Heavy disk usage (could lower my SSD life?)

[Leon86 13]

You can be worried about your mechanical disk as well (in this case you wouldn't worry just about the write cycles...), so the problem remains: ArmA3 "streams" the files, even when it's not (technically) necessary. It is a waste of resources and it affects the game performances. It would be nice to have (even a basic) file caching, since it doesn't look to be that hard to implement (for a game developer). I'm honestly surprised that it doesn't have a such primitive technology already, that's why i tought it was a "bug" rather than a missing feature.

the maps are too big to have everything in adress space all of the time, so streaming is required. anyway, there is cacheing.

http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/85-breaking-the-32-bit-barrier

dont worry about the hardware, it can easily cope with much more abusive stuff, there's not that much disk acces during gameplay.

[fabio_chavez 103]

Arma 2, just like Arma 3, is 32-bit application. They can't use more than 4 GB RAM in any situation. It doesn't matter if you add -maxmem=8192 in the startup parameters – it is there but doesn't change anything in reality. Only thing it could cause is game crash.

afaik it also depends on the memory allocator and the operating system, since i only got 4gb i cant verify, but people reported of getting arma to utilize more than 4gb of ram, i for example switched from arma3s standard malloc to win 7s own malloc wich doubled the amount of ram used by the game it now utilized all the ram available on my system (75%)

i recommend hw info 64 combined with msi afterburner overlay to figure out your specific hardware use of arma in relation to the settings.

[WalkerDown 1]

there's not that much disk acces during gameplay.

The HD is used likely 100% during the gameplay.. and the same files are accessed zillion of times for no reason, i did not see any file caching to be honest, neither in a basic form. An HD could surely cope with it, but there's no point of wasting the resources, especially when there's a much faster resource available (your RAM).

[Leon86 13]

The HD is not used 100%, system keeps writing data to the pagefile so it can clear it from memory if needed, but as long as ram is available it should stay in ram too.

as described here http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/85-breaking-the-32-bit-barrier

You can easily see with the resource monitor, tab disk, then monitor arma3.

Do 2 runs of armamark, first run arma3.exe will read a lot from the drive, might stutter quite a bit.

second run arma3.exe will barely read anything from the disk and it'll be smoother. The only disk activity is windows writing arma stuff to the pagefile, but it's not cleared from ram unless the ram is needed for something. Arma is using windows to cache data in ram. And the harddrive is not used 100%, it's writing at 1MB/s, next to nothing for a modern drive.

If you're worried the pagefile writes will eventually degrade your ssd move the pagefile to an oldskool mechanical drive, it shouldn't impact system performance if you have a lot of ram.

[jumpinghubert 49]

Agreed, I tested it actually some hours ago... I copied my whole A3 folder from SSD to RAMdisk that had from 500 to about 4500 MB/s read speed, skipped the Steam launch to make sure that the game is run from RAMdisk and benchmarked the game (PC specs: i5-3570k@4,5 GHz, GTX 670 OC edition, 16GB 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 DDR3 RAM, Win7 64-bit, Samsung 830 SSD). The result was surprisingly a little bit worse (-0,7%) with RAMdisk than with SSD. The change in stuttering wasn't very noticeable either. The loading times, however, were ridiculously short – e.g. Stratis was loaded in few seconds.

I can confirm this. From my Samsung 840 ssd (540mb write) to my ram (11200mb write) there was nearly Zero advantage in smoothing and popups because its still smooth without popups on the Samsung ssd. Made ramdisk with "softperfect" and symbolic links per link Shell Extension.

[WalkerDown 1]

The HD is not used 100%, system keeps writing data to the pagefile

I don't have any pagefile on my system, and the HD is used by Arma3 continuously. I didn't only monitored the HD usage, i've even monitored the file accessed, and this is why i said that the game is accessing to the same file multiple times for no reason, while a simple file caching would avoid it completely.

If you're worried the pagefile writes will eventually degrade your ssd move the pagefile to an oldskool mechanical drive, it shouldn't impact system performance if you have a lot of ram.

Again: i have no windows pagefile on my system.

[Leon86 13]

A file is accessed multiple times because there are multiple files in the .pbo files, you cant cache everything because there's not enough virtual address space. The game is already 7GB, the full size island and all the vehicles aren't even in, nevermind mods with even bigger worlds and amounts of vehicles.

anyway, arma doesn't keep reading on my system, if I restart the armamark mission it's not reading from the harddrive.

Edited April 3, 2013 by Leon86

[WalkerDown 1]

Leon, you can have the files unpacked (just unpack the pbo) and see that the SINGLE files are accessed continuosly over and over again. You can try this with any MP mission out there and check yourself.

[white 1]

You think that the game loads the full map with all textures and objects into RAM...?

The Alpha installation is 7Gb and most of that is the terrain, objects and texures COMPRESSED.

Altis is going to be MUCH bigger so u think it can load all that into your RAM...?

NO

ARMA uses streaming to load the terrain/objects on the fly.

Reading data does NOT shorten the SSD life.

i have 16gb so yeah it could. but the game uses less than 4gb by limited 32bit design. (acctually ive never seen it use more than 1gb)

from time to time i see dozens if not hundreds of mb´s related to windows error reporting logs made for Arma3, those probably are part of all the hd usage while playing.

game doesnt crash but they keep being created.

Edited April 3, 2013 by white

[4 IN 1 0]

Not using pagefile to force everything to write on ram inorder to increase performance is a myth busted like a broken honeycone structure for a long time if I remember correctly.

[gossamersolid 155]

Not using pagefile to force everything to write on ram inorder to increase performance is a myth busted like a broken honeycone structure for a long time if I remember correctly.

Also, not supposed to disable your pagefile EVER.

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

[Leon86 13]

doesn't matter, if it's needed it's created by windows without asking.