Here's how I got ARMA2 to perform smoothly using RAMDISK

[cjph 0]

@cjph - Thanks for the tip! if they load up into ramdisk automatically on startup, it will definitely be the IDEAL solution! :) Anyways, I will put in another 4gb like you did before I try again. 1gb ramdisk really doesn't do much..mmmm... maybe just use ramdisk for ACEX since there soooo many new textures in that?

I think ACE/ACEX is not as heavy on the system as you might think - I played for one night with ACE/ACEX on my old gen raptor and there was no significant performance hit I could tell compared to a stack of addons I was using before. Moving it to a RAMdisk did improve things though.

@Tankbuster - afraid my USB stick turned into a WOM (write only memory) so I can't show how it was performing, but from what I remember in game performance was improved and only the loading time was impacted (I would guess as it involves big reads which would take longer on the USB stick). I have been trying to borrow a 16Gb stick to see the impact of moving the whole Addons folder, but have not been able to get one as yet and have too many present to buy from Christmas.

[Freebie 10]

Luhgnut;1514614']yes' date=' exactly. Make sure the bisign files stay with the pbo's and you're gold. Even though the flashdrives aren't able to xfer data as fast, for some reason, I get no stutters doing it this way at all. Maybe cause it's on a separate channel or something. but you have it right. Make sure you load the "core" bohemia pbo's first so they get top priority. then load your other goodies.[/quote']

OK thanks. I don't think it's really worked though.

I copied the C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\AddOns folder to my 16GB USB thumb drive which shows up as drive E. I then created another folder on it which I called @USB and placed the AddOns folder inside that.

Then I changed my Arma2 desktop icon shortcut target line to "C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\arma2.exe" -nosplash -mod=E:\@USB

It loads and plays ok, even seems to load a little faster, but I still get the usual stutter and pop-ins.

Have I done something wrong?

[.kju 3244]

Move your ArmA2\addons folder and you will know for sure.

[jasonnoguchi 11]

OK thanks. I don't think it's really worked though.

I copied the C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\AddOns folder to my 16GB USB thumb drive which shows up as drive E. I then created another folder on it which I called @USB and placed the AddOns folder inside that.

Then I changed my Arma2 desktop icon shortcut target line to "C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\arma2.exe" -nosplash -mod=E:\@USB

It loads and plays ok, even seems to load a little faster, but I still get the usual stutter and pop-ins.

Have I done something wrong?

Did you move the original addon folder into a disabled folder or did you just leave it there? If you left it there, ArmA2 will STILL load that folder BEFORE letting the mod overwrite it. Obviously then it will always check between the original and the mod to see which to display. Move that entire original addon folder into a disabled folder and see what happens.

[-RIP- Luhgnut 10]

Did you move the original addon folder into a disabled folder or did you just leave it there? If you left it there, ArmA2 will STILL load that folder BEFORE letting the mod overwrite it. Obviously then it will always check between the original and the mod to see which to display. Move that entire original addon folder into a disabled folder and see what happens.

have to move them. Copying won't work.

Remember, after a major patch, delete the old ones, and move the new ones to your thumb-d. So when 1.05 comes out, you'll have to do it again. The Beta's don't have this limitation.

[Freebie 10]

I cut/pasted the AddOns folder to my USB drive. So it's only on my USB drive. I just checked in the C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2 folder and it's definately not there.

Does it matter that I've got several other things on the USB drive? There's still about 6.5GB free space on it. Can't understand why it's not working when it works for everyone else :confused:

[jasonnoguchi 11]

@freebie, maybe paste your shortcut for us along with your system spec? I don't think this idea works if your cpu is under par in the first place.

[Nazul 10]

Im going to try the USB stick method. How are you loading the USB as a mod folder? Just using SYMLINK?

nevermind, sorted.

Edited December 15, 2009 by Nazul

[Freebie 10]

@freebie, maybe paste your shortcut for us along with your system spec? I don't think this idea works if your cpu is under par in the first place.

OK my entire shortcut line is... "C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\arma2.exe" -nosplash -mod=E:\@USB -mod=@MODS

AddOns folder is in E:\@USB and I've got a few mods in @MODS which is still in my default Arma 2 folder.

It's not a PC performance issue as I've got a pretty decent system. It runs Arma2 on high-very high settings and does a good job of it.

