qwertz

Great. This is on a ramdisk, correct? You are hitting 500-800 IOPS.

Hi guys, I have fixed my tool - you can download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/qwertz Should work with everyone's data now - let me see the results !

I have found the error(s). First, there is an error in the function which parses the PBO name. Second, I have to add functionality to support international number/date formats, i.e. it seems like in Sweden they use "space" rather than "," as a thousands seperator (1 024 rather than 1,024), and that does not work with the sheet either. I will post a new version tonight that should work with everyone's data. Thanks for testing !

Hi ReiLar, that's odd. Are you shure you pasted the data into the sheet as described in the instructions? You need to copy column A to G and row 2 to (max 10,000) from your ProcMon CSV logfile and paste it into cell B9 on the "Data Input" tab in the tool. Also please try to hit "F9" in Excel in order to make sure the data gets calculated. If you want to check for yourself, the password to unlock the sheet is "opensesame". I have only locked the sheet to make sure people don't accidentially change formulas. Could you paste some lines of your ProgMon logfile here so I can see if it is in the correct format? It should look like this: (...) 08:07.6 arma2.exe 3844 ReadFile G:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2\AddOns\sounds.pbo SUCCESS Offset: 7,856,128, Length: 4,096, I/O Flags: Non-cached, Priority: Normal 08:08.0 arma2.exe 3844 ReadFile G:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2\AddOns\chernarus.pbo SUCCESS Offset: 34,541,568, Length: 4,096, I/O Flags: Non-cached, Priority: Normal 08:08.0 arma2.exe 3844 ReadFile G:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2\AddOns\warfare2.pbo SUCCESS Offset: 311,296, Length: 4,096, I/O Flags: Non-cached, Priority: Normal 08:08.5 arma2.exe 3844 ReadFile G:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2\AddOns\weapons.pbo SUCCESS Offset: 401,281,024, Length: 32,768, I/O Flags: Non-cached, Priority: Normal (...) Also, can you upload your file so I can see what's wrong ? Thanks, qwertz ---------- Post added at 05:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:43 PM ---------- That might be not easily possible or effective. With 9GB of assets, you just run out of cache very quickly with 99% of all gaming rigs. Therefore, it might be better to optimize for direct streaming w/o relying on cache. But I'm not a programmers so I'm just speculating here. More often than not, we should assume they know what they are doing and as with many other things in life, there's always a tradeoff no matter what decision you make.

I am GLAD that BIS made the decision to not optimize for the lowest common denominator and delivered a game that is taxing for most rigs for quite some time. Let's face it: the Arma franchise is doing something that NO OTHER game developer has achieved so far. A vast, open world with incredible detail and graphic quality. You don't get that for free. They could have done what all other developers have done so far: make sure that it runs on your average rig (or a console), so no open worlds, blurry textures, dumb scripted gameplay, bad graphics etc. These are all design decisions (as opposed to incapabilities of the programmers) and I am happy that BIS is going for the max here. So we can be sure the game looks fresh even in a few years when the next generation of hardware is out. Until then, I just had to use the info on this forum and some of my time and my own research to find ways to play the game completely smooth on max, even on today's hardware.

Hi guys, I have pimped my analysis tool a little so that everyone can download and use it to easily analyze his/her own ArmA 2 disk performance. I am not a programmer so this is one large Excel file. It includes all instructions, and the process is rather simple (read the instructions carefully though). If you use it, It would be great if you guys would share the results here in the forum so we can all learn more. Here's the download link to the file (NEW VERSION 0.21 - should work with everyone's data now): http://www.mediafire.com/qwertz Please let me know what you think, i.e. if there are any problems with the tool. Have fun, qwertz

Hey tcp, pls read the original post here - all the read access to the PBO files use the IRP_NOCACHE flag. That means that Windows caching is DISABLED for the A2 streams.:( "In the NT operating system, user processes are allowed to specify at the time of opening a file whether data for the file should be buffered in memory. Only those files opened without the IRP_NOCACHE flag—to indicate that data for the file can be buffered—have their data cached in system memory." http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:K93j3a6BdPQJ:zhainan.kilu.de/FileSystem/Chapter6.pdf+IRP_NOCACHE&cd=110&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

PLEASE CONTINUE THIS DISCUSSION IN THE NEW THREAD LINKED BELOW - THANKS, QWERTZ. I have posted my findings in a new thread. Please continue this discussion here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88629 Maybe a MOD could lock this thread > thanks !

