Possible FPS gain with UltimateDefrag?

[yarisbandit 10]

Sorry - I meant "UltimateDefrag" in the thread title...

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Hi all,

Came across Arma 2 about two weeks ago, bought it and had the usual issues with old pc, poor performance etc. But i stuck with all the tweaking suggested to improve performance since it's a fantastic game.

I've a fairly old rig, Athlon X2 4200+, 8800GT, 4gig of ram and some oldish hard drives, but i've the CPU overclocked from 2.2 to 2.53 Ghz which made the game *almost* playable (16-18 FPS, with drops to 13-14 near small towns). I'm running win7 x64.

The biggest problem was the stuttering, where FPS would randomly jump from 17 or 18 down to 13 or 14 and then back up again. Often when nearing towns (or when turning to look at buildings) the FPS would stutter down to 4/5/6/7 for an instant before steadying out at about 13-14.

It was also obvious in the chopper where as new forests were popping into the draw distance the frame rate was suffering very badly.

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So i figured... maybe it's the loading of objects from disk that's the problem?

I downloaded UltimateDefrag and used it to physically move the Arma2 folder and files to the outside (fastest part) of the disk. It has a feature "High Performance" that lets you select the files to move.

Right away my copy of Arma2 jumped up about 3-4 FPS. More importantly the stuttering and sudden FPS drops are much reduced - I'm now able to get about 20-21 FPS in forests and out in the open and the drops near buildings are only to 17-18 without the big jerk to single figure FPS's when the buildings come on-screen.

I've by no means the prettiest settings but I can now run 1024x768 with objects set to normal (long grass to hide in...) and very high post processing (to put some lipstick on the pig!!!)

Hopefully this might work for others on here also :) I'm also hopeful that this + future patches might get me to the all elusive 25fps!!!

Anyone want to try this to confirm or did i just get lucky?

---------- Post added at 12:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:08 AM ----------

PS steps to do this:

1. download and install UltimateDefrag free version. Run it.

2. Menu - Tools > Options. Click the hard drive aram2 is installed on

3. Under "High performance" turn off automatic, check "Custom" and click "Select files"

4. Locate your arma2 folder, check it and click the button to add it to the files list.

5. Go Ok > Ok back to the main menu

6. Click the drive arma2 is installed on

7. Choose "Folder/File name" radio option

8. Click options next to "Folder/File name"

9. Check the first two checkboxes and uncheck the last 2 checkboxes. Go ok.

10. Click start, watch it run away for a few minutes and wait for it to finish.

11. Test it out!!!

Looking forward to seeing if this helps anyone else :cool:

[-=seany=- 5]

hmm maybe worth trying. I see your on windows7 though and supposedly It and Vista removed the need for defragging because they do it on the fly in the background. Although, it may have been that "High performance" option that did it.

[Leopardi 0]

Worse than PerfectDisk.

[Greg 0]

I tried something similar a week ago.

1) I defragged the whole drive, moving data toward the outside of the disk.

2) Installed the game on a 2nd larger and faster drive that was nearly empty.

Neither of these produced a speed increase. (Measured using the demo benchmark, and the demo benchmark in the full game.)

This makes sense. Although faster drives should allow you to load new scenery faster, the loading is done asynchronously in a background thread. With slower hard disk access, you simply wait longer for the data to arrive in memory and get switched from lower LOD to higher LOD, or from absent to present.

Edited July 31, 2009 by Greg

[no use for a name 0]

I've also had a pretty noticeable increase and stutter reduction by defragging. I was using the built-in defragger that comes with windows but it sucks. Once I used a good defrag (like Diskeeper) almost all my stuttering went away, and I got higher FPS in towns

[ck-claw 1]

This was a tip/trick for ArmA -and it helped me by moving the files to the outer edge of the disk.

Not tried it in ArmA 2

[ericodapinco 10]

I also use diskeeper... helped me with stuttering in Fallout 3.

Autodefrag option defrags more than only manual defrag with this program.

[43st 10]

Mydefrag (formally JkDefrag) has a similar script that optimizes the outer band of the hard drive platter area. It works well, but doesn't have as many options as UltimateDefrag.

UltimateDefrag did a good job when I tried it, but I didn't like that it moves archive files into the center of the disk. I see no reason why they all can't be at the edge, just with a preference toward the Windows and Games folders. (maybe there is an option for this that I may have missed)

[hnoor0077 0]

thanks for everything....

 

 

 

=== Solitaire ===

[anarky321 0]

necro-ing a 7 year old thread as your first post...well done