Disabling Advanced Graphics Settings.

[saggs]

I got a:

2.4Ghz quad core processor
ATI 4850 video card
8GB RAM

Yet...
         every time I start the game my framerate will be around 10-15 for the first 20-30 seconds, and then jump up to 60 and pretty much stay there.  Half of the time the game will automatically disable my advanced graphics settings after 10 seconds of slow framerate on startup, and I have to go reset them.

After 30 seconds, my framerate is always good, and I have no problems. 

What is causing this slow framerate at startup?  Anything I can do about it?

[The Fugitive]

The game monitors how fast your system loads the files. If it's too slow it knock back your video settings. My guess is that your video card is a bottle neck, or you have a lot of things running in the background on your computer. I'd run a defrag, and get my processes down into the 20's and see how that works. You just might be on the edge, and cleaning things up might set you strait.

[Tigger29]

The 4850 isn't that bad a video card.  I have a feeling it's due to more background processes running more than anything.

Being that you have 8GB of ram, I have to assume you're using a 64bit operating system?  Is it Vista or is it 7?  Open your task manager and let us know how many processes are running... I bet you're just so loaded down with anti-smav software and auto updaters and speed loaders that it's dragging things down.

[saggs]

OS is Windows 7 64 bit.

AH is running from a solid state drive, so I don't thing a defrag will help.

Task manager says I'm running 47 processes, right now, with firefox open.

My problem is I don't know which I can turn off without messing something important up.

It is a weird problem, like I said after 20-30 seconds, my framerate goes up to 60 and stays there, with all advanced graphics boxes checked and all sliders to full.  Why does it do this only at startup and not all the time if it's a resource issue?

[Skuzzy]

Try disabling the "Superfetch" and "Readyboost" services in Windows 7 and see if that helps.  It sounds like the OS is struggling to free resources, so the game can load.

By the way, it does not matter how much system RAM you have.  Windows does not use system RAM like many think it would.  You can have 4000TB (terra bytes) of system RAM, but Windows will only allow a 32 bit application to run in a 4GB slice of RAM.  In that 4GB of RAM, the application will have, at most, 3GB to run in.

All more RAM does is allow more applications to be loaded, at the same time (which you do not want to do when running the game!!!), unless they are 64bit applications.

Running the game out of a solid state device is not a good idea.  The game constantly updates its configuration files (many. many writes), which can cause all manner of performance issues with the game.

[Noir]

what? SSD no go?

[Skuzzy]

SSD's usually suffer performance issues when they are written to a lot.  Generally, it is not a good idea to place programs on them that do a lot of writes.

[Noir]

SSD's usually suffer performance issues when they are written to a lot.  Generally, it is not a good idea to place programs on them thet do a lot of writes.

ok so my hybrid hdd wasn't a so bad idea afterall, except that it caused microfreezes before I updated the firmware

[saggs]

Thanks Skuzzy,

I'll try disabling those things, and I guess I'll move AH over to my HDD now too, never new that about SSDs.  Good to know.

Kinda off topic, but that brings up another question in my mind.  I also run Lightroom and Photoshop off of the SSD, but if I understand correctly that's OK, because the files I open and change and save in PS and LR are on a separate HDD, just the programs themselves are on the SSD.    Sound right??

[gyrene81]

where is your scratch disk for photoshop saggs?

[Ack-Ack]

Try disabling the "Superfetch" and "Readyboost" services in Windows 7 and see if that helps.  It sounds like the OS is struggling to free resources, so the game can load.

By the way, it does not matter how much system RAM you have.  Windows does not use system RAM like many think it would.  You can have 4000TB (terra bytes) of system RAM, but Windows will only allow a 32 bit application to run in a 4GB slice of RAM.  In that 4GB of RAM, the application will have, at most, 3GB to run in.

All more RAM does is allow more applications to be loaded, at the same time (which you do not want to do when running the game!!!), unless they are 64bit applications.

Running the game out of a solid state device is not a good idea.  The game constantly updates its configuration files (many. many writes), which can cause all manner of performance issues with the game.

I've heard that disabling SuperFetch really won't give you that much of a boost, true?

Why disabling SuperFetch is a bad idea

ack-ack

[Skuzzy]

Superfetch simply fills all available system RAM with programs that Windows thinks you will be using.  Once it has done that, to start another application it has to either write the loaded information to the swap file, or stomp over it.  Stomping is faster, but it still requires more than a few context switches to get it out of memory.

Sure, if you never load anything that Superfetch has not already loaded, it will be faster.  I have done a lot of testing with this and have never seen Superfetch benefit any game, at all.  As you know Ack-Ack, games load an enormous amount of data.  The faster that can be done, the better the game is going to run.  Superfetch does not preload 'data'.  It only preloads program and the data segment of said programs.

That article is bullocks about it being a "bad idea".  It will not hurt anything to disable it, and is always worth trying.  Vista is particularly stupid when it comes to Superfetch.  It will merrily tie up a computer for 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the available memory (this is where more RAM can actually hurt you) preloading everything after a fresh boot.

There will always be someone who has bought into the Kool-aid and will find a why to make it look pretty and shiny.  Anyone who actually knows what they are doing would simply tell a person to try it and make up your own mind.  It really is not that hard to do.

[Ack-Ack]

Superfetch simply fills all available system RAM with programs that Windows thinks you will be using.  Once it has done that, to start another application it has to either write the loaded information to the swap file, or stomp over it.  Stomping is faster, but it still requires more than a few context switches to get it out of memory.

Sure, if you never load anything that Superfetch has not already loaded, it will be faster.  I have done a lot of testing with this and have never seen Superfetch benefit any game, at all.  As you know Ack-Ack, games load an enormous amount of data.  The faster that can be done, the better the game is going to run.  Superfetch does not preload 'data'.  It only preloads program and the data segment of said programs.

That article is bullocks about it being a "bad idea".  It will not hurt anything to disable it, and is always worth trying.  Vista is particularly stupid when it comes to Superfetch.  It will merrily tie up a computer for 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the available memory (this is where more RAM can actually hurt you) preloading everything after a fresh boot.

There will always be someone who has bought into the Kool-aid and will find a why to make it look pretty and shiny.  Anyone who actually knows what they are doing would simply tell a person to try it and make up your own mind.  It really is not that hard to do.

Is it possible for SuperFetch to cause low disk storage errors?  Been trying to track down an error at work that we've never been able to reproduce but it never occured to any of our techs or myself to disable SuperFetch and see if we can reproduce the low disk error message.


ack-ack

[Skuzzy]

I have never seen that happen, but I'll take a look.  Microsoft did some changes to SF (SuperFetch) for Windows 7 to stop it from preloading while the OS is busy loading another application.  Other than that, it is the same as Vista's version.

[saggs]

where is your scratch disk for photoshop saggs?

I've never changed the settings for it, so it's the same SSD that the Windows is on.  

Is it bad to use SSD as a scratch disk???  I only have like 12 GB free on the SSD anyway.   I'd honestly never though of it before but maybe I'll partition part of the HDDs as a scratch disk.  

Also I use Lightroom (doesn't use scratch disk AFAIK) a lot more then photoshop, and it's setup to save the XMP sidecar files to the same drive as the image files, so I don't think it writes anything to the SSD.

Basically I built my system with 2 500 GB HDDs in RAID 1 mirror, for all the data, and a 60 GB SSD that I have Windows 7, Photoshop CS4, Lightroom and Photomatix (all 64 bit versions) on.


PS. Back on topic, I have no idea what Superfetch is (half of Skuzzy's explanation went over my head) but I disabled it.  Haven't had a chance to play for several days, so I can't tell you if it helped or not yet.