. Give up playing simulation games? – don’t even go there!!! 😦 No – my solution is to buy a high-end gaming pc that will work alongside the existing HP Envy. All games will be moved across to the new machine and the old machine will have more free space on its hard drive to process photos. Shifting the games from the current machine will significantly reduce the stress on the graphics card and CPU – possibly extending their lifespan. And the games will benefit from a more suitable environment to provide a glitch free experience and thus improved immersion when driving my trucks 🙂

I have spent 6 months looking at a number of options, not helped by the continual changes in the computing equipment market place. I did consider building my own but I probably need a couple more years of knowledge gaining before I’m ready to take that step – although Alasdair is quickly learning such skills on his BTEC course 🙂 In the end I opted to buy from CCL Computers after they were recommended by simulation guru Squirrel. I chose to balance cost against performance – which means that I chose to buy the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X processor. The graphics card is the Nvidia RTX2070 which is upper-mid-range in Nvidia terms but with performance way above the top of the current AMD range (at a price). Today was its first day in service and what a day – a delivery for an SCS Software event. We took a racing truck from Köln to Санкт-Петербу́рг (St.Petersburg) as part of the #OneTruckFamily event that SCS are currently running with the FIA European Truck Racing Competition. That was 2hrs:46mins of driving on the new rig with no glitches and no stutters 🙂 Alasdair asked me when I told him about my intended drive – “How long would that take in the real world?”. 67.5 hours or 2.8 days including rest stops – and I was tired after just 2hrs:46mins! Some images below of my MAN TGX on this run…