ArmA 2 + SSD = FUBAR [ReSolved as SATA controller issue]

[[frl]myke 14]

Ok, first the facts so far:

System is set up completely new. Reformatted all drives and reinstalled Vista x64 ultimate completely new. All Hardware Drivers were latest to date 31.12.09. Windows is up to date (at least Winupdater doesn't find anything).

ArmA 2 usually runs fine on my system, not overhelming fast but good. Only thing that bothered me were the reloading stutter but as the nice boy *cough* i was, Santa brought me a 40GB SSD to hopefully reduce those stutters.

But the result wasn't even near what i've hoped. Let me describe the scenario:

i start in a A10 south of Chernogorsk over the sea, heading more or less straight north. I was used to have noticeable stutters all the time flying across Chernarus but this time it was different.

I just passed Chernogorsk, seeing that there were missing objects (probably where the viewdistance ended at startup), awaiting more or less smooth reloading of objects and textures....and suddenly the game started to stutter until a few secs later (not more than 5 i guess) it completely freezes. No miving, not even slightly stuttering, just a complete freeze. No input was accepted, even ctrl+alt+del was ignored. Ok, i've waited....a long time. Sadly i hadn't a stopwatch so i've counted it....it was frozen for +1:20 minutes. One minute and 20 seconds! Then it continued just to restart the whole thing when reaching the next "viewdistancelimit".

Ok, i know it isn't the fault of ArmA 2 so i'll not even think of blaming ArmA 2. With normal HD i had permanently stuttering but never any freezes. Minor framedrops as worst what happened but even those were rare.

System specs:

Phenom II X4 940

4GB Ram (don't ask for manufacturer) DDR2-800

Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4

Asus HD5870

Asus VW222 Screen

Logitech Trackman, G15 and Attack3 (joystick)

What i've tried so far:

re-downloaded and installed AHCI drivers: no result

re-formatted SSD (not recommended, i know) with FAT32 (NTFS before): no result

resized partition so it doesn't use the whole space (around 8GB unused): no result

Any ideas why the SSD performance is so lousy? Did i miss a driver or a setting somewhere?

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Oh, and while you're reading here: happy new year, mate. :D

Greetz

Myke

Edited January 6, 2010 by Dwarden

[Smee 10]

have you done ssd speed check to see what transfered rates.

You may find that you need to have better SATA drivers. have you tried different intel matrix drivers. also has your SSD got your latest firmware.

Check your responce times in your performance monitoring it should be fantasticly low.

some sata drivers link

http://www.station-drivers.com/page/intel%20raid.htm

also check out this thread

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88388

Edited January 1, 2010 by Smee

[[frl]myke 14]

Thx Smee,

SATA drivers are the most actual, i've already tried to improve the most obvious things.

The SATA drivers Link is pretty useless to me since my MoBo is not Intel (also the SATA is not Intel). Got latest drivers from AMD for SB600 Southbridge.

Also i don't see how it is related to a Ramdisk, sorry.

[BigWolf 0]

Out of curiosity, is the OS, Game and pagefile all on the SSD?

[tonygrunt 10]

What manufacturer and model is your SSD?

[[frl]myke 14]

@Bigwolf

no, the SSD is exclusively for ArmA 2. Besides this, there is nothing on it. OS is on a separate regular HDD where also the pagefile is located. Also already tried with disabled pagefily, no change in result.

@TonyGrunt

Manufacturer is Kingston, Model is SNV125-S2BD/40GB. Checked for updated Firmware, there is none.

Superfetch and Prefetch is disabled, defragmentation has been disabled for the SSD also indexing.

[mrbinkels 10]

Excerpt from a post I posted on DCS BS forums reference to SSD drives.

"...........I picked up a 30gb OCZ the other day($129 on newegg dot com w/30MIR). I wanted to put BS on it and ARMA 2. Loading times are faster however did not make any other improvements. I've never had a micro-stuttering issue in ARMA2 (that I can tell).......... going back to the ssd drive, I did quite a bit of research and if you go over to the OCZ forums, there seems to be a lot of maintenance required to keep these ssd drives up to speed. Using TRIM, GC(garbage collection) and firmware updates, which wipes all your data off the drive. I'm sure in time they will get better and the prices will come down..........."

Now the background on this is the drive I received from Newegg had old firmware on it, so old in fact I had to send it to OCZ to get flashed as they would not release the flash tool to me(public). The drive also had extremely slow speeds until the flash.

With saying that, it's possible you need to flash your firmware. IMO a real inconvenience to do.

Download HDTune and post what the results are.

[[frl]myke 14]

Just finished a HDTune pass for read:

Min: 136.2 MB/s

Max: 138.7 MB/s

Av: 137.7 MB/s

Access time: 0.3ms

Burst rate: 122.9 MB/s

CPU usage: 13.4%

The line is straight on both, transfer rates and access times. No peaks at all.

What i noticed on HD Tune, it says the SSD runs in UDMA Mode 6. In this context, the transfer rates are ok as UDMA Mode 6 allows ~133MB/s. But i doubt the SSD is meant to run in this mode.

The SATA Controller is set to AHCI. I'll check the BIOS once again to see if i overlooked an option there.

