Running Arma2 from SSD

[Tankbuster 1733]

Yeah, sure, in a day or two. W7 and my sound card are having a spat and I'm waiting on delivery of a new Xonar. :)

[zoog 18]

Yeah, sure, in a day or two. W7 and my sound card are having a spat and I'm waiting on delivery of a new Xonar. :)

Don't bother for me, unless someone else is interested, I just came back from the shop with the X25-M 80GB

[Dead3yez 0]

Just got myself one of these yesterday:

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_agility_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

;D

I will report later when I get home and plug this baby in. Along with a clean operating system on a new seperate HDD.

[Tankbuster 1733]

Don't bother for me, unless someone else is interested, I just came back from the shop with the X25-M 80GB

Welcome to the fast club, dude.

[EDcase 87]

Anyone know the best "File Allocation Unit Size" to use when formating the drive?

[Dead3yez 0]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314878

Why not search? It might depend on which SSD you have.

however, I think default would work fine.

[zoog 18]

Well, I just tested a few things with a clean install (since my old harddisk completly died), but somehow my performance is actually worse than when I was using a regular SATA disk (in ArmA 2 mind you, Windows is freaking fast). Something must be wrong O.o When using the same settings I now get a lot of slowdowns when looking left and right in the chopper, and also when flying over cities (armory). Very strange. TRIM is enabled and I'm using the same Windows (only difference is Professional instead of the RC1).

Might be my latest vid drivers, on my old hdd I hadn't updated for a while so I was using something like 9.9 instead of 9.12 which I'm using now. Haven't been able to update my firmware yet, since the firmware doesn't recognizes the SSD (although it's set to AHCI mode). I'll be trying to update using a different SATA connection (seems this works for some people).

Anyhow, something is not quit right...

[zoog 18]

I've been testing some more, just me with a chopper in the editor and I'm getting slowdowns as low as 6 to 7 fps. Simply looking around drops the FPS to about 12 ~ 16. If I look left and right while flying it goes down to 10 ~ 18 FPS.

I never had any slowdown problems with my regular HDD using the same settings. Anyone has any idea what I could try out?

[kklownboy 43]

I've been testing some more, just me with a chopper in the editor and I'm getting slowdowns as low as 6 to 7 fps. Simply looking around drops the FPS to about 12 ~ 16. If I look left and right while flying it goes down to 10 ~ 18 FPS.

I never had any slowdown problems with my regular HDD using the same settings. Anyone has any idea what I could try out?

put your Game on its own drive, OS on another.

[Dead3yez 0]

Gnat;1529512']Not sure if it was the 1.05 patch or the new computer' date=' but the LOD detail at larger distances is AWESOME. Much more detailed screens![/quote']

It is the SSD, for me. :D

After using mine now for a little bit there WAS a noticeable change in loading times, but not a massive amount.

LOD detail is very nice now. Less stutter. The game 'feels' much more 'stable'. Faster loading times.[edit]Better FPS when zoomed in with scope etc. and slightly better fps overall.

That's all I have to report. :)

It's worth it if you love ArmA2.

Edited January 24, 2010 by Dead3yez

[thedudeabides 40]

So is a SSD worth it or not? Is it better to wait until the tech is a little more advanced?

[zoog 18]

put your Game on its own drive, OS on another.

Even when using an SSD? I thought the whole idea behind an SSD was that it has so much read speed etc. I never had this problem with my old regular HDD which also had the OS and ArmA on the same disk, although it was on a seperate partition. I think it would be a bit over the top to get another SSD for 210 euro...

[Dead3yez 0]

Even when using an SSD? I thought the whole idea behind an SSD was that it has so much read speed etc. I never had this problem with my old regular HDD which also had the OS and ArmA on the same disk, although it was on a seperate partition. I think it would be a bit over the top to get another SSD for 210 euro...

Do you have pagefile disabled? disable it on the SSD if you do.

[zoog 18]

Today I tried all the SSD tweaks like disabling pagefile, search indexing, superfetch etc. But still it runs like crap with slowdowns to ~7 fps :(

[kklownboy 43]

Even when using an SSD? I thought the whole idea behind an SSD was that it has so much read speed etc. I never had this problem with my old regular HDD which also had the OS and ArmA on the same disk, although it was on a seperate partition. I think it would be a bit over the top to get another SSD for 210 euro...

