ArmA 2 I/O analysis results

[jpinard 10]

I have 6 Gig of triple channel memory. I set my Ram Disk size to 3 Gig and to my srpise resource monitor shows only 100 Meg free when the game is loaded. I was under the impression the game + OS only used 2 Gig? Theere is 800 Meg in a section called standby memory. Is this Superfetch cache?

If so, should I turn off superfetch when play Arma 2 and make a bigger ram disk? If not, is it possibel sueprfetch can do as good a job as a RAM Disk?

Otherwise for a 3 Gig Ram Disk, what files should I put in it?

Thanks! :)

[Vipera 10]

I have 2.3 Gb RAM disk where I have next files:

buildings.pbo

buildings2.pbo

buildings2_Ind_CementWorks.pbo

plants2_Bush.pbo

plants2_Clutter.pbo

plants2_misc.pbo

plants2_Plant.pbo

plants2_Tree.pbo

rocks2.pbo

structures.pbo

I don't have any stutter.

[Leon86 13]

I have 6 Gig of triple channel memory. I set my Ram Disk size to 3 Gig and to my srpise resource monitor shows only 100 Meg free when the game is loaded. I was under the impression the game + OS only used 2 Gig? Theere is 800 Meg in a section called standby memory. Is this Superfetch cache?

If so, should I turn off superfetch when play Arma 2 and make a bigger ram disk? If not, is it possibel sueprfetch can do as good a job as a RAM Disk?

Otherwise for a 3 Gig Ram Disk, what files should I put in it?

Thanks! :)

The most I've seen arma2 use was 1.2GB or so, windows 7 takes about 1GB, with a 2.8 GB ramdisk I can say with almost certainty that your pagefile will not be used for arma, with a 3.3GB ramdisk windows will be paging and performance will go down drastically. What exactly happens between the 2.8 and 3.3 I dont know, this is all for 6GB ramdisks of course.

[jpinard 10]

The most I've seen arma2 use was 1.2GB or so, windows 7 takes about 1GB, with a 2.8 GB ramdisk I can say with almost certainty that your pagefile will not be used for arma, with a 3.3GB ramdisk windows will be paging and performance will go down drastically. What exactly happens between the 2.8 and 3.3 I dont know, this is all for 6GB ramdisks of course.

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying if I keep my main RAM @2.7 Gig, and the RAM disk @3.3 gig that my performance will go down because I haven't lefrt enough RAM for Windows & base ARMA2?

[Leon86 13]

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying if I keep my main RAM @2.7 Gig, and the RAM disk @3.3 gig that my performance will go down because I haven't lefrt enough RAM for Windows & base ARMA2?

I'm saying that when you make your ramdisk 2.8GB there will still be enough ram left for arma2 and windows. There will be not much activity in the pagefile.

If you make your ramdisk 3.3 GB windows will see a shortage so it will move some of the arma2 data in the memory to the pagefile, so when arma2 needs that data it will have to be read from the harddisk, decreasing performance.

[jpinard 10]

I'm saying that when you make your ramdisk 2.8GB there will still be enough ram left for arma2 and windows. There will be not much activity in the pagefile.

If you make your ramdisk 3.3 GB windows will see a shortage so it will move some of the arma2 data in the memory to the pagefile, so when arma2 needs that data it will have to be read from the harddisk, decreasing performance.

Ahhh super, thanks for the clarification!

[node_runner 0]

I personally dont think there is much for BI can do on this matter

On the contrary, it's pretty strong evidence that storing more data in memory increases performance a lot. Hence, having 64-bit addressing and using more system memory would help quite a bit.

[evilfury 0]

One thing I want to clarified. I made ramdisk 2.3GB. In there i made folder with name @ram and folder in called addons. Path: R:\@ram/addons. After this i made shortcut with -mod=R:\@ram -nosplash. What I want to ask, is this correct way?

[PogMoThoin 10]

One thing I want to clarified. I made ramdisk 2.3GB. In there i made folder with name @ram and folder in called addons. Path: R:\@ram/addons. After this i made shortcut with -mod=R:\@ram -nosplash. What I want to ask, is this correct way?

