FancyCache

[frogblastvent 10]

This is a must have for ArmA. This is an amazing bit of software.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html

Can run ArmA at 1920x1200 with all setting at very high with a visibility of 10k.

There is no lag at all in normal game play. Flying at 2x speed, zoomed in flawless.

My system has 24gig of ram i have 8gig as a ramdisk used as cache with 13gig standby and free at startup. With ArmA running FancyCache will use all of it.

Os is on a HD and ArmA is on a SSD. FancyCache is set on default on both with level-2 cache also set on the SSD.

Will get rid of the ramdisk and see what FancyCache does with the extra 8gig.

[frogblastvent 10]

After more testing the boot drive "C" uses up to 4gig of cache and the SSD which hold ArmA uses 2gig of cache. No level-2 is used now on the SSD, don't need it and it is slower. If you have OS and ArmA on one drive 4-6gb should be enough.

Using 4KB block size for both the HD and SSD.

Upon statrt up and through benchmark 1 in ArmA the C drive reads 463mb and write 35mb, the SSD reads 757mb of data.

At highest settings and 10k vis the system is now GPU limited, this is a sli gtx460.

The read hit rate on C is 25% and on the SSD it is 45% so far.

The boot drive needs twice as much cache but the SSD reads twice as much data due to ArmA.

[reconteam 19]

Interesting stuff. Wish I had 24 gigs of RAM to work with.

[frogblastvent 10]

With just 8gig you could assign 2-4 to FC to your HD and see a big increase.

I ran Windows Experience Index on my HD without FC it is 5.8, first time with FC 5.9, second time with FC 6.1 That is a big speed up for a hard drive.

Have no paging file active, did not see it being used anymore with FC on.

[icewindo 29]

Does it make any sense to use Fancy Cache as as Ramdisk even if you only have a HDD?

It seems interesting and I'm rather disappointed from the performance increase following my upgrade from a E8500 @3.16 ghz, 4870 HD, 3GB RAM (couldn't use more) to a i2500k@4.2 ghz, 8 GB RAM and a gtx 560.

[frogblastvent 10]

With 8gig of ram you can assign 2-4 gig to FC and that will speed up your HD.

Don't need an SSD for FC, just need ram, the more the better.

[stk2008 14]

I only have 4gb of ram could I see an improvement?.

I have win7 64bit

Thanks

[frogblastvent 10]

It's free to try. Maybe set it to 500meg and test it out.

[raynor 0]

Running with 8 of 16GB RAM allocated to the program. Now running ArmA 2 at 6km view distance max settings (Except Post-Processing, didn't want to puke from the blur) no lag or stuttering on my system.

[Rich_R 1087]

Does this help with textures popping in? I have 12 GB of ram...looks like I might finally get some use for it:)

[domokun 515]

Running with 8 of 16GB RAM allocated to the program. Now running ArmA 2 at 6km view distance max settings (Except Post-Processing, didn't want to puke from the blur) no lag or stuttering on my system.

Try Oktane's noBlur mod. It offers the best of post-processing without the suck

BTW does anyone have any screenshots on how to setup FC for OA?

Edited December 13, 2011 by domokun

[raynor 0]

Does this help with textures popping in? I have 12 GB of ram...looks like I might finally get some use for it:)

I don't know about textures popping in but as I often alt+tab out of game loading back in is much faster now and the models do not take long to load from their low-poly state which before would take up to a minute to remedy itself.

Try Oktane's noBlur mod. It offers the best of post-processing without the suck

BTW does anyone have any screenshots on how to setup FC for OA?

I am latest 1.6 RC and had to disable that mod for the time being as it crashes the game. To set it up ( Volume ) Simply select the volume the game is installed on. Set how much you want your cache size to be ( level 1 is RAM ) and then click on the start caching button.

[maddogx 13]

I bought an extra 8GB of RAM because of this thread. :cool:

Can those of you who are already using FC post how they set it up? I've been reading a bit about it on the website, but it seems to be a tad more involved than 1. activate FancyCache, 2. recieve bacon. :D

[cjph 0]

Hi

I used Fancycache briefly last night (using a pre-1.6RC beta) on the system below, allocating 6GB to the 64Gb SSD C drive (OS + Arma2), 2GB to another SSD holding some utlities and general apps, and 4GB to a WD HDD holding other games. It was very easy to set up with just a couple of clicks to allocate the memory to the relevant disk(s) and then pressing the 'Start Caching' button. Compared to the 12GB RAMDisk I was lucky to be using before I did not perceive a huge improvement to the system performance but it did feel more responsive, though some maps were quick to load in the editor, some seemed to take a little longer though nothing dramatic. Certainly alt-tabbing to the desktop was faster. I tried a 10km VD flying over Chernarus in a Harrier, and whilst the framerate was low it was better performance than I have played before, especially given the system has to drive the three screens (did not have a counter running - will try later this week to see if FPS is affected compared to normal disks and/or RAMDisk). I tried MW3 out, however I did not see any change since performance is already very good and improvement would be hard to detect.

