Bad performance with SSD

[zoog 18]

I bought the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD a few days ago, but only ArmA 2 took a very big performance hit since it's installed on SSD.

I'm using the exact same graphics settings as before when I was running it from a normal drive (which had good ArmA 2 performance).

Right now I experience, when for example flying alone in Chernarus with a heli, slow downs as low as 7 fps. But most of the time when I look around it's somewhere near 12 ~ 15 fps. Also when walking through a forest I get slowdowns to 10 ~ 12 fps when looking sideways. Again: I never had any issue when using my old regular hdd, and all settings are currently the same on a freshly installed system.

I also tried SSD tricks for Windows 7 like turning off superfetch, pagefile and stuff like that, without any performance boosts in ArmA 2.

I'm a bit lost at this moment, I really don't know what I can try. Are there other people having problems with ArmA 2 + SSD? Anyone has any suggestions?

Complete system info:

Phenom II x4 955 3.2Ghz

Ati HD4890 1GB

2x2GB DDR3

MSI 790gx-g65

Intel X25-M 80GB G2 SSD

Windows 7 64-bit

Edited January 24, 2010 by zoog

[jw custom 56]

Maybe this can help you:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=92899&highlight=SSD

[zoog 18]

Thanks. I looked at the link and solution, but the issue seemed to be with AMD's Southbridge 600 SATA controller, but I have the SB750 which doesn't have any known SATA issue (according to my internet search).

I did ran Process Monitor and let it monitor my ArmA 2 folder while launching and playing the game. The only strange error I encountered was that the process Explorer.EXE during the operation 'QueryOpen' encounters an error 'FAST IO DISALLOWED' on the ArmA2.exe. Not that I know what it exactly means, but as far as I know IO can also have something to do with harddisk operation (?).

Edited January 24, 2010 by zoog

[jw custom 56]

Thanks. I looked at the link and solution, but the issue seemed to be with AMD's Southbridge 600 SATA controller, but I have the SB750 which doesn't have any known SATA issue (according to my internet search).

I did ran Process Monitor and let it monitor my ArmA 2 folder while launching and playing the game. The only strange error I encountered was that the process Explorer.EXE during the operation 'QueryOpen' encounters an error 'FAST IO DISALLOWED' on the ArmA2.exe. Not that I know what it exactly means, but as far as I know IO can also have something to do with harddisk operation (?).

A guy here mention that updating the chipset drivers should fix the problem "FAST IO DISALLOWED" issue!

http://www.pronetworks.org/forums/how-to-disable-fast-io-disallowed-t112300.html

[zoog 18]

Checked for latest drivers, but they are all up to date unfortunately. I also checked if there was any difference in using the Windows 7 AHCI drivers and the official AMD AHCI drivers. Didn't change the performance either so I set it back to the Win 7 drivers (it seems that those work the best according to most sources and supports TRIM while AMD drivers do not).

Checked the Process Manager again. There are also some .dll files in the ArmA 2 directory that get the FAST IO DISALLOWED message. But it could be that everybody get's those, it's hard to tell if it really is a real issue or just a message which you should ignore.

Did read some sites which claimed that the SB750 from AMD is also inferior to most Intel based SATA controllers. But still it doesn't explain why ArmA 2 runs really bad while Windows and SSD benchmark on my system get results you would expect for an SSD. So it's not that the disk is performing bad outside of ArmA.

The search continues..

[zoog 18]

It seems that I fixed the problem for now. I thought about which things changed since I got the SSD and that was a) the SSD as harddrive and b) the latest video card drivers. In my previous system with the normal HDD I used the Ati 9.9 drivers while in this freshly installed pc with SSD I used the 9.12 drivers.

I reinstalled Windows 7 today but this time I downloaded the older 9.9 drivers, and the slowdowns are gone.

Another problem arised though, now some objects take 3+ seconds to show up (like a house or church) and sometimes they stay untextured for 7+ seconds (white model). This happens quite a lot (about 5 times in 2 minutes walking through Chernagorsk).

But the extreme slowdowns are gone :D

[Yoma 0]

Damn that's not too good. On my system the x25-M has been performing pretty great. What do you get when you benchmark the disk with something like HDTune?

[zoog 18]

Damn that's not too good. On my system the x25-M has been performing pretty great. What do you get when you benchmark the disk with something like HDTune?

[Leon86 13]

The guys in these tests get more speed on 4k review on tweakers.net but your speed is still way above a normal HD. what happens if you copy the addons folder to a normal harddrive and load them from there (with -mod=D:\ if you would put it on root on D disk)

[zoog 18]

Well, keep in mind that I fixed the stuttering with using a lower version of my graphics card drivers so I don't really have the problem anymore ;)

I also read other benchmarks which indeed have higher 4k write speeds, so I'm still investigating that issue. Right now I'm questioning my Southbridge chipset.

At this moment I don't have a normal HDD (it's being replaced under warranty). I can test it out when I get my drive back, and see if it does work correctly, even with the new drivers.