Running Arma2 from SSD

[dogz 10]

one thing peeps should keep in mind when considering various ways to test HD v SSD is that often the files being accessed when loading games/data have to be unpacked or extracted.

this then becomes cpu intensive, I am not sure how much this applies to A2 tho...

@Grunt... thats seems like a very long time even for the SSD array, I am not at my pc but I dont think it takes that long on my rig I will not be able to test for a week but will have a look when I can.

@1longtime... can you test startup on your rig?

Edited October 7, 2009 by dogz

[TimRiceSE 10]

Yeah looking forward to installing win7 on a new SSD, just waiting on the next gen SSD to become avail from intel =) Performance should negate some of the bad memory management of Arma 2.

Any idea when the next intel SSD gen is coming? Im looking into getting a intel SSD myself, if theres a new gen coming in the next couple months i'll put that on hold :)

[tonygrunt 10]

@dogz:It was with the 1.04 version non beta, so there was the cd checking time. With beta version and "-world=empty" the times are 5 secs for the vertex, 9 secs for the raptor.

I personally see differences in load times in MP against others, when a mission is selected I'm almost always first in the lobby to green up :).

[jw custom 56]

Really interesting thread, too bad SSD's are so expensive. Maybe i'll start out with a 60GB.

[hamis 0]

Well,i think i'm investing for 2xOCZ Vertex 60gb's.They are almost as quick and good as intel but much cheaper.

[1longtime 10]

@ 1longtime

Could you test arma2 loading time from desktop to main menu with both disks?That would be much more helpful than benchmarks.

Sorry, I don't have Arma installed on the traditional HDD anymore. What I have noticed is the loading time from desktop to the Arma main menu seems about half (but my old HDD was a 7,200 RPM, so the difference is more dramatic than 10k owners). From computer boot to Windows desktop is very, very fast... maybe 30 seconds total, and most of that is during the BIOS bootup.

I really think the more important statistic, however, is what happens IN the game. Think about it: you only start the game once (unless maybe you use a launcher like Yoma's tool AddOn Sync, which is awesome btw).

The screenshots of disk activity from a few posts back are disk activity DURING the game. I think that is WAY more important, since it makes your gameplay dramatically improved.

Well,i think i'm investing for 2xOCZ Vertex 60gb's.They are almost as quick and good as intel but much cheaper.

I'm very happy with my OCZ Vertex. I think I was very lucky with my price, however... it was 120GB a little over $300 + tax after the mail in rebate. BUT all the 120GB OCZ models I see now for that price are WITHOUT THE CACHE. The OCZ 120GB with the cache is closer to $400. Like I said, I think I got lucky on my price.

*SERIOUSLY* DO NOT buy an SSD without the onboard cache. The manufacturers are dumping these no-cache drives everywhere because they are stuck with them. They're usually $100 cheaper (or less/more). Don't fall for it!! Let their stale hardware sit on the shelves. Buy one with the cache, or suffer with new hardware that writes slower than your old HDD!

Edited October 7, 2009 by 1longtime

[jmc 0]

First: you're getting FPSs in the 50s, even up to the 80s. What are you complaining about?

Second, you should set the Video Memory to DEFAULT so Arma 2 can detect all your vRAM automatically.

Third, SSDs fixed all my stuttering like magic. Not sure what else to tell you. Are you sure you are actually running Arma off the SSD?

Heh, the High FPS were on a "bare" editor mission- no AI, just to test the

graphic setting. Fraps FPS reading too unsteady on an active mission.

Setting Video Memory to DEFAULT worked in ArmA 1 but NOT ArmA 2.(for me)

I got really messed up graphics and had to change texture detail to a lower

level and back up to fix image corruption. (on 1 Gig card)

Dropping to next highest setting fixed the problem.

Hmm, well, my SSD is a slow one 155/90 R/W but the game starts up

much faster.

I'll be moving to my OCZ Vertex SSD when W7 gets here.

Would LOVE for the micro stutters to be gone!

Oh yeah, my SSD does have the evil "jmicron" controller. :(

(not the Vertex tho, once W7 get here... fingers crossed)

Thanks,

jmc

---------- Post added at 08:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:03 AM ----------

@dogz:It was with the 1.04 version non beta, so there was the cd checking time. With beta version and "-world=empty" the times are 5 secs for the vertex, 9 secs for the raptor.

WOW, thank you for that "-world=empty" my SSD load time went from 27

to 12!

