frogblastvent

This is a must have for ArmA. This is an amazing bit of software. http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html Can run ArmA at 1920x1200 with all setting at very high with a visibility of 10k. There is no lag at all in normal game play. Flying at 2x speed, zoomed in flawless. My system has 24gig of ram i have 8gig as a ramdisk used as cache with 13gig standby and free at startup. With ArmA running FancyCache will use all of it. Os is on a HD and ArmA is on a SSD. FancyCache is set on default on both with level-2 cache also set on the SSD. Will get rid of the ramdisk and see what FancyCache does with the extra 8gig.

Having tried many different setups, arma ramdisk, arma hd, arma ssd, hd paging, no paging, ramdisk paging, and FC it looks like you can turn off all paging. Did not see any activity on the ramdisk page file with FC on. Also i am not seeing any FC cache activity on the ssd which hold arma. It seems that arma goes to the FC cache on the OS HD when it reads off the ssd. One thing that is odd is that defrag takes forever now with FC on. After a few runs it is fast though. FC block size is set to 4KB which is supposed to be the fastest setting although the controller has to work more. Will try different block sizes some time. If i knew the average file size of all arma data then that might be the best block size.

It's free to try. Maybe set it to 500meg and test it out.

It will improve over an ramdisk that contains ArmA in that a ramdisk is just a fast disk. Once ArmA loads it spends most of its time going to cache. If you have enough ram you could do both or get a small 30gig SSD and put ArmA on that and use the ram for FC. The ArmA ramdisk is a great idea and does speed up the game, but FC speeds up the game and the OS.

With 8gig of ram you can assign 2-4 gig to FC and that will speed up your HD. Don't need an SSD for FC, just need ram, the more the better.

With just 8gig you could assign 2-4 to FC to your HD and see a big increase. I ran Windows Experience Index on my HD without FC it is 5.8, first time with FC 5.9, second time with FC 6.1 That is a big speed up for a hard drive. Have no paging file active, did not see it being used anymore with FC on.

After more testing the boot drive "C" uses up to 4gig of cache and the SSD which hold ArmA uses 2gig of cache. No level-2 is used now on the SSD, don't need it and it is slower. If you have OS and ArmA on one drive 4-6gb should be enough. Using 4KB block size for both the HD and SSD. Upon statrt up and through benchmark 1 in ArmA the C drive reads 463mb and write 35mb, the SSD reads 757mb of data. At highest settings and 10k vis the system is now GPU limited, this is a sli gtx460. The read hit rate on C is 25% and on the SSD it is 45% so far. The boot drive needs twice as much cache but the SSD reads twice as much data due to ArmA.

The best use of ram is ram caching. My system has 24gig of ram, 8gig is in a ramdisk and set as the paging file under the virtual memory settings. There is a new program called FancyCache which allows the use of ram for caching without the need of a ramdisk. Have not tried it yet but it looks interesting.

Normal gameplay is perfect, running with high settings and have no lag, stuttering, lod issues or mouse lag. I had to import some files from a USB device and plugged in a mini USB adapter to plug the device into. After the import was done i disconnected the USB device from the mini adapter but left the adapter in the USB port. So for the last week my game play has been awful, mouse lag, jumpy mouse, stuttering, etc. Starting thinking wtf did i do to mess up my system and remembered the USB adapter, so i yanked it out and my gameplay went back to normal. Might be something to test if you have game play issues as above. Wonder if USB flash devices might cause this issue also. Anyway i can reproduce this effect by just plugging back in the USB adapter.

I created a 16gig ramdisk and put the whole CO on it and there was zero difference in gameplay, loading time, fps and lod as an SSD. The key item is that an ramdisk is still a disk and still loads into system ram and then into the paging file. If you have a 2nd disk you can test this by making a paging file on it and turning off all other paging files. This 2nd drive should be unused by the system or applications for this test. After playing for some time you will see the paging file activity.