:EDITH:

Also checked the BIOS. SATA Controller is set to "SATA -> AHCI" mode. Options there would be "Native IDE", "RAID" and "Legacy IDE" but i doubt that any of these would be better. I didn't found a BIOS setting to change the UDMA Mode 6.

Edited January 1, 2010 by [FRL]Myke

[mrbinkels 10]

What drive do you have and what firmware do you have? Mine is running UDMA Mode 6 as well with firmware 141 GC (garbage collection).

Here's what I got just now with a OCZ_VERTEX 30GB

Min: 134.9 MB/s

Max: 215.5 MB/s

Av: 189.5 MB/s

Access time: 0.1ms

Burst rate: 192.3 MB/s

CPU usage: -1.0%

Seems a little low although I don't know what drive you have.

[[frl]myke 14]

@mrbinkels

Infos are there: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1531468&postcount=6

[mrbinkels 10]

Well dang kinda hard to compare my SDD with yours then.

[[frl]myke 14]

@mrbinkles

it is not about slow transfer rates in general although they aren't top notch. The problem is the hang for more than one minute when it should reload objects and textures.

[mrbinkels 10]

Yea I hear ya, I'm not much help but might check this thread on the OCZ forum reference to SSD tweaks.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=442158&postcount=3

[[frl]myke 14]

@mrbinkles

don't get me wrong, i really appreciate your attempts to help. I'm just frustrated that nothing works. I've already done everything what was suggested on the links you've posted but the result was disapointing.

If i sounded harsh, don't take it personal at all, i'm really glad and you tried your best. Thanks for that.

[mrbinkels 10]

No offense taken, that was more out of aspiration on my part. If you do get it figured out post up and let us know.

[killswitch 19]

...

System specs:

Phenom II X4 940

4GB Ram (don't ask for manufacturer) DDR2-800

Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4

Asus HD5870

Asus VW222 Screen

Logitech Trackman, G15 and Attack3 (joystick)

...

Any ideas why the SSD performance is so lousy?

If I read the specs of that motherboard correctly, it could be the infamous AMD/ATI SB600 southbridge's SATA controller causing you problems. The AHCI implementation in that one is known to be... unremarkable, and that's being polite to the SB600's SATA controller. (Also, from your mentioning UDMA 6 mode, maybe the drivers know this and switch the drives back to non-AHCI mode.)

(I'll be blunt - the SB600 is a broken POS)

Edited January 1, 2010 by Killswitch

[[frl]myke 14]

@Killswitch

thanks, after your post i'll take the risk and ordered a PCI-X1 SATA controller. Will see how it performs.

For completeness: run a AS SSD benchmarc and although it is a cheap SSD, i guess the results weren't that bad.

[[frl]myke 14]

Problem solved.

Seems the SATA Controller of the AMD Southbridge SB600 doesn't like SSD Drives. Installed now a cheap SATA controller card and this solved the problem. Sure, a high-end card would have been better, it's always the question what one can afford. ;)

So for those who like to buy a SSD or already have one and struggle into the same problem: if you have AMD Southbridge SB600 (mostly at 790 chipsets used, check motherboard manual) you may have to add a SATA controller.

Thread can be closed now. Thanks to all who tried to help. Always appreciated.

[LondonLad 13]

Not sure if you have the latest drivers for your motherboard, but I thought I'd post the URL to the Drivers for Vista x64

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/Driver_Model.aspx?ProductID=2695&ost=windows+vista+x64+(64-bit)#anchor_os

You can also obtain the latest BIOS from the site.

[mrbinkels 10]

Glad you got it figured out Myke

[[frl]myke 14]

@LondonLad

Thanks for pointing. BIOS is the latest (F9) already. Drivers for the Chipset i never get from Motherboard Manufacturer as they tend to be outdated. Instead i take them directly from AMD who made the Chipset. And yes, they where the latest.

@mrbinkles

Yeah, i'm glad too. ;)

[Dwarden 1125]

the problem was quite obvious from the 14% CPU usage on the SATA while testing SSD ...

it's th SB600 SATA controller ... it can't handle the amount of I/Ops on SSD

i remember AMD fixed it at some point to use different one

[Yoma 0]

Maybe change the name of this post into

"Arma 2 + SSD + Silly AMD controller= FUBAR"

so people don't get the wrong idea about SSD's.

[[frl]myke 14]

Maybe change the name of this post into

"Arma 2 + SSD + Silly AMD controller= FUBAR"

so people don't get the wrong idea about SSD's.

I second that.

So if a Mod would be so nice. Just as i started the thread i couldn't know about the reason. Maybe thread title "Arma 2 + SSD + AMD SB 600 controller= FUBAR" would be more precise. :p

:EDITH:

For competeness: now i have a SiI3132 SATA Controller. Still a cheap one, simply i couldn't afford a better (expensiver) one. At least it does the job and i have indeed better performance in meaning of less reload stutter. Still there but significantly harder to notice. And it might be Placebo-effect (why do i have to grin while writing this?) but i think als FPS profits a little.

Edited January 6, 2010 by [FRL]Myke

[PuFu 4600]

Maybe change the name of this post into

"Arma 2 + SSD + Silly AMD controller= FUBAR"

so people don't get the wrong idea about SSD's.

+1 on this