HDD 37 to 15 seconds! (samsung 500Gig/platter F3s)

jmc

---------- Post added at 08:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:15 AM ----------

Try

Texture Detail and Video Memory- normal

Hmm, dropping to "normal" did boost the FPS! (texture detail)

I thought that my card with 1 Gig would be able to handle

the highest texture level and had not tested.

Dropping to NORMAL helped, to LOW no improvement.

Did not notice change with "video Memory- normal"

thanks,

jmc

Edited October 9, 2009 by jmc

[.kju 3245]

Well the GPU may not be your bottleneck but HDD read speed.

[jmc 0]

Well the GPU may not be your bottleneck but HDD read speed.

Hmm, it just dawned on me that the "micro stutters" I refer to are ALWAYS

in the ArmA2 benchmark mission from the DEMO. As the camera pans

across the battlefield I get the micro up to 1 large hesitation in camera movement.

Can NOT say that I am aware of this happening while playing normal game.

(and I find them so annoying (stutters) that I believe they must not be

happening)

So can anyone say that running the ArmA2 benchmark mission from

the DEMO (in demo or full game) is completely SMOOTH?

I am now thinking that perhaps the stutters are something to do with the

camera movement.

thoughts welcome!

jmc

[liquidpinky 11]

Hmm, it just dawned on me that the "micro stutters" I refer to are ALWAYS

in the ArmA2 benchmark mission from the DEMO. As the camera pans

across the battlefield I get the micro up to 1 large hesitation in camera movement.

Can NOT say that I am aware of this happening while playing normal game.

(and I find them so annoying (stutters) that I believe they must not be

happening)

So can anyone say that running the ArmA2 benchmark mission from

the DEMO (in demo or full game) is completely SMOOTH?

I am now thinking that perhaps the stutters are something to do with the

camera movement.

thoughts welcome!

jmc

It isn't the camera itself, it is the switch between model details and LOD texture levels loading that cause the stuttering. The faster your disk access the less noticeable it is. It certainly still does it with a Raptor so an SSD is the the best solution to reduce/remove it even more.

It is the nature of the beast, all games that have large maps continuously streaming will always benefit from good, quick and clean disk access.

If not using an SSD defrag the drive regularly.

[.kju 3245]

Did you try any of the tweaks to reduce Resolution LODs and/or mipmap textures?

[1longtime 10]

Hmm, it just dawned on me that the "micro stutters" I refer to are ALWAYS

in the ArmA2 benchmark mission from the DEMO. As the camera pans

across the battlefield I get the micro up to 1 large hesitation in camera movement.

Can NOT say that I am aware of this happening while playing normal game.

(and I find them so annoying (stutters) that I believe they must not be

happening)

So can anyone say that running the ArmA2 benchmark mission from

the DEMO (in demo or full game) is completely SMOOTH?

I am now thinking that perhaps the stutters are something to do with the

camera movement.

thoughts welcome!

jmc

The camera movements stresses your hardware. Some scenes still have hesitation, but it's much less than with HDDs I scarcely notice them. Here's what I'll say for my ArmaIIMark (non-demo) performance:

Tests

#1, two UAZs- on HDD, several stutters mid-scene, no stutters on SSD

#2, fly over the base- on HDD, popping textures and stutters throughout, on SSD textures pop much less, still one quick stutter in middle (during the quick snapped camera pan toward ground)

#3, tank walk- on HDD this was brutal, stutters throughout (not much popping though) with one huge stutter mid-scene when camera turns downward near tree and colored smoke, on SSD much smoother and stutter is zero

#4, spin test- never had problems here on HDD or SSD

#5, crash landing (very demanding test)- lots of stuttering on HDD, less stuttering on SSD but still not very smooth (limitations of my hardware, I suspect)

The real question is: how does it play? I'm curious how the old "evil" Jmicron controller on your SSD handles Arma2... I've heard the older controllers tried to do caching improperly and can sometime take up to one full second to catch up doing drive writes, so I wonder if you ever see performance problems with it.

In Win7 you can use Task Manager -> Performance -> Performance Monitor and watch the disk activity, and Arma2 definitely does a few drive writes (but mostly reads of course). I was happy with the response time on my SSD when doing a write, but I'm curious about the older models. Arma like to write to arma2.rpt occasionally.

[kklownboy 43]

if your getting a write back to the rpt... its game over with old SSD's i have had that happen, near million IOs... 5seconds a frame... yeah thats 5seconds! A frame. It can happen on newer SSDs too if they have low cache and lame controller... but raid on a dedicated card ($$) the lame old ones can work ok, speed and the cache/cpu of a dedicated will handle it

[1longtime 10]

if your getting a write back to the rpt... its game over with old SSD's i have had that happen, near million IOs... 5seconds a frame... yeah thats 5seconds! A frame. It can happen on newer SSDs too if they have low cache and lame controller... but raid on a dedicated card ($$) the lame old ones can work ok, speed and the cache/cpu of a dedicated will handle it

Very true, but I'm not having that issue with my OCZ Vertex (64MB cache). I actually captured it doing a write to the RPT, which you can see from the screenshots I posted on page 5 in this thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1456467&postcount=45

The "write" is 1ms, but of course probably cached and takes more like 5-20ms or more in reality, but the caching makes that transparent to the system, so we won't notice. Obviously if it's too "write-heavy" the cache will eventually have to catch up, but I can't see that as being a common problem in a gaming application.

Edited October 10, 2009 by 1longtime

[4 IN 1 0]

since you guys are talking about SSDs here is something for you

maybe someone can run ARMA2 with this setup to see if they can make the damn gamn run faster?:D

[JuggernautOfWar 1]

Now I want an SSD (or 24 :)) thanks a LOT guys, now I have to waste my money on one more part for my PC...

[Pyronick 21]

Hehe, wait until the SAS2 spec is out with TRIM commands. Then the SSD craze will really begin.

SATA only eats CPU power and has long command queues.

[EDcase 87]

1longtime: I've ordered a 30Gb vertex for ARMA2 ;)

What Firmware do you have?

The latest (1.3) supports TRIM though apparently its not active in Windows7 yet. OCZ have released the "Garbage collector" utility to do the cleanup manually.

Have you tried it?

Edited November 3, 2009 by EDcase

[Freebie 10]

I'm a bit "light" on computer knowledge so I'm kind of trying to convey what I "heard" from someone else about SSD's.... Can someone with computer smarts confirm or deny these....

1) What I heard was that running Windows XP on an SSD is no good as what gets written to the drive doesn't get automatically deleted afterwards. It just builds up until the drive gets quite full and the initial big performance boost goes down the tube for good.

2) Apparently this isn't a problem with W7 though.

3) I have Windows XP as I found that this runs Arma 2 best on my system. So this is my question..... Assuming that 1) and 2) are fairly correct then does this mean there's no way to run Arma 2 on XP installed on an SSD? Or does that garbage collector thingy work with XP? Or is there another way to keep the drive working at optimum performance with XP?

[tonygrunt 10]

Simple answer, you can use SSDs with XP and maintain performance. SSDs with garbage collection work regardless the OS, this is the way I'm using mine at the moment. You can also perform a manual Trim command (that is the functionality of the W7 you are speaking of) as long as the drive supports it and have a utility provided from the manufacturer (wiper.exe for OCZ).

For more information on SSD I recommend visiting the OCZ SSD forums and reading some posts:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=186

[kklownboy 43]

...

1) What I heard was that running Windows XP on an SSD is no good as what gets written to the drive doesn't get automatically deleted afterwards. It just builds up until the drive gets quite full and the initial big performance boost goes down the tube for good.

...

If and when your SSD "fills up" and slows down, just format it and start over. I use my SSD ONLY for Arma2, so i dont wory about all the hacks/tricks to make the OS/browser ect run nice. I never delete anything from my SSD, just rename folders, so that way i know what is really being reported as capacity. Easy to format and install A2 then copy over ACE, CAA1 ect. Also i dont use Steam on my SSD(anymore).

[TimRiceSE 10]

TRIM is available for a lot of SSDs now as well, which stops the slowdown in the first place.

[AnimalMother92 10]

i got an Intel X25-M G2 SSD for xmas and coming from a VelociRaptor I can definitely say there's a big difference. Lovin my SSD

[Tankbuster 1747]

While I'm waiting for the cash to build up to buy an SSD, I've copied my entire game directory, all 8.2GB of it to a USB drive. I know that i's sequential read speed is much slower than my 500GB Spinpoint, but the much lower access time more than makes up for this. I get no texture lag anymore, no slowdowns, faster game loads and slightly better FPS.

The drive in question is a 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager. I've put it in a USB port that's directly attached to the motherboard header. It's average read speed is (only) 28MB/s and it's average access time is 0.7 ms.

[cjph 0]

I've just ordered a Kingston SSDNow 40Gb (I believe it is a re-badged Intel drive) for £79to put Arma2 on (I use a 6Gb RAMdisk at the moment). I tried a couple of cheap flashdrives I had sitting around but had various problems with them, so opted for the SSD. Just wondering now whether to use the disk to host just addon files (ACE etc) or move the whole contents of the 37Gb Raptor to the new drive.