Guess this performance boost method doesn't work for everyone. It's not so much the stuttering as I don't get a lot of that anyway but the 'pop-in' graphics is really what grinds my gears.

[jasonnoguchi 11]

Why do you have 2 mod tags? I don't know what the effects may be but it should just be -mod=e:\@USB;@MODS

If it doesn't work for you, then your bottleneck may be somewhere else. There are many factors why stuttering happens in ArmA and you may have to go through all possibilities like I did. For me, the USB method works as well as my ramdisk. It does not get rid of 100% of the stutters, not even my ramdisk did, maybe because I never transferred the whole folder but I experience only about 10% of the frequency of stutters. I also realised lately that stutters are also VERY AI dependant. When there are a lot of AI at work, stutters increase as well, so the bottleneck could be anywhere.

[Freebie 10]

Why do you have 2 mod tags? I don't know what the effects may be but it should just be -mod=e:\@USB;@MODS

Changed it but still the same. Thanks anyway. Hopefully there'll be another work around for the texture pop-in in the future.

[Dwarden 1125]

do people realize usual USB drives aren't that fast ?

this covers seek times , transfer speeds not to mention USB polling cycles (relies highly on quality of USB I/O chip and drivers) which may cause quite CPU load

there is very limited amount of very qualite USB flash drives which are quite often also released with E-SATA interface which can beat HDD

note i dont speak about USB SSD drives as that's completely different price tag

[-RIP- Luhgnut 10]

do people realize usual USB drives aren't that fast ?

this covers seek times , transfer speeds not to mention USB polling cycles (relies highly on quality of USB I/O chip and drivers) which may cause quite CPU load

there is very limited amount of very qualite USB flash drives which are quite often also released with E-SATA interface which can beat HDD

note i dont speak about USB SSD drives as that's completely different price tag

yeah. but for some reason (prolly moon wobble) it smoothed out micro-glitches.

Now USB 3.0 comes out. whoot.

[King Haggis 0]

Note that bad overclocks can cause your game to stutter. I once had my CPU set to 3.8 GHz. and the game flew like sh** off a shovel. In other words, it was awesome. Next day, I raised my clockspeed to 4.0GHz. and tried an as low as possible CPU voltage for that clockspeed. The system was running stable and Fraps monitored a higher framerate within ArmA 2 than with my 3.8 clock but I found the game to run very sluggish. Upping the voltage made the game smooth again. Maybe more people have that problem, trying to keep their voltages as low as possible and their clocks as high as possible may give weird results in ArmA 2.

My game runs ultrasmooth now that my system is correctly overclocked. And agreed about the USB HDD's. They suck. Better buy E-SATA HDD's or decent internal SSD's or regular SATA's. USB is made to connect printers and webcams :-)

Just my 2 cents...

[MrBump 10]

do people realize usual USB drives aren't that fast ?

this covers seek times , transfer speeds not to mention USB polling cycles (relies highly on quality of USB I/O chip and drivers) which may cause quite CPU load

there is very limited amount of very qualite USB flash drives which are quite often also released with E-SATA interface which can beat HDD

note i dont speak about USB SSD drives as that's completely different price tag

My understanding is that yes, in sequential reads, like copying files, a standard hard drive will easily hammer a Flash drive, in HD Tools my Caviar Black HD has an average read speed of 90Mbs per second and my Flash drive does a flat 18Mb. However the seek time of the Flash drive is 0.7ms compared to 13ms for the HD, this means for instance, that when transfering smaller 64Kb chunk sizes the Flash drive can do 16.331Mb/s compared with just 4.753Mb/s for the HD. Now qwertz said that he found Arma 2 reads an average chunk size of 97Kb, surely this means that the Flash drive would actually be the fastest in this case?

Anyway I'm sure there are lots of variables but in my testing, putting part of the Addon pbos on the Flash drive has removed a lot of the stuttering, esp the big jump caused when the ACM or SOM modules load new models, in Arma Mark it's smoother, the overall score is very slighly better, also and the harddrive is not making as much noise, it a win win for me... it'll do till SSD are cheap enough.

Also I'm not sure what relevance polling rate has if any, but there is no increased cpu usage.

[Rakov 0]

This really did make things smooth.. (after I tweaked my bios, which did not like my new upgrade to 8gig) But the nice and easy tutorial really worked... I'd like to try this in some of my other sims... but is ARMA pretty much unique in its passion for HDD, as opposed to say, Rise of Flight or lock on... etc...

