Rail Simulator
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Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): Simulation Home Page: http://www.railsimulator.com/
Watching the hills roll by... The steam locomotives display the best of the modelling. Simulation games rarely push the technological barrier of PC gaming forwards - instead, they typically rely on what was well-tested and understood from the previous few years, and use them thoroughly. Rail Simulator is no exception: the engine is somewhat multithreaded, physics is provided by Ageia's PhysX libraries (CPU processed only) and the graphics are firmly basic DX8-level (even though they require Shader Model 2.0 graphics cards, as a minimum). On face value, it's all very competent but at the same time, it all feels a bit underwhelming. Certainly, the physics of the trains seems to be appropriate; each carriage is separately modelled and the bogies appear to be more than just static meshes. Travel too fast over a set of points and derailment can occur, producing effective-looking accidents. Not wishing to dwell on the morbidity of such incidents, but there's scope for Rail Simulator to be used as a learning tool for investigators, engineers and reporters.
Alas the overall effect is diminished by the very functionary graphics - they're certainly an improvement over Kuju's first rail game, and the preset routes are painstakingly well modelled, but bit-mapped trees, low resolution textures and matchstick-men animations belong in another era altogether, sim game or otherwise. When a good part of the charm of rail travel is just being able to sit back and admire the views, it's a shame that more wasn't done in this area; considering that reasonably modern graphics card easily cope with the workload, even at high resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, there's certainly room for it to be more graphics-intensive.
The publisher's minimum hardware requirements are pretty low by today's standard: a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 equivalent CPU, with 512MB and a 64MB DX9 graphics card. Unfortunately, it's also unrealistic - using the suggested NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, the resolution needs to be kept right down (800 x 600) and most of the details setting pushed to Low or Medium. Hidden away in the ReadMe file are the recommended specs, which do allow for a much better gaming experience. Our own suggestions for the minimum hardware needed to enjoy Rail Simulator require a much stronger CPU, more RAM and, naturally, a better graphics card - the reasons for this are simple: at busy junctions, with multiple points, the CPU workload is quite high and a decent graphics card will ensure that one can using anti-aliasing to smooth out tracks, wires, etc and anisotropic filtering to make the best out of the weak textures. One aspect of the performance that couldn't be removed by using better hardware was the persistent "jerking" in the frame rate, every minute or so. A 3GHz quad core CPU, backed up with 4GB of RAM, shouldn't have any problems just trundling along a route but when the frame rate routinely crashes from 70 to 8 fps, for no apparent reason, you just know that something's not right with the engine.
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