Windows x86 only sees <4GB. The RAMdisk driver is able to see the rest and use it as RAMdisk. There are two advanced RAMdisk product I know of that support using the physical RAM above the 32bit boundary: http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk Currently testing both.

I am not sure that you are on the right track with "Virtual Disk" - this is neither a Ramdisk nor does it seem to create symlinks - it seems to be something similar to Win 7's "libraries". Here's a nice program to create hard links in XP: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html Vista or Win 7 support "softlinks", so if you use one of these Windows versions, you should work with softlinks rather than hardlinks. Just use an elevated command promt and the mklink command: a) For files: mklink x:\folder\...\file.abc y:\folder\...\file.abc b) For directories: mklink /d x:\folder\...\folder y:\folder\...\folder In both cases - read the manual (i.e. google it and get familiar) before you play around with the different forms of NTFS links - it is important to understand how they work if you want to avoid messing up your data! Also, Vista/Win7 differ from XP in this regards, so make sure you read the right manual! I am using mklink with my Win 7 main system a lot to move various temp directories and files from different programs off my SSDs to my Velociraptor RAID0. However, on XP, soflinks do not work. Hardlinks can do the same job, but can be more dangerous and are more restricted. If I find some time on the weekend, I will write up a comprehensive guide. Best, qwertz

Some more benches (I just realized my RAM was running at 1066 rather 1600 Mhz after BIOS update - fixed): 900k iops read :eek: I will experiment a little more with various ramdisk products over the weekend, and will try to find a good solution for ARMA2 and people with only a few GB free physical RAM.

4GB DIMMs are used in servers for some time now, and as such the price is rather low. In the desktop world, most PCs still ship with 3 or 4 GB total. And to be realistic, this will not change a lot in the near future because more than 4GB of RAM is hardly needed by 98% of users during the WIN 7 years to come.

Yep, but the problem is that you only find ECC/buffered server memory 4GB modules that cheap. AFAIK, the cheapest non-ECC/buffered 4GB DDR3 DIMMs are still around $200 a pop, so $1200 for 24GB. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231310) Wait a minute - that would be 20GB of ramdisk for Games/Pagefile - I am tempted to hit the button....

That would be ideal, but I only have 12GB ram and no space for my pagefile anymore on my 8.5GB ramdrive. It is possible with Superspeed Ramdrive Plus and some other products, I don't know if there is a free ramdrive software supporting pagefiles.

I used ProcMon from Sysinternals and set up a filter to just monitor mu ARMA2 directory.

InFireBaptize, pls read the original post. I am using the address space above 4GB for the ramdisk, which Windows 32bit can't see, so it is 8GB of wasted ram without a Ramdisk. Even on a 64bit system that can access all 12GB - how do you make sure that the ARMA2 textures and assets are remaining in RAM all the time and don't have to be read from disk? It's not like you have any influence on Window's memory management...

Guys, I don't think that a USB flash drive is helpful here - I mean, try it out, but last time I checked you will get 30MB/s transfer rate, which is 1/3 of a modern SATA hard drive. It is a little faster on access times, but we are talking about a LOT of streaming here (GBytes). I moved to the RamDisk idea coming from 2 x Vertex 120GB in RAID 0 which deliver 500MB/s transfer with below 0.1ms latency, and I experienced a very noticable improvement. I am not sure what all these USB stick or "pagefile on seperate HD" discussion really have to do with it ?

