ArmA 2 I/O analysis results

[sbsmac 0]

But again, it is worth a try - it might well be that you can get rid of a substantial level of stutter at the expense of having a small number of extreme stutters and/or increased level loading times.

In other words,

Accesstime = latency + fetchSize/bandwidth

I've only skimmed this thread (at work) so apologies if I have missed this but has anyone tried to correlate the size of fetches against particular pbo's ? Ie, if structures.pbo is the one responsible for 1Mb fetches you are probably better off putting it on HDD than USB-drive.

What also doesn't add up for me is that the 'stutters' appear to be of much greater duration than the IOP duration. (Thought I may be misenterpreting the figures.) Anyone have a theory about what is going on here ?

[liquidpinky 11]

In other words,

Accesstime = latency + fetchSize/bandwidth

I've only skimmed this thread (at work) so apologies if I have missed this but has anyone tried to correlate the size of fetches against particular pbo's ? Ie, if structures.pbo is the one responsible for 1Mb fetches you are probably better off putting it on HDD than USB-drive.

What also doesn't add up for me is that the 'stutters' appear to be of much greater duration than the IOP duration. (Thought I may be misenterpreting the figures.) Anyone have a theory about what is going on here ?

I have upped my RamDisk to 5gb and put a 1.5gb pagefile on it, I then removed paging from my physical HDDs. This has removed a lot more stuttering again that was still present with loading files from RamDisk alone.

I am wondering if the whole pbo files are loaded, unpacked and then placed in cache to be individually loaded. For individual models and textures etc.

Maybe this shifting around of files is the bottleneck?

I still get some stuttering when I take a little one man invasion trip into Cherno on MP warfare servers.

MP Warfare servers are a real good way to see the performance difference BTW. ;)

[polecat.uk 11]

All this talk about ramdisks, thought this would be of intrest.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139716/Engineers_create_fingernail_size_chip_that_holds_1TB_of_data

[Dwarden 1125]

yeah but it will take at least 5 years before it reach end customer market ...

[polecat.uk 11]

i'll still be hear :)

[EDcase 87]

All this talk about ramdisks, thought this would be of intrest.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139716/Engineers_create_fingernail_size_chip_that_holds_1TB_of_data

Nah, this is what we want...

http://gizmodo.com/5168424/fusion+io-iodrive-duo-is-the-worlds-fastest-ssd

• Sustained read bandwidth: 1500 MB/sec (32k packet size)

• Sustained write bandwidth: 1400 MB/sec (32k packet size)

• Read IOPS: 186,000 (4k packet size)

• Write IOPS: 167,000 (4k packet size)

• Latency < 50 µsec

Takes a minute to sink in...

[...Yes, starting at £4000 its way out of budget but we can dream... ;)]

Edited October 23, 2009 by EDcase

[tcp 10]

And ArmA will have grown to a size and persisted with issues that can only be fixed by the next, next-gen hardware.

[Dwarden 1125]

always remember the CPU hit (depends lot on chipset and CPU) while using ramdrive

[Zeron 10]

And ArmA will have grown to a size and persisted with issues that can only be fixed by the next, next-gen hardware.

Actually all they should do is make a 64bit version and use the ram properly like it should be in 2009 ;)

[dogz 10]

@EDcase those fusions @ 80gig retail at about $4000 in AU so I wont be getting one no matter how fast :)

[Vipera 10]

Actually all they should do is make a 64bit version and use the ram properly like it should be in 2009 ;)

I agree 101%.

[lt_darkman 0]

With Windows 7 finally offering an OS good enough (and even cheap enough) to tempt everyone away from XP I can't see a reason why the next generation shouldn't be written to take advantage of 64-bit.

It does seem strange that a piece of software attempting so much is being hamstrung by an artificial limitation when most people who are likely to run it have spare capability left in their system.

Future potential > current implementation.

P

[S-M 10]

How come that huge picture is still allowed on the first post? :D

[frag85 10]

This morning I decided to mess around with RivaTuner using the PerformanceMonitor plugin.

here are my results after a couple minutes. I still have to tweak the multiplier to get the values correct but:

I had been running a monitor that reads disk read for a while to see how much A1 and A2 use the disk, but never set up the PerfMod.ini for Rivatuner to use I/O.

Ok, try #2. this one looks much better. :)

Edited October 23, 2009 by frag85
image link fix

[.kju 3244]

Is it possible to get an Office 2003 version of the sheet.

Even the 2007 compatibility pack did not work here.

Thanks!

[cjph 0]

Is it possible to get an Office 2003 version of the sheet.

Even the 2007 compatibility pack did not work here.

Thanks!

+1 for this.

[frag85 10]

99% of the spreadsheet works in Open Office. i have also tried converting it to .xls for Office 2003 (or anything pre-office 2007) and most of it works.

The only down side is that it takes 3-5 minutes to open (on 4.4ghz corei7 no less, maxing out 1 full core) and takes up 600mb of ram....

I sent the OP a PM earlier about this, and have a file almost ready to go.

Edited October 23, 2009 by frag85

[walker 0]

How come that huge picture is still allowed on the first post? :D

Hi S-M

Because what it says is important enough to the community.

The community has always appreciated proper scientific analysis and encouraged it.

This particular thread is a benefit to developers, modders, and players optimising their system. It tells us all a lot about how ArmA works.

Kind Regards walker

Edited October 23, 2009 by walker

[Leon86 13]

always remember the CPU hit (depends lot on chipset and CPU) while using ramdrive

I think that the cpu hit of the ramdrive while playing arma2 is almost neglectible. If you look at it it's not really that much data, just a bit fragmented. A file transfer from hd to ramdrive doen't stress my cpu much more then a file copy from hd to hd. Sure a copy from ramdrive to ramdrive stresses my cpu about 60% but a 1GB copy is done almost instantly, incomparable to Arma 2's traffic.

[EDcase 87]

Oops sorry, didn't mean to post.

[tcp 10]

Crysis only receives a 15% performance boost with the 64-bit version. However, I think that game is GPU-intensive. ArmA2 might benefit greatly since it's CPU and memory-intensive. Still, I don't think 64-bit technology is that great except on servers. They need to redesign the pathways on all interfaces of the motherboard to impress me.

[qwertz 10]

Crysis only receives a 15% performance boost with the 64-bit version. However, I think that game is GPU-intensive. ArmA2 might benefit greatly since it's CPU and memory-intensive. Still, I don't think 64-bit technology is that great except on servers. They need to redesign the pathways on all interfaces of the motherboard to impress me.

Yep, but it seems like the arma engine would specifically benefit from being able to allocate enough ram to cache/prefetch the game assets so it does not have to stream it from disk in real time. This would only work with 64bit. This is different from the effect of 64bit on CPU/GPU/Ram performance.

---------- Post added at 07:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:17 PM ----------

99% of the spreadsheet works in Open Office. i have also tried converting it to .xls for Office 2003 (or anything pre-office 2007) and most of it works.

The only down side is that it takes 3-5 minutes to open (on 4.4ghz corei7 no less, maxing out 1 full core) and takes up 600mb of ram....

I sent the OP a PM earlier about this, and have a file almost ready to go.

Hi Frag85, received your PM. I have tried to convert if to Office 2003 format, but the main problem (other than the adaption of some functions) is that pre-2007 office versions are limited to 7 nesting levels in formulas - I have used some lengthy formulas to extract/parse the information from the data output of ProcMon.

I can try to find more elegant/less nested solutions for this, but this needs some major rework - Excel is really a poor tool for this kind of work, but it is the only tool I am familiar with:-)

Will see what I can do - how many people need/want an Office 2003 version ?

It seems that this formula is the main culprit - it is extracting the correct PBO name from the ProcMon log, taking into account that path names are different from user to user - if anyone has a simpler solution, please let me know!

E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2\AddOns\anims.pbo

=IF(ISBLANK('2 - Data Input'!F9),"",IF(COUNTIF($L$2:$BI$2,TRIM(MID('2 - Data Input'!F9,(FIND("*",SUBSTITUTE('2 - Data Input'!F9,"\","*",LEN('2 - Data Input'!F9)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE('2 - Data Input'!F9,"\","")))))+1,100)))=0,"OTHER PBOs",TRIM(MID('2 - Data Input'!F9,(FIND("*",SUBSTITUTE('2 - Data Input'!F9,"\","*",LEN('2 - Data Input'!F9)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE('2 - Data Input'!F9,"\","")))))+1,100))))

Edited October 23, 2009 by qwertz

[InFireBaptize 0]

i'm not familiar with the .pbo files but wouldn't it help break down the files into smaller chunks hence streaming them would be faster?

[tcp 10]

PBOs are just like folders. They aren't compressed and you can grab a single file out of them.

ArmA2 seems to need too many textures to render a single area and there's just not enough room with the amount of memory available.

[InFireBaptize 0]

Crysis only receives a 15% performance boost with the 64-bit version. However, I think that game is GPU-intensive. ArmA2 might benefit greatly since it's CPU and memory-intensive. Still, I don't think 64-bit technology is that great except on servers. They need to redesign the pathways on all interfaces of the motherboard to impress me.

how did you come up with 15%? based on which system specifications? Crysis doesn't rely much on CPU, so the more ram you can give it the better. Think about ArmA2, 8GB vs 3GB with the 64bit OS /64bit version of the game you can load more files into RAM. ROF has exactly the same issue, 8GB ram errors and stuttering.

---------- Post added at 07:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:35 PM ----------

lat night it was my first time playing online "just got my internet" and what a horrible stuttering, i did do the RAMDRIVE thing on xp64, will try again tonight on 7.