Yes, thats fine

[Alex72 1]

I have 2.3 Gb RAM disk where I have next files:

buildings.pbo

buildings2.pbo

buildings2_Ind_CementWorks.pbo

plants2_Bush.pbo

plants2_Clutter.pbo

plants2_misc.pbo

plants2_Plant.pbo

plants2_Tree.pbo

rocks2.pbo

structures.pbo

I don't have any stutter.

Wow sounds great. Cant wait until 3 weeks-ish when i get my new system. With 6GB (starting out with that and go 12 later) i should be able to move up around 4GB A2 files and use the remaining 2GB as conventional RAM usage?

And since playing ACE maybe the A2 files can be ran from RAMDISK plus then some of the bigger addon files can be moved up as well? Ive gotta learn this now as its not long until its here. :)

Anyone running a free good (decent) version of RAMDRIVE? Or does all of them have to be baught (better ones i mean). Thanks.

Edited April 3, 2010 by Alex72

[qwertz 10]

Anyone running a free good (decent) version of RAMDRIVE? Or does all of them have to be baught (better ones i mean). Thanks.

IMHO:

Best commercial Ramdisk: http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

Best FREE Ramdisk: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Best,

qwertz

[SgtStone 10]

Hey guys,

I spent some time yesterday with qwertz' great analysis tool.

Here are the results (IOAnalysis.pdf). I combined several tests to get a better overview of what ARMA2 is streaming.

http://www.mediafire.com/stone

Quite interesting is the high rating of dubbing.pbo!

edit:

I currently own OCZ 4GB DDR2 800mhz RAM. Would it be better to get another 4GB for a larger ramdrive or a 32GB SSD with 200+mb/s read, 100+mb/s write and 64MB cache like http://www.patriotmemory.com/products/detailp.jsp?prodline=8&catid=21&prodgroupid=166&id=913&type=17 or http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_vertex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd for about the some money?

Edited April 12, 2010 by SgtStone

[stk2008 14]

Hi all

my specs are

Win xp 32bit

Q6700

8800gt

4GB

Now I cant afford any thing but I have loads of sata hard drives etc.

What improvement would I get by having XP and ARMA2 etc on one drive and page file on another just a large page file?.

cheers

[Alex72 1]

IMHO:

Best commercial Ramdisk: http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

Best FREE Ramdisk: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Best,

qwertz

Thanks a lot qwertz.

With my initial 6GB ram i'll put the heaviest (4gb total) files up in RAMDRIVE and then use the rest from the RAID0. Hopefully satisfying results until i get 12gb ram.

[oktane 0]

Quite interesting is the high rating of dubbing.pbo!

Hello

Dubbing is all the voice in the game. This is caused by people (including AI) that are talking, as well as the conversation engine. So basically, they are sound files of voices, parts of sentences, etc. As you can imagine, there is a lot of that if you are around infantry, and don't use a no-voice mod or ACE.

[SgtStone 10]

@oktane:

yeah thanks thought of something like that...

Should I move dubbing.pbo according to the high Ranking onto the ramdrive or does this only apply to textures?

Would having 8gb ram be better than using 4gb + a 30gb SSD drive (still about 10x slower than ram!)?

[oktane 0]

@oktane:

yeah thanks thought of something like that...

Should I move dubbing.pbo according to the high Ranking onto the ramdrive or does this only apply to textures?

Would having 8gb ram be better than using 4gb + a 30gb SSD drive (still about 10x slower than ram!)?

Dubbing? I'd list that low on the priority list. But we don't know if it causes blocking situations in the A2 code. (IE, we have to wait for dubbing to do other things, making FPS go down. I doubt it is coded like that)

If you have a choice, why mess with the ram, just go with the SSD. Myself, I cannot afford that.. I just raided 4 identical old drives I had with Intel raid0, 16kb stripe and allocation size, fast enough for my tastes. Living on the edge though, 4 times the chance of total data loss. I back everything up though. I got tired of the ram, seemed to make arma crash to desktop frequently with weird lines in the RPT file. Now with this raid, I can put everything the os considers temp data, pagefile, browser cache, etc as well as games on it, so everything has improved, without needing to have the OS on it. I assume you could do the same with your SSD.

