Running Arma2 from SSD

[Yoma 0]

How come it doesn't speed up loading/paging when the game is actually loaded? Surely as far the HD is concerned it shouldn't be that much different to loading an application, I mean it's just data transferred from the disk, right? I don't think I would bother with SSD if it wont speed up HD/file access in game, load times aren't really that big of a deal, you only have to load it once.

Maybe Ill get one in a year or two when they are competing on par with mechanical HD's.

Actually with the streaming engine i'm quite sure stuff get's loaded from disk to memory and then dumped all the time. So having a disk with really fast readspeed and near 0 accesstime might matter more ingame then you think.

While the purring HD is still looking for the correct texture, my silent SSD is allready looking for 3 new ones :-)

Of course if it were possible to further optimise the streaming engine, maybe you wouldn't notice much difference, but today i think you do. Of course the rest of your system will need to be up to speed as well, no point in having a fast SSD if it's X-mas by the time the data reaches your VGA :D

[1longtime 10]

This was a hot topic for me, so I wrote a rather long post about it. I'll link to that post in a moment, but first to address some of the questions I read earlier in this thread:

Q) Should the pagefile be on my SSD?

A) Yes.

"Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. [...] In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD."

Source directly quoted from here (thanks to the post by Some Kind Of Guy, above):

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Q) Will an SSD improve performance with Arma2?

A) Yes and no. Let me start with the "yes": I saw stuttering completely stop on my machine, even in complex environments like cities and dense forests, because large texture files are no longer slowing down the rendering. The difference on my eyes was tremendous and immediate. The ArmaIIMark scores increased as well. Now for the "no" part: an SSD will NOT improve your frames per second. However, it will remove the disk limitations that you are probably experiencing (although you may not be aware of it). Got stuttering in Elektroz even though you have a beefy video card and a Quad Core or better? Yeah, probably your disk loading textures, and you will probably be amazed by an SSD. If you want to read more, I created a long post with screenshots of disk performance here:

http://www.tacticalgamer.com/arma-2-general-discussion/148235-performance-ssd-armed-assault-2-a.html

Here's my disclaimer: if you have a weak machine, don't expect an SSD to be a magic bullet. Don't be the guy with a single core machine and a five year old video card who spends $300 on an SSD and complains about a lack of increased performance. This is only my experience and what I feel justifies it with some evidence (ie-- Performance Monitor screenshots and some research I've done). I didn't see much info on this subject, so I'm posting this solely to share my experiences, not to provide Customer Service.

Hope this helps.

Edited October 1, 2009 by 1longtime

[Leopardi 0]

Still a looong way before SSD comes down to reasonable prices.

[1longtime 10]

Still a looong way before SSD comes down to reasonable prices.

Depends on what you think is reasonable, I guess. $300 for 120GB.

BTW, shop carefully if you do choose an SSD. The models with a write cache are a must have.

[no use for a name 0]

Still a looong way before SSD comes down to reasonable prices.

AND a way to go before they're more reliable then standard HDD's, although they're getting closer

[1longtime 10]

AND a way to go before they're more reliable then standard HDD's, although they're getting closer

Ok, I really need to stop stalking this thread, but I have to chime in again:

Your statement is not necessarily true.

Virtually all newer SSDs, even the less resilient MLC drives, now use wear-leveling controllers so a single-cell is not repeatedly written to. The cheaper drives now can handle an estimated 10,000 writes to a single memory cell before that cell will fail. When the cell goes "bad" it is marked as invalid by the drive an operation will continue normally (ie-- it won't "crash" like when a traditional platter reaches failure).

It's estimated that the cheap MLC drives sold now with wear-leveling controllers can last 7-10 years or longer. My drive was $300 and came with a 2 year warranty, so who knows.

There's alot of info out there, so look around before you swallow the "SSDs wear out fast" theory.

[Helmut_AUT 0]

^What Longtime said.

My new system (to arrive in one or two weeks) has a Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD in it. I'm a discriminating user and not a pack rat, so my entire files currently are 80 gig (including music and digital pictures).

The Torqx has a 10 year (yes: TEN years) manufacturer warranty on it. And of all the SSDs sold in the shop where I have my system built, only one came back so far - with a controller error. In the same time a proportionally much larger amount of total mechanical HDs sold were returned.

I would say that's pretty damn reliable, especially given that even if you reach the limit read/write cycles, you get a read-only drive which will not work for the OS anymore, but allows you to fully recover your data.

[nouty 10]

An SSD would really be a dream for OS and games. The price is currently way too high for me though, I can get a single 300GB velociraptor cheaper than an 80GB SSD.

[1longtime 10]

An SSD would really be a dream for OS and games. The price is currently way too high for me though, I can get a single 300GB velociraptor cheaper than an 80GB SSD.

Velociraptor 300GB - $230 + tax

OCZ Vertex 120GB - $320 + tax (after $40 mail-in rebate)

It's all what you consider "way too high" for this:

Velociraptor average latency: 5.5 milliseconds.

OCZ average latency: < 0.1 milliseconds.

EDIT: If you can't tell, I'm seriously biased toward buying an SSD based on a) how happy I am with my purchase and b) how damn long I've been trying to get Arma2 to play to its full potential. So to me, this is the Best. Purchase. Evar. Gobuynow. Mention my name and get a free latte grande.

Edited October 1, 2009 by 1longtime

[aulias 10]

This article is a must read if your are interested in SSDs.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

[jmc 0]

I've got ArmA2 on a 30 Gig OCZ 155 read, 90 write.

I only see an improvement in load times...

hard drive- start to first menu - 35 sec

SSD- 22 sec

Was hoping to get rid of the ocassional studder as some mentioned here

but no luck.

I ran the DEMO benchmark mission in the full game

and still got the very noticable pause. It just happened several

seconds later then normal.

The 1.04-59210beta did jump the results from 44 to 52 FPS.

OT... sure would like to stop the map from loading color textures!

jmc

Edited October 2, 2009 by jmc

[Helmut_AUT 0]

I think the problem with SSDs is that many people just can't "restrict" themself to fewer files and data. I cleaned out two games I never play today, and I'm now at 64GB including my iTunes library, 10 installed games, lots of digital edited pictures, OS and applications.

If you can trade volume for speed, it's a godsend thing.

[.kju 3239]

jmc what texture settings do you use?

[1longtime 10]

I think the problem with SSDs is that many people just can't "restrict" themself to fewer files and data. I cleaned out two games I never play today, and I'm now at 64GB including my iTunes library, 10 installed games, lots of digital edited pictures, OS and applications.

If you can trade volume for speed, it's a godsend thing.

Hey Helmut, you can still keep the traditional disks for many apps, even all of your other games if you like. If you're a Steam user, there's even a trick to put Arma in a different location than your Steam folder (and on your new SSD). Here's the the post on how to create a SYMLINK in Windows (or just Google it):

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?p=1431426

You may end up thinking hard about what apps will live where, and where your OS will live in particular. I have the OS installed in two places actually... once on SSD and once on HDD. I almost always boot off the SSD, but I didn't feel like removing the OS that was already on my HDD. Most of the apps stayed where they were on the HDD, and I moved or reinstalled a few "fast" apps on my SSD (such as Arma of course). I even keep a very small separate partition on my SSD just for Windows XP (specifically for Arma 2).

But iTunes and movies and music? Nah, that can stay on the HDD platters.

If you actually REMOVED the old drives, then I understand what you're saying. Even with 120GB, I couldn't possibly fit into that space without HDDs. After years of buying games on Steam, I could almost fill that with games alone. So don't throw away your HDDs.

jmc: Sounds like something else is slowing you down or something else is wrong in general. An HDD average latency is minimum 5ms and an SSD is usually less than 0.1ms, so loading textures from disk should not be your bottleneck.

Edited October 2, 2009 by 1longtime

[berghoff 11]

I also have been running ArmA II on an Intel Postville SSD and the stutter is completely gone here. Loading from the harddisk no longer slows down the game. Loading times are also short.

But biggest improvement is noticed in Win 7. Upgrading to this SSD was a much better experience than placing a 300eu gfx card in my system. Everything is so smooth now ^_^.

[bangtail 0]

I've tried a few different SSD's. I just grabbed a Corsair 256 (mainly for the size) but I have to say that the Intel's are the absolute business.

If you are in the market for an SSD, go Intel. Of the different SSDs I've owned, they are easily the best.

Eth

[jmc 0]

jmc what texture settings do you use?

Visibilty 2046

interface res 1900X1200

3D res 1900X1200

Texture Detail- Very High

Video Memory- Very High

AF- LOW

AA- LOW

Terrain Detail- Very Low

Object Detail- Very High

Shadow Detail- Normal

PostProcess- Disabled

Aspect ratio 16:10

Q9450/4Gig ram

XP32

Ati 4870 1Gig

Beta 1.04-59210

Full game benchmark mission (from DEMO)- 52

Hmm, turned off AA and FPS only jumped to 58

On simple misson, no AI, just looking at village the FPS

jumps from 50 to 88 with AA off.

jmc

Edited October 3, 2009 by jmc

[.kju 3239]

Try

Texture Detail and Video Memory- normal

[1longtime 10]

Visibilty 2046

interface res 1900X1200

3D res 1900X1200

Texture Detail- Very High

Video Memory- Very High

AF- LOW

AA- LOW

Terrain Detail- Very Low

Object Detail- Very High

Shadow Detail- Normal

PostProcess- Disabled

Aspect ratio 16:10

Q9450/4Gig ram

XP32

Ati 4870 1Gig

Beta 1.04-59210

Full game benchmark mission (from DEMO)- 52

Hmm, turned off AA and FPS only jumped to 58

On simple misson, no AI, just looking at village the FPS

jumps from 50 to 88 with AA off.

jmc

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?

[1longtime 10]

Here are my screenshots of disk activity from before (with an old 7,200 RPM drive) and after (a new SSD 120GB for around $300 + tax [after rebate]) of Test #1 from ArmaIIMark:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Good luck, hope this helped.

Edited October 7, 2009 by 1longtime
just the screenshots now

[W0lle 1042]

1longtime

Merged your thread with this one, simply because your post has nothing to do with troubleshooting.

Besides that, this thread - in which you already posted - covers the theme already, there is no need to clutter the forums even more.

Normally you should get a warning for starting a new thread while another one exists (and you knew that it does exist).

[1longtime 10]

Wow, that warning is a real kick in the teeth.

You just made this info harder to find, which doesn't help anyone.

Edited October 7, 2009 by 1longtime

[FraG_AU 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.

[hamis 0]

@ 1longtime

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

[tonygrunt 10]

@ 1longtime

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

Did the test on my setup 2*Vertex120G vs 2*WD RaptorX 150G both in Raid0. Startup parameters were "-winxp -nosplash".

20 sec with the vertex vs 31 sec with the raptor.