ArmAII: Hard drive activity

[Chucara 10]

I don't know if this should go in the optimization thread, but I'd hardly call it optimization, as the game is unplayable for me.

My specs:

- Core 2 Duo E6600 @ Stock

- Asus P5KC

- 2GB CellShock DDR2

- NVIDIA 8800 GTS 640MB (Latest driver)

- 500 GB Maxtor hard drive.

- Windows 7 (Fresh install, nothing but Steam and Arma II)

I've performed all the steps recommended on this board to get performance out of this game, but to little avail. It seems there is very little difference between Very Low and High.

My framerate is decent on the first level (the forest), but drags to a screeching halt as soon as I enter a city.

Especially in vehicles, I have serious issues, but generally whenever I change direction with the mouse, it's choppy to the point of being completely unplayable. I've noticed that there appears to be a lot of hard drive activity when the worst choppiness occurs.

I know I don't have a monster rig, but I'd still like to think that it should be able to pull off this game - at least on Normal or Low. (I can play Crysis on normal without a hitch)

Should I just wait for a patch, or is there actually anything I can do - short of ordering a SLi i7 powerhouse?

[BF2_Trooper 0]

I have the same processor and RAM as yours. But my video card is the 9800GTX+ and I'm running on windows XP SP3. I also seem to notice a lot of hard drive activity, but it's graphical/texture detail lag I'm noticing in that sometimes (especialy in a city) the textures and object details take a few seconds to load.

[f2k sel 164]

Same here, my Harddrive being hammered which is never good news.

I'd like to know what drive is actually being used, I played with the page file and moved it to a faster drive but it doesn't make a difference. I've even tried with no pagefile and that did nothing either.

[no use for a name 0]

I had the exact same problem until I defragged my HDD. Use a real defrag, not the built in Windows one as I was still getting it with that. I used Diskeeper 09 and now it's 10x better. The HDD usage is normal since it's constantly streaming textures/objects, so the faster you move the more it needs to load

it also helped some with texture lag and they seem to load faster

Edited July 8, 2009 by No Use For A Name

[The.Yield 10]

Interesting I should find this thread. I recently went to a bit of an extreme to conquer ARMAII's HDD pounding behavior. This behavior is not unlike that of MMORPG's as they have game worlds that constantly stream into memory as ARMAII does. I remembered back to my old Everquest 2 days, and the things I did back then to get the HDD activity as quick and snappy as possible.

Long story short: I now have my Win7 x64 on it's own HDD. And my ARMAII is on it's own HDD as well, alongside my windows pagefile (which is configured to be solid size - That is to say that it starts as large and it ends, this prevents fragmentation of data by quite a bit).

What this does is greatly reduce the effects of "load lag". The drops and interrupts in frame rate that occur when the game caches info from the HDD into memory (which is ALL the time, while playing).

You can even take it one step further, like me, and put ARMA in a partition on the outside edge of the disc of that HDD.

Why? Because data on the outside edge of a HDD's platter is much narrower than it would be at the front of the platter. When you move all the game's data and your systems pagefile to outside of the platter, it reduces the mechanical arm movement needed to read the data on the disk.

It also doesn't hurt that my dedicated ARMAII HDD is in fact two 10,000RPM HDD's in a Raid0 configuration, lol :cool:

[OUT FOX EM 10]

Interesting I should find this thread. I recently went to a bit of an extreme to conquer ARMAII's HDD pounding behavior. This behavior is not unlike that of MMORPG's as they have game worlds that constantly stream into memory as ARMAII does. I remembered back to my old Everquest 2 days, and the things I did back then to get the HDD activity as quick and snappy as possible.

Long story short: I now have my Win7 x64 on it's own HDD. And my ARMAII is on it's own HDD as well, alongside my windows pagefile (which is configured to be solid size - That is to say that it starts as large and it ends, this prevents fragmentation of data by quite a bit).

What this does is greatly reduce the effects of "load lag". The drops and interrupts in frame rate that occur when the game caches info from the HDD into memory (which is ALL the time, while playing).

You can even take it one step further, like me, and put ARMA in a partition on the outside edge of the disc of that HDD.

Why? Because data on the outside edge of a HDD's platter is much narrower than it would be at the front of the platter. When you move all the game's data and your systems pagefile to outside of the platter, it reduces the mechanical arm movement needed to read the data on the disk.

It also doesn't hurt that my dedicated ARMAII HDD is in fact two 10,000RPM HDD's in a Raid0 configuration, lol :cool:

And so what are your results because of it?

[The.Yield 10]

Oh sorry, lol. The result is a night-n-day difference in the reduction of the "Load Lag" I was experiencing with ARMA2.

Moving at high-speeds in helo's close to the ground used to be unpleasant (to say the least). Now, while it's certainly not 100% buttery-smooth, it is very much improved.

[bhaz 0]

I used to have a ton of hard disk activity when I was on Vista. I've only got 2GB of RAM and Vista was eating between 500-800 on bootup, and that's after disabling all the caching and a bunch of other stuff.

After switching over to a dual-boot of XP and removing / disabling as much as possible, I've managed to get that number down to 80MB on startup (19MB without drivers :D). Haven't had any significant HDD activity in-game ever since.

[f2k sel 164]

Would the outer platter be the C partition and which should go on first Swapfile or the game?

[The.Yield 10]

Would the outer platter be the C partition and which should go on first Swapfile or the game?

There is no such thing as an "outer platter". You have to create a partition on the outer edge of the platter...

I do this simply and lazily with the windows 7 disk manager thingy' in admin tools > comp management (It's also in Vista).

You can shrink a volume by a certain amount, which it takes from the outside of the platter.

EDIT: And it doesn't matter which goes first (Game or Swap). Once you get both on there, you should end up with a solid consistent block of data that will never fragment until you write something to it (like a patch or adding a mod, etc). In which case you just defrag afterwards.

Edited July 8, 2009 by The.Yield