[cjph 0]

My understanding is that yes, in sequential reads, like copying files, a standard hard drive will easily hammer a Flash drive, in HD Tools my Caviar Black HD has an average read speed of 90Mbs per second and my Flash drive does a flat 18Mb. However the seek time of the Flash drive is 0.7ms compared to 13ms for the HD, this means for instance, that when transfering smaller 64Kb chunk sizes the Flash drive can do 16.331Mb/s compared with just 4.753Mb/s for the HD. Now qwertz said that he found Arma 2 reads an average chunk size of 97Kb, surely this means that the Flash drive would actually be the fastest in this case?

Anyway I'm sure there are lots of variables but in my testing, putting part of the Addon pbos on the Flash drive has removed a lot of the stuttering, esp the big jump caused when the ACM or SOM modules load new models, in Arma Mark it's smoother, the overall score is very slighly better, also and the harddrive is not making as much noise, it a win win for me... it'll do till SSD are cheap enough.

Also I'm not sure what relevance polling rate has if any, but there is no increased cpu usage.

So what I wonder is, Qwetzs' excellent original work on this highlighted the 3.21Gb of pbos which are most frequently accessed and so benefit the most from moving to a RAM disk (leaving approx 5Gb of files on a relatively slow HDD). Like most people I am limited to the size of RAM disk, but wonder if a slightly different mix could perform better, ie if you knew the pbos which were accessed only for 100kb or smaller transfers, maybe loading them to a USB drive would be more efficient ? Perhaps a RAM disk would be overkill for these files ?

What I am thinking about is a USB drive for the group of pbos with small (<100kb) transfers, then putting the remaining most accessed files onto a RAM disk if you have one, then what is left (which would be the less often accessed pbos involving larger transfers) on the HDD. I think I remember Ohara posting that the optimum setup for Arma2 is a number of SSD small drives.

It is just a thought - with a limit of 6Gb on my RAM disk there are a number of big files still on the HDD - anims, sounds etc which may still cause occasional stuttering. And of course, I don't know if there is a list of the pbos with only small transfers.

I should also add that with the cost of a fast USB stick the option of a small SSD which could hold the remaining pbos and additional mods is looking more compelling.

[Amuro 10]

Regarding moving paging file to a secondary physical drive, do you still need to keep a small paging file on the system drive (c:\), say 1GB? For Vista, I remember I read it somewhere that you need to do that, but not sure if that's really necessary for Win 7.

[MrBump 10]

I have been doing a lot of testing using Windows 7's Resource Manager that shows that, apart from a select few pbo's, a flash drive is def faster than a hard drive for streaming:

Have a look, this is a real-time screen during Arma Mark, it's listed by access time: C is my disk drive, G is my Flash drive and K is a small Ram drive for a few pbos that didn't perform well on the flash drive...

One thing I don't understand though is why the caa1 stuff is being loaded??? Arma Mark doesn't use caa1 stuff...

Edited December 18, 2009 by MrBump

[.kju 3244]

caa1 misc and buildings replace arma2 addons. Otherwise it would not work.

If you don't need caa1 in the game session, you can just not load it along.

[MrBump 10]

caa1 misc and buildings replace arma2 addons. Otherwise it would not work.

If you don't need caa1 in the game session, you can just not load it along.

Oh right, I thought caa1 was just for when you're playing on Armed Assault islands, I didn't know it relaced default pbos on bis islands like Chernarus.

[.kju 3244]

BI uses the same namespace/prefix/container for those two.

So merging them was the least troublesome solution for everyone.

Edited December 19, 2009 by kju

[MrBump 10]

Thanks for info kju and thanks for caa1!

[Rakov 0]

Any special considerations for how the patch gets installed for us Ramdiskers?

[Kardis 10]

Sry for the stupid question I've been trying really hard to follow this forum with the amount to detail and info in it is rather hard. Ok here I go, I'm running XP 32bit but 6 gigs of DDR3, windows only shows 3 in use, tried Ramdisk but I won't allow me to use more than 3 gigs, and its the memory thats in usage (or the memory that XP sees). Is there a way for it ramdisk to use the 3 that is not in usage as a seperate ram drive?? and if so how?