You are right, exactly what i said. Use the extra ram as a ramdisk if you don't have an ssd. But it still is better to use it for paging. A ramdisk for data will load faster into ram, just like a harddrive, but faster. The real activity happens after the data is loaded into ram (from a HD, SSD, or ramdisk) and that activity takes place in the paging file. After ArmA2 uses its limit in ram (around 2gig) there is about 10x amount of data transfer (write and read) from the paging file.

My system has 24 gig of DDR3 triple channel ram. I have created a ramdisk that is used for virtual memory paging file. It is 8 gig in size and it is the only paging file on this pc. ArmA2 is installed on a dedicated SSD. Most of the activity after ArmA2 loads is from the paging file. I have tried sizes from 1 gig to 8 gig and found that they all work fine. A ramdisk for ArmA2 is a waste of ram from my tests, except for load times, same as a SSD. Readyboost is off, and no USB drives. System Specs: Win 7 64 bit, i7 930 overclocked to 4.0 ghz (watercooled) GTX460 1 gig Hyperthreading turned off in bios.

Over at OCZ support forums there is a SSD Tweak tool which works. http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?49779-SSD-Tweak-Utility Also this tool works great. http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner Ran CC and disabled paging file then a reboot and then ran the Tweak and another reboot. System runs much faster now, no increase in fps, just very smooth play in Arma2. It seems that the Large System Cache enabled by the tweak tool does a great job in using more of the ram. This system has 12 gig in it, Arma2 tends to use up to 1.5 gig. Win 7 64 bit The system runs great except in Arma2 online multiplayer, after a couple hours then it slows down. The ram use is almost all 12 gig as the paging is using up all the ram. During play with no paging file there are still the objects loading on screen, but is is very fast and most times don't even see it happen. Also instead of single or small groups of objects loading on screen, there will be large areas that load very fast. The data in ram does not get moved to the paging file on disk so the loading is off ram all the time untill you run out of ram after a couple of hours. So 64 bit os and no ramdisk is the best way. And no paging file if you have like 12 gig ram. Keep paging file on if you don't have this much ram. Just ordered another 12 gig, as the board has 6 slots, will try with 24 gig ram and see how it plays after many hours on-line. Also in armory i can have VD @ 10k and texture and object details at very high flying at 4x speed zoomed in with no lag or stuttering. The load times off the SSD are longer and there is some lag as the graphics load but after 30 sec it is quite smooth. Also ordered a gtx 460 to replace this gtx 260.

The audio started to cut out while playing arma2. It is 2 speaker plus sub that was connected to the RL audio jack. The usb for the speakers was plugged into another computer and the two computers shared the speakers for years no problem. I switched the plugs so the pc now has the usb plug and the mac has the audio jack. Everything is fine now even with 128 channels. It is a usb 3 plug so it provides more power. The interesting thing is my fps went up a few fps. And the screen has less jerkyness. It is not at all that jerky to begin with. After reading about audio problems other people were having in games they tend to find that getting a audio pci card helps with fps on slower cpus.

System Spec: i930 2.8 over clocked to 4.0 (water cooled) Tried stock 2.8 and no change in fps Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard 12 gig DDR3 Triple Channel PC3 10700 GTX 260, 896 Video Ram Win 7 64 bit on a 10k SATA 3 ArmA 2 and OA installed on a 30 gig SSD Virtual memory on 2nd drive 19000 mb fixed Bench Marks: BM01 52 fps BM02 23 fps E08 44 fps In big towns i set visibility lower and when flying i set higher. 1920x1200 @ 100% Visibility 2000 Texture - High Video Memory - Very High AF- disabled AA - disabled Terrain - very low Objects - High Shadow - High PP - very low 32 = audio -nosplash -world=empty -cpucount=4 (fixes micro stutter) -exThreads=7 (no change seen with this option) Nvidia Control Panel: pre-rendered frames = 3 (also edit CFG file to match) Texture filter = high performance Triple buffer = off Vsync = force off Power = Maximum performance Turned off all Window features except .Net and Explorer 8 Windows Experience Index: Processor: 7.7 Memory: 7.7 Graphics/Gaming: 7.2 Hard Drive: 5.9