So there seems to be benefit in using FC, although I do have a lot of RAM to play with and probably don't need to have any allocated to the second SSD. I've also not tweaked any of the other settings other than the size of RAM used for each disk so there may be some scope for improvement. A benefit for me is that with a RAMDisk there is some juggling of the addons and mods required to fit them in, whereas this is not needed when using FC as I believe they simply reside in the RAM cache.

Two questions I have are whether the pagefile needs to be disabled when using FC, and whether there is an optimum size of memory ?

cj

[frogblastvent 10]

Having tried many different setups, arma ramdisk, arma hd, arma ssd, hd paging, no paging, ramdisk paging, and FC it looks like you can turn off all paging. Did not see any activity on the ramdisk page file with FC on.

Also i am not seeing any FC cache activity on the ssd which hold arma. It seems that arma goes to the FC cache on the OS HD when it reads off the ssd.

One thing that is odd is that defrag takes forever now with FC on. After a few runs it is fast though. FC block size is set to 4KB which is supposed to be the fastest setting although the controller has to work more. Will try different block sizes some time. If i knew the average file size of all arma data then that might be the best block size.

[sailindawg 0]

Im running 16G ram using fancy cache. ARMA resides on my RaptorX RAID stripe, but I symbolically link ARMA to my Corsair 300 64G SSD, where my OS resides. I've allocated 4G ram cache to the SSD & 2G ram cache to the RAID array. ARMA CO plus mods utilizes ~3G of the ram cache when running. ARMA does not use the page file at all. I've monitored this with Win7 Resource Monitor.

I have tried turning off the page file. However, my ATI drivers use the page file some how. I was greeted with BSOD that referenced an ATI.sys violation. Other programs & aspects of Win7 utilize the page file as well. I leave the PF on, managed by OS. With FancyCache, there is no use of the page file. The OS seems to need it at some level. I'd say keep the PF. It's there for the OS and little else if using FC. Your programs/OS will use the ram cache before the PF. I've not had good luck turning PF off.

Edited December 15, 2011 by Sailindawg

[Tankbuster 1747]

Some users think they understand what page file does and when their machine is full of RAM, they turn off the PF.

But everyone that knows what they are talking about, and I don't for one minute include myself in them, says you must not turn off the page file. Do a search and you'll see.

Edited January 7, 2012 by Tankbuster

[stk2008 14]

I agree it should be left on really from what I have read.

I know that some peeps may get away with it but it depends on application,games your using.

[kremator 1065]

Never have used pagefile (I have an SSD) and Arma2CO runs absolutely fine and smooth.

[stk2008 14]

Never have used pagefile (I have an SSD) and Arma2CO runs absolutely fine and smooth.

Umm oh well maybe times have changed?.

This FC does look good though I may give it a go.

I tried to download it but the link on the main site is down.

[cjph 0]

Hi TB, thanks for the reply (and when are you going to o/c that 2600 ?)

A couple of years ago I read a lot of the previous 'advice' and ran for several months without a pagefile on a previous system build under XP32 and suffered few problems I could'nt put down to beta crashes or enthusiastic overclocking. Then I was enlightened by those who know . . .

I now run a pagefile on W7, but not having the required technical knowledge I did wonder if it would be needed when using FC. As stated here I believe it is needed, so my question would be the ideal size - with 16GB of RAM, keeping say 6 for the system/apps, 4 for the OS/Arma disk cache, 2 for another game HDD cache, would the remaining 4 be large enough for a pagefile on a RAMDisk, and help performance at all ?

cj

[hugin 10]

Umm oh well maybe times have changed?.

This FC does look good though I may give it a go.

I tried to download it but the link on the main site is down.

Try this

http://www.romexsoftware.com/download/beta/FancyCache.Volume.Setup.zip

for Volume

and this

http://www.romexsoftware.com/download/beta/FancyCache.Disk.Setup.zip

for disk version.

[stk2008 14]

nice thanks very much.

[Tankbuster 1747]

Hi TB, thanks for the reply (and when are you going to o/c that 2600 ?)

cj

Never got round to it, I should... it'd be rude not to.

BTW, did you see I released an early version of Takistan Rhapsody the other day?

[domokun 515]

Sorry if this sounds daft but having increased my RAM from 4 to 12 gigs, which version of Fancy Cache should I be downloading? The Volume or the Disk version? Or both?