If you do use an SSD, I read that there is a special way you need to format it, to align the formatted filesystem to its physical block size, for optimal speed.

Edited April 13, 2010 by oktane

[SgtStone 10]

I ranked the file dubbing.pbo high because in all my tests it was streamed very often. Check out ioanalysis.pdf at http://www.mediafire.com/stone if you want further Information.

I guess I gonna go for a 30gb ocz SSD for less than 100€ with 200+mb/s read, 100+mb/s write and 64mb cache. Does this sound decent?

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_vertex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

When I run the ArmaMark it stutters at first. When I restart it it runs smooth because everything necessary has been already cached I think.

Would a 2gb ramdrive on top of it give some real extra boost or is it neglectable? Would a decent SSD drive like the one I just mentionend do the job?

Edited April 13, 2010 by SgtStone

[oktane 0]

I understand why it was rated high, I saw it too. I was just questioning the value of prioritizing it. If you have the space, do it. I'd put the whole game on fast storage. (which is what you can do with a raid0 array or SSD, or TONS of ram)

I cannot decide what you do with your own money. If it were me, I'd do a lot of research and get the best SSD I could for my budget, not RAM. Be careful which one you buy, I read ones with the JMicron JMF602A/B controller in the drive may have studdering issues. Some have wear leveling issues or something too. I don't know much, I don't have one myself.

OFP/Arma/ArmA2 ALWAYS studders at first, while it's reading in the intial data. If you have first started the game this is apparent, as well as if you teleport to another location instantly (like in domination). The streaming system basically has to start over and start caching from scratch. In OFP, I just used to turn around in a circle a few times and it went away in a few seconds. I would not base any buying decision on this specific startup-issue, only other issues like studdering in towns and poor loading of textures.

[MavericK96 0]

I've been having issues with the RAMDisk. From my sig, you can see that I have 6 GB of RAM, and so I've tried a couple of options with no real success.

First, I tried making a RAMDisk with 2.5 GB of space. I loaded on some files, and off I went. Stutter seemed less, but it was hard to tell because I was also running ACE and several other mods on a very crowded server (also it was a night mission) so there was a lot else going on. After a couple minutes I started getting windows messages saying I was low on memory. Then, after a very short time, ArmA2 started showing the "Receiving..." window over and over and over, with short bursts of black screen in-between. I had to exit and reload the game.

On the second try, I played the game for a little while, but eventually the game froze up and I got a BSOD, rebooting the PC.

So, I then switched to a 2 GB RAMDisk (I was going to do a 1.5 GB, but it wasn't really enough to get the files on there that cause the most stutter). I played for a longer period of time with this, but after awhile I again started to get "low memory" errors (though no "Receiving..." screen again) and eventually another BSOD.

So my question is, why does Windows 7 + ArmA2 need more than 4 GB of RAM to function? This should be way more than enough, and even when I alt-tab out of game, ArmA2 is not using more than 1 GB, and it says the system has at least another GB free. I was under the impression that a 2 GB out of 6 GB RAMdisk would not affect Windows/ArmA2 performance negatively, but so far it's done just that.

Do I need to turn off SuperFetch or anything? I have my page file turned off, but so far that hasn't caused any issues in ArmA2 or otherwise. Only after trying the RAMDisk have I been getting BSODs and low memory errors.

[qwertz 10]

(...) I have my page file turned off (...)

There is your problem. Besides all these "expert" tips on the intewebz (most of them originating from Win98 days and floating around since then), it is a bad idea to disable the page file. Paging is one of the basic functions of (Windows) memory management, and I have yet so see anyone who knows better than MS how to "tweak" the Windows memory management. Paging happens even if you have free physical RAM available, and for a reason. Some programs are not functioning reliably w/o a page file. Switch it on again, and your problem will be solved.