Yes even when using a SSD... Not sure why your slowdowns are so much? Also dont partition SSDs... Tho many will say BS, i say games on there own SSD, System on a fast HDD, and ( i came around to this) your page on a different HDD. My guess is you are getting write slowdowns... Most veteran SSD users do not have there My Documents and Browser cache ect on the SSD... I have had terrible issues using Steam, and RPTs being written to SSD... so i just separated the game(dvd not Steam!) from the OS, a HDD for 40$ for your OS ...

The next question is what is your SATA controller on your Mother board? and what type of driver are you using? Native, AHIC, ect?

[zoog 18]

Currently I have the OS on the SSD because I want quick boot times and also the game is installed there. At this time I don't have an extra HDD because it's sent back to the supplier because it broke down. It's getting replaced so I need to wait a bit more until I get it back.

I have the SB750 chipset for SATA on my mobo and tried both AHCI and IDE settings in the BIOS and tried both AHCI drivers from official AMD and from Windows 7.

I got these speeds, I think that last row is way too low (I see people getting 4k write speeds in the +50mb/s):

(right now I even get as low as 12.93 / 18.18 for the last row < not in this screenshot)

Edited January 24, 2010 by zoog

[Dead3yez 0]

They look 'OK', I have similar results.

Are you sure you have latest directx installed:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

maybe openAL (oalinst) might help:

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx

At a last resort you may want to try latest firmware.

[Väinämöinen 0]

SSDs are shitty. Put Arma2 on ramdrive. That will lessen the stuttering some:

Its still too slow in my opinion. When you respawn in MP game it takes some time to load all surrounding textures.

[zoog 18]

They look 'OK', I have similar results.

Are you sure you have latest directx installed:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

maybe openAL (oalinst) might help:

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx

At a last resort you may want to try latest firmware.

Thanks for the suggestions. It seems that I fixed the problem for now. I thought about which things changed since I got the SSD and that was a) the SSD as harddrive and b) the latest video card drivers. In my previous system with the normal HDD I used the Ati 9.9 drivers while in this freshly installed pc with SSD I used the 9.12 drivers.

I reinstalled Windows today but this time I downloaded the older 9.9 drivers, and the slowdowns are gone.

Another problem arised though, now some objects take 3+ seconds to show up (like a house or church) and sometimes they stay untextured for 7+ seconds (white model). This happens quite a lot (about 5 times in 2 minutes walking through Chernagorsk).

[EDcase 87]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314878

Why not search? It might depend on which SSD you have.

however, I think default would work fine.

Yeah, I did search and I know what it is. I was asking if anyone knew the best size to use with ARMA because all the information available relates to installing an OS on an SSD and not a game with constant reads.

[papoose244 10]

Arma 2 has to be installed on the SSD for it to have an effecnt correct?you cant install arma on a second harddrive and launch the game threw the SSD.

Edited January 25, 2010 by papoose244

[therev709 10]

Arma 2 has to be installed on the SSD for it to have an effecnt correct?you cant install arma on a second harddrive and launch the game threw the SSD.

to be honest, and im no genius when it comes to computers so correct me if im wrong, but i dont think that even makes sense . . .

[chiefredcloud 10]

The program, in this case ArmA has to be on the drive that you run (the ssd here) it from. Yes the SSD. And keep in mind, like normal hard drives, not all SSD's are created equal. Some by their architechure are faster than others.

[pieterbaarlo 10]

Arma 2 has to be installed on the SSD for it to have an effecnt correct?you cant install arma on a second harddrive and launch the game threw the SSD.

Yes and No.

Nope it doesnt need to be installed on the drive.

However, you do need arma on the SSD.

So, a simple copy your ArmA dir to the ssd, and lauch arma from the SSD and youre done.

A complete reinstall isnt neccesary.

Don't bother for me, unless someone else is interested, I just came back from the shop with the X25-M 80GB

Whats the rest of your specs zoog? and, do you have your OS on the ssd?

i have the 120gb OCZ xtreme.

it might be nice to do some testing to see the performance difference in reallife benchmarks.

Same for you deadeyez! you have an ocz agility, i got the Vertex series. ( http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_vertex_ex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd )

All these drives have different write speeds. it might be interesting to compare

Edited June 4, 2010 by pieterbaarlo

[R3MF 0]

Yes and No.

Nope it doesnt need to be installed on the drive.

However, you do need arma on the SSD.

So, a simple copy your ArmA dir to the ssd, and lauch arma from the SSD and youre done.

A complete reinstall isnt neccesary.

are there no horrible registry entries?

if it really is as easy as cut-n-pasting the install folder then creating a new shortcut i will be delighted.........