Hi Iena, here's the HD Tune result: By no means is it useless to buy SSDs - you will be surprised how much they will speed up your system in general, and it certainly helps for ARMA2 compared to a standard mechanical hard disk. However, as you can see above, that's still a different animal compared to RAMdisk speeds. :eek::)

No you should not. If data is not found in RAM, it might be mapped in the pagefile. If it is not mapped there, it will be loaded form you game files on the HDD. In both cases, it will be loaded from the HDD, but the pagefile is likely to be faster than your game directory. On the other hand, many applications don't work correctly without a pagefile, and might crash. There is no reason to NOT use a pagefile. In my case, with the ramdisk, it matters though, because the pagefile is the only data location that is left on the slow HDD. Therefore, I want to avoid a lot of data being found there, because the next level is the ramdisk, which is faster than the pagefile.

Having more video ram should definitively help, but will not completely eliminate the problem. Heres the problem: I believe that Arma2 has >8GB of game assets that get dynamically loaded. Only <1GB will fit into your video ram (actually, much less if you use AA or triple buffering etc.). The rest will be requested from RAM. If it is not found in RAM (and it is only in RAM if it has already been loaded before AND is still there, which means you need a lot of RAM to increase your chances here), a "page fault" happens, meaning the data is then being looked for in paged memory, or, ultimatively, in your game directory on the HDD. Moving from 512MB to 1024BM only slighty increases your chances here. The ideal solution would be having 8+ GB of video memory. As long as we don't have this, the next best option is to have the data in system RAM. Arma2 uses only max 2GB for all its data, and 32bit systems can only use 3-3.5 GB. So, we are still limited here. This is where the ramdisk comes in handy. Effectively, you have all the data you need in RAM. So, when a texture or other asset is not found in video memory, it will be looked at in RAM. As we are still limited to 2GB usable for ARMA, there will still be page faults and the data will be looked up on the disk. The disk is now RAM as well - voila. The only caveat here (and this i why I said that with 16GB rather than 12GB I would put the pagefile on the ramdisk as well), is that some date will still be read from paged memory, which is the pagefile residing on some HDD. The best solution here is to reduce the size of the pagefile to a very small amount (switching it off is likely to cause issues). This has nothing to do with FPS - it could improve stutter and texture popping, though. Having said that, before I moved to using a ramdisk, I had my ARMA2 folder on my Vertex SDD RAID, which delivers around 500MB/s transfer rate and very low latency. This was not enough to eliminate the stutter. With a ramdisk, you are in the 3-5GB/s range. Therefore, I don't think that moving the pagefile to another (compared to the above SLOW hard disc) will help a lot, but feel free to try it out, I might be wrong.

Actually, you can. And it might help - if I would have more than 12GB Ram, I would actually put the pagefile on the Ramdisk as well. Having only the pagefile on a Ramdisk might not alleviate the problem that ARMA2 still streams gigabytes of data during gameplay form the HDD. Of course, this would not make sense on a 64bit system, because as you said you better use your ram as ram. However, on 32bit systems, all physical memory above 4GB is not used at all, so it actually makes sense to use it for the pagefile. By the way, a few clarifications: 1) I chose to use XP 32 bit for my dedicated ARMA2 install/hard drive for reasons stated above. With any 32 bit system,I can only use 4GB of my 12 GB. Actually, because ARMA2 is only able to use up to 2GB of RAM (and I have yet to see that happening in real life), and you really only need 2.5GB available physical ram on Win XP for ARMA2. However, on 32bit systems that does not fully use the 36bit PAE mode (and this applies to WinXP/Vista/Win7 32 bit), the system needs to reserve memory address space for all memory mapped I/O (MMIO) devices such as your GFX and other system devices below the 32bit address room barrier of 4GB. This is the reason why you can use only 3.0-3.5 GB max on a Windows 32bit system. The reason why I am writing this is that you have to have that in mind when creating your RAM disk. Ramdisk software such as RamDisk plus is able to use all physical memory above and below the 32bit barrier for the ramdisk, however, it is not automatically detecting how much memory adressable space needs to be reserved below 4GB for add-in cards and devices, so there is a chance you crash your system if you are cutting it to the edge. I have reserverd 1.5GB for my GFX and system devices in BIOS (your mileage may vary - add another GFX in SLI and you need more), which means that I only see 2.5GB usable memory in Windows 32bit. At the same time, I have created a 8.5GB RAM disk to fit the whole ARMA2 folder into the ramdisk. 1.5+2.5+8.5 = 12.5, which is 0.5 GB more than I have installed. This means that 0.5 GB of the Ramdisk is cutting into the 1.5GB reserverd for MMIO devices - which is risky and really cut very close, but works in my case. Again, your mileage may vary. This all sounds like a lot of hassle, but I will never go back to playing Arma2 from a HDD, that's for sure ! :-)

