Hi guys. I've had an idea rolling around in my head for a little while, and figured it might be worthwhile throwing it out here.
As it stands right now, I've got a relatively old system running AH. I'm reasonably happy with it, it runs 60fps all the time except on the runway during FSO when there's 50 or so planes sitting on top of one another. Other than that, no complaints. In flight, my framerate is good and solid. All graphics set to full, no shadows, no AA, no AF. This thing is just my AH terminal, all other considerations are secondary.
This system is not a worldbeater by any stretch:
Athlon 64 X2 2800+
Asus M2NBP-VM CSM motherboard
4 gigs RAM
GeForce 7800 1GB video card, manufacturer escapes me at the moment, not tremendously important.
Windows XP 32 bit.
The single slightly annoying thing with this system is, when I'm loading the game, it pretty much locks up as I'm going into the arena. It sorts itself out, but after the progress bar runs and the tower appears, it takes a while for the graphic textures to load, I can't do anything, and occasionally if it pauses at the wrong time, it drops UDP and switches to TCP during this process. Sometimes it switches off the advanced graphic features due to low frame rate during this process. If the wrong map is loaded in the arena, I sometimes get booted from the arena for being nonresponsive. If I reboot at this point, I'll be able to get in, no problems.
Once the game is fully loaded, it runs like a top. If I start from a fresh bootup, I don't run into the dropping to TCP issues, losing connection, or the dropping of the advanced graphic features. It still takes a while to load, but it doesn't have the issues mentioned above.
Now by what I know of how AH operates and how my system operates, here's what I believe is my situation. My PC is capable of running the game under the settings I've specified with no problems, once it's up. I know the reason I need to reboot sometimes is NVidia's drivers leak memory. I know and accept this limitation. Alt-tabbing out and back in, it seems to have to reload some stuff off the hard drive which slows it down. Loading the game at first, the dropping to TCP and occasional bootings are due to the fact the machine is taking too long to respond to the server so it thinks the connection is flaky/graphic settings are too high.
My system seems to be capable of RUNNING AH just fine, but it seems to be a bit marginal for LOADING the game. My impression is that my main bottleneck running AH has to do with hard drive access. I defrag often, also.
Here's what I'm contemplating: It's a 64 bit system running a 32 bit OS. Would I see much of a performance boost on this system if I were to get myself a SATA SSD and a retail copy of Windows 7 64 bit, in preparation to slide them into the next complete rebuild I do? Or should I just save my pennies and get a whole new system? Secondly, in practical terms, would running a SATA SSD be that much worse than a PCI-e SSD in the future when I get a motherboard that's capable of utilizing a PCI-e one?
It would seem to me that while Windows 7 has a bit more overhead, it would be running in 64 bit mode instead of 32, which would probably pretty much cancel each other out, or possibly boost performance slightly. The SSD would greatly decrease how long it takes to get the stuff off the HD and into RAM, but what I'm slightly concerned with is, I see by the benchmarks that the SATA SSD's aren't as fast as the PCI-e ones, and I don't believe my system will boot from PCI-e anyways. I know generally speaking benchmarks and speed ratings don't always translate over in practice.
Does anyone have experience doing something similar?
Wiley.