Cheers,

qwertz

[stk2008 14]

SgtStone that pdf file has been very well put together did you do it?.

Any way I think my Q got lost :P.

I have two sata drives if I use one with windows and arma on and the other just for one massive page file or small would it be a bit better?.

[MavericK96 0]

There is your problem. Besides all these "expert" tips on the intewebz (most of them originating from Win98 days and floating around since then), it is a bad idea to disable the page file. Paging is one of the basic functions of (Windows) memory management, and I have yet so see anyone who knows better than MS how to "tweak" the Windows memory management. Paging happens even if you have free physical RAM available, and for a reason. Some programs are not functioning reliably w/o a page file. Switch it on again, and your problem will be solved.

Cheers,

qwertz

I have yet to try this, but I'll give it a shot, thanks.

However, I have noticed that regardless of which .pbo files I include on the RAMdisk, performance doesn't seem to be all that much better. I still get pretty noticeable LOD thrashing and stutter, even with a view distance of around 3500.

EDIT: I ran ArmA2Mark (I know it's kind of synthetic but still) and I actually get more than 100 points less using the RAMDisk versus just having it all on my C: drive. I actually got about 100 points more than standard when I put most of the .pbo files on a USB flash drive and ran it from there. Very odd results.

I am using the ACE2 mod, however, maybe with the mod it doesn't make as much difference simply using the standard .pbo files? Someone should run the game with ACE2 and do that I/O analysis and see what is actually used the most.

Edited April 14, 2010 by MavericK96

[SgtStone 10]

SgtStone that pdf file has been very well put together did you do it?

Thanks! I did everything but the detailed pages of each scenario which have been pasted from qwertz analysis excel sheet.

@MavericK96:

I had a blue screen with my 2gb ramdrive on 64bit Win7 with 4gb ram while running Arma2 but it also might be a result of to much overclocking ;)

[jpinard 10]

Responding to several questions posted:

1. You MUST use a Page File. Most programs have to access it at some point even if they don't require the extra RAM. This is because programmers can't count on the fact everybody has a ton of RAM. This is also why ArmA2 doesn't use all the RAM you have. Too expensive to program/compensate for such extreme ranges of hardware. If you want to limit pagefile use, change its max and min size = 1024 MB. I have 6 Gig of RAM and set my max/min to 3072 to be safe. Techncially you can keep ease it down until you start crashing again... Personally I'd start with 3072, go to 2048, then 1024, then 512, then 256, then 128, then 64 MB.

2. Having several smaller page files isn't going to be better than one slightly larger one. As you can see the I/O is already being taxed and making your hardware scan many places isn't more efficient unless you have a wicked slow hard drive.

3. SSD vs. more RAM? That's a tough one. From doing a boatload of research you should go with the Intel 80 Gig SSD. It has the fastest random read (sacrifices a bit of linear read speed) speed and is more durable than any other SSD drive out there. The Intel drives requires the least amount of specialized tweaking and maintenance. If you use mods, this is the way to go as long as you have SATA2. Otherwise you're better off going with RAM since at SATA1 your bottlenecking the drive. If you're using a bunch of mods, then you'd need over 6 Gig of RAM to get the full boost you'd like to see. Using full ACE2 requires nearly 3 GIG. Add a few vehciles and a good sound mod and you've just added another Gig.

4. Sadly, I saw no difference in LOD thrashing with a RAM Drive. When your hardware is good, the LOD swaps you see are hardcoded. Sucks, I really wanted to see more detail at further distances. When running Benchmark #1 I have load trash on the pink building set and it's caused by the angle of view + distance. It's just at that perfect distance where the LOD has to switch from high to medium.

5. USB drives. I've seen many people comment pbo's on USB drives works smoother. With USB 3.0 built into new motherboards, there may be a real performance advantage to this as it uses separate threads & drivers from your SATA source. Technically it's slower than SATA, but sometimes theory doesn't alwasy directly translate into how one computer handles stuff vs. another.

Edited April 26, 2010 by jpinard