Lots of questions - let me try to answer. It depends. If you want to start Arma2 from within Steam, you need to reinstall. If you don't mind, you can just start arma2.exe from the folder on the ramdisk (or create shortcut to your dektop). It very much depends on which RamDisk software you use. I only have experience with RamDisk plus (and tried it the first time with this exercise), and it was pretty painless. I would suggest though that you read the FAQ/Helpfile that comes with the program carefully. (http://www.superspeed.com/) In regards to your RAM - 6GB is not enough to get everything into the ramdisk. The folder with all the assets (pbo files and such, I'm not at my gaming PC right now), which is the stuff you want to have on the RamDisk, is 8.2GB alone after a fresh installs and might be bigger with addons/mods. What I would suggest in case of less than 12GB RAM (besides adding another 6GB) is to to be selective. Use Process Monitor from Sysinternals, set a filter to only monitor your Arma 2 directory, play for a while, identify the files that are being read from most in ProcMon, and move these files to the RamDisk. You can then create NTFS symlinks to the files you moved from the original directory to the RamDisk (in Vista and above, the command is mklink x:\filename.extension y:\filename extension, in XP you need tools). This might in fact be a rather clumsy way to achieve some of the benefits - I guess the best solution is to buy more RAM. If you are really into ARMA2, it is well worth it. Without workarounds (see above), yes. My ARMA2 folder is 8.5GB. You need at least 12GB RAM to be able to create a 8-10GB Ramdisk. Even this might be too small if you have lots of custom assets files - your mileage may vary. I am not an expert with mods and assets - could someone check whether they use their own pbo's ?

I am relatively new to ARMA 2 (was playing OFP a lot online, but skipped ARMA 1), and one thing that really starting to bore me is that online gameplay is typically following the same tired pattern: 1) Taget gets announced (in coop, in hold we skip this step) 2) Everyone rushes for attack helis and aircraft 3) Target gets bombed to rubble 4) When infantry finally arrives, most enemy armor and infantry is already destroyed 5) Infantry does some sweeping and kills a few leftover enemies (plus, very often, gets bombed by trigger happy AC) 6) New target gets announced, rinse and repeat As a consequence, any armor other than the MHQ is typically not used at all, because its too slow to arrive at the battle scene. Tactics for every town are the same. Plus, infantry combat is reduced to shoot infantry, and the difficulty of completing a mission is largely reduced (c'mon, how difficult is it to bomb a town to rubble ?). Plus, the game's complex features are not used, and gameplay is shallow. Hence my question: Why is noone restricting their servers to limit the ACs available or get rid of them totally? Is it only me who gets bored by the gameplay above? Is i t possible to configure a server to use popular missions but restrict available AC ?

Same her. Razor team does not move, tried capturing the towns on my own. Weird thing is, I HAVE to be at the given capture points before BLUE gets there, otherwise I get a "task failed". Jumped in a car and did some car racing from town to town to be there before the BLUEs, but this got really boring after a while. Some towns get captured by RED in the meantime, so I have to re-capture them (again, car-racing). Have not fired a single shot yet after capturing 10+ towns. This in when I started to think "must be something really wrong here" and checked this forum. DAMN! I'm done now with this game, this is too much. See you again in year or so (hopefully that gives BIS enough time to get their code from alpha to beta).:mad: