Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: caldera on June 20, 2012, 05:18:49 PM
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Would having AH on a separate partition help map rendering speed or FPS at all?
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Not that I know of, but having useless things in the background shut down help - like Windows for example, if you shut down certain details you can improve FPS, or turn your graphics from Quality to Performance.
Just find the best median for 40+ FPS
tell me your FPS and what settings in game you have on, also what settings on your video card do you have on? what programs?
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cal I partition my hd into 3 parts for simple reason is if windows crashes all I would have to do is delete the partition where windows is location. I have ah in it's own partition and even though I would have to reinstall the game, I wouldnt lose all my data. I also have a 3rd partition where I keep some programs that I installed but just to find it easier to delete rather than trying to figure out where in the windows directorty the folder is. I have thinks like wot, fraps, speed fan, things that really arent part of windows.
of course I also have 2 hd's and that makes it 6 partitions, but it makes it easier to organize stuff. all my ah movies are in one, songs on another.....
semp
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Not that I know of, but having useless things in the background shut down help - like Windows for example, if you shut down certain details you can improve FPS, or turn your graphics from Quality to Performance.
Just find the best median for 40+ FPS
tell me your FPS and what settings in game you have on, also what settings on your video card do you have on? what programs?
Have only 30-31 programs running (windows7-64) and frame rates usually in the 50s but have the detail sliders halfway and stuff like enemy skins off.
video card is a 9800GTX+ running things "application controlled" and "quality" on the Nvidia control panel, as well as one notch of AA in the AH video settings.
Nothing to complain about, but smoke and big crowds sometimes slow things down. I've also noticed that for a few years now, the film viewer takes a lot longer to load a film (and has stuttering that never occurs in-game) but that may be another issue.
When I first built this machine, it ran the game with everything maxed out at 59 FPS on a 27" monitor but now that isn't possible. Trying to make the most of what there is to work with. Not sure what my hard drive speed is (WD 300gb) but the performance rating in windows is only 5.9. Still have a ton of room on it (267 gb iirc) so no issue there.
cal I partition my hd into 3 parts for simple reason is if windows crashes all I would have to do is delete the partition where windows is location. I have ah in it's own partition and even though I would have to reinstall the game, I wouldnt lose all my data. I also have a 3rd partition where I keep some programs that I installed but just to find it easier to delete rather than trying to figure out where in the windows directorty the folder is. I have thinks like wot, fraps, speed fan, things that really arent part of windows.
of course I also have 2 hd's and that makes it 6 partitions, but it makes it easier to organize stuff. all my ah movies are in one, songs on another.....
semp
My system is rock solid and never crashes (well knock on wood :uhoh).
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mine has a couple of times. but it makes the difference between spending 20 min reinstalling windows or hours trying to figure out where your back up is :).
the only thing you may have to do is upgrade the video card. that card was one of the best 3 years ago but with the new eye candy you may want to update. assuming you have at least an e8400 cpu.
semp
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My system just so happens to be an E-8400 (3.0 ghz). I also just so happened to order a new card yesterday - after seeing that Stuka video that HiTech posted. :)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=14-127-566&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Page=3#scrollFullInfo
Does the hard drive have anything to do with game performance or is it mostly GPU or CPU power? Also have 8 gb of 1066 ddr2 if that means anything.
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I dont think there is any benefit from using partitions because OS operations and program operations have to occur through the same hardware controllers and it cant be good. I dont think it does much for the cache efficiencies either. Probably you are better off getting a hard drive controller card as well but separate drives are the first step (OS and programs). With programs like Premiere and video editing it helps to have two drives off of the OS drive (not partitions of the same drive) where one is for video and one for audio. Personally I would like to be able to use more than a single drive for AH (sounds and textures) but we have it as it is.
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When is the last time you defragged your HD?
This is 1 reason to put AH in it's own partition,so you can defrag that partion quicker.
:salute
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I dont think there is any benefit from using partitions because OS operations and program operations have to occur through the same hardware controllers and it cant be good. I dont think it does much for the cache efficiencies either. Probably you are better off getting a hard drive controller card as well but separate drives are the first step (OS and programs). With programs like Premiere and video editing it helps to have two drives off of the OS drive (not partitions of the same drive) where one is for video and one for audio. Personally I would like to be able to use more than a single drive for AH (sounds and textures) but we have it as it is.
Don't more drives = more heat and more blockage of the front fan? What's your opinion on SSDs?
When is the last time you defragged your HD?
This is 1 reason to put AH in it's own partition,so you can defrag that partion quicker.
:salute
The system gets defragged every week from the task scheduler thingy.
Thank you all for the help, btw. :cheers:
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I had a virus on my pc other month, some search engine Blekko would appear as a search engine and could not be deleted. Also microsoft essentials and firwall was corrupted.
I have partitioned my HD into 3 and have i installed windows 7 onto drive C.
Can this new partition be infected by the other moody partition?
Is better to fit in another physical drive as my pc has carriages to slot in 3 other drives?
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Don't more drives = more heat and more blockage of the front fan? What's your opinion on SSDs?
Depends on the case you use at to what happens with heat. My case has a giant fan at the front pushing air for the hard drives.
I think SSDs are a complete waste of money; a gimmick which I define as a feature that makes something standout but without relevance.
The real question you need to ask yourself is whether your specific space requirements agree with your budget concerning the price for an SSD and whether that requirement will change as time goes by. SSDs are not likely to come down in price for a while (probably years) but right now is not a bad time to buy larger hard drives. In fact the next breakthrough will probably give you even more space on a HD while the SSD will remain as it is.
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Depends on the case you use at to what happens with heat. My case has a giant fan at the front pushing air for the hard drives.
I think SSDs are a complete waste of money; a gimmick which I define as a feature that makes something standout but without relevance.
The real question you need to ask yourself is whether your specific space requirements agree with your budget concerning the price for an SSD and whether that requirement will change as time goes by. SSDs are not likely to come down in price for a while (probably years) but right now is not a bad time to buy larger hard drives. In fact the next breakthrough will probably give you even more space on a HD while the SSD will remain as it is.
amazing, seems the real world isn't listening to you, ssd prices have decreased to very competitive levels in the past 12 months. without the limitations of mechanical drive technology, they are hardly a "gimmick" or "waste of money", welcome to the 21st century.
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amazing, seems the real world isn't listening to you, ssd prices have decreased to very competitive levels in the past 12 months. without the limitations of mechanical drive technology, they are hardly a "gimmick" or "waste of money", welcome to the 21st century.
you can get at least 10x's the space for the same price with regular hd as oposite to ssd's.
semp
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amazing, seems the real world isn't listening to you, ssd prices have decreased to very competitive levels in the past 12 months. without the limitations of mechanical drive technology, they are hardly a "gimmick" or "waste of money", welcome to the 21st century.
Irrelevant. Your bending of the word "competitive" seems a bit strained in reality. My space requirements on my boot drive are for at least 400GB. With a little spare room thats somewhere between 450 and 500 which will cost $500. I can get a 1TB HD for $100. Gimmick + waste of money = bling.
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Irrelevant. Your bending of the word "competitive" seems a bit strained in reality. My space requirements on my boot drive are for at least 400GB. With a little spare room thats somewhere between 450 and 500 which will cost $500. I can get a 1TB HD for $100. Gimmick + waste of money = bling.
Says the man who has tri-sli. Classic :D
SSD is like turbocharging the computer. I/O increases so much that any operation depending on it will improve vastly.
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Says the man who has tri-sli. Classic :D
SSD is like turbocharging the computer. I/O increases so much that any operation depending on it will improve vastly.
The big point you should be paying attention to is that I can afford to do what makes sense. SSDs dont. The only thing an SSD can do is improve the I/O by eliminating seek time. If the data is properly cached in RAM seek time is already zero. So the best thing you can do for AH is get Windows 7 64-bit with at least 8 GB of RAM and at least two hard drives. An SSD is of no advantage except for the initial load time. After everything is cached there is no difference. So your $500 bling will leave you sitting there wondering how really dumb that purchase was. Instead you could have two hard drives and another video card.
Really smart thinking there Ripley.
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The big point you should be paying attention to is that I can afford to do what makes sense. SSDs dont. The only thing an SSD can do is improve the I/O by eliminating seek time. If the data is properly cached in RAM seek time is already zero. So the best thing you can do for AH is get Windows 7 64-bit with at least 8 GB of RAM and at least two hard drives. An SSD is of no advantage except for the initial load time. After everything is cached there is no difference. So your $500 bling will leave you sitting there wondering how really dumb that purchase was. Instead you could have two hard drives and another video card.
Really smart thinking there Ripley.
LOL if you can afford a tri-sli you can afford a 1TB SSD :)
I wasn't talking about AH performance there dude. I was talking about operations that require I/O. App load times, videoediting, OS installation, OS bootup, anything requiring handling of large data or large files...
And what goes for transfer speeds, current SATA3 SSDs blow out regular hdds in that area also. A HDD is simply antiquated in terms of performance. Look at these (http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-vertex-3-240gb-review/8) graphs.. You'd think a Velociraptor hdd is blazing fast, right? See what's sitting on the bottom...
You can get a SSD large enough to store all your main data for around 200 bucks. And you really feel the difference in daily use, the computer just seems so much more responsive that it's like upgrading to a new one.
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It doesnt matter Ripley. Everything you mentioned does nothing for anyone in AH. Nothing. The question was "whats your opinion on SSds?" and I answered. If it offered any advantage or presented any meaningful improvement I would have mentioned it. SSDs do nothing for AH in practical terms and therefore a user is better off using the money that might be spent on an SSD and improving their video instead (or controllers or audio etc etc). SSDs are bling.
And concerning video editing your mistaken. The programs themselves will load faster but the problem is that the cache files should be (I would say must be) on secondary drives. To optimize that type of scenario would require more than a single SSD. Also... video and audio reside on separate drives from each other. Once loaded the entire thing resides in RAM. SSD irrelevant.
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It doesnt matter Ripley. Everything you mentioned does nothing for anyone in AH. Nothing. The question was "whats your opinion on SSds?" and I answered. If it offered any advantage or presented any meaningful improvement I would have mentioned it. SSDs do nothing for AH in practical terms and therefore a user is better off using the money that might be spent on an SSD and improving their video instead (or controllers or audio etc etc). SSDs are bling.
And concerning video editing your mistaken. The programs themselves will load faster but the problem is that the cache files should be (I would say must be) on secondary drives. To optimize that type of scenario would require more than a single SSD. Also... video and audio reside on separate drives from each other. Once loaded the entire thing resides in RAM. SSD irrelevant.
Keep believing that Chalenge while the rest of us enjoy the blistering fast I/O, your choice :D
It's pretty funny how people in the same thread ramble about defragging the drive and then others state i/o doesn't matter. That's like night and day advice.
With old hdds you really need multiple drives because they have so horrible seek times. Hopeless effort trying to stream AV from a regular disk while having to do something else in the background as every head movement and file access takes forever. With a SSD seeks are near instant and output easily covers the streaming needs.
To clarify: I never claimed a SSD would increase AH2 fps, but it may help avoiding texture and other content related stutters if user suffers from them.
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So its better to have AH on its own drive?
When I installed Win7 onto one of the partitions it has a file called windows.old, can these be deleted?
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Keep believing that Chalenge while the rest of us enjoy the blistering fast I/O, your choice :D
It's pretty funny how people in the same thread ramble about defragging the drive and then others state i/o doesn't matter. That's like night and day advice.
With old hdds you really need multiple drives because they have so horrible seek times. Hopeless effort trying to stream AV from a regular disk while having to do something else in the background as every head movement and file access takes forever. With a SSD seeks are near instant and output easily covers the streaming needs.
To clarify: I never claimed a SSD would increase AH2 fps, but it may help avoiding texture and other content related stutters if user suffers from them.
You are mixing apples and oranges. BADLY mixing
Yes Zack. On its own physical drive and not just a partition.
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do both of you guys realize how silly you look arguing everytime over everything. getting and ssd drive isnt going to improve most player's puter's performance. if you already hit the max fps and you have whichever eye candy you like then it wont make a difference if you get and ssd or not.
you guys are arguing over nothing and it's silly. most player wont get an ssd just for one reason and one reason only, price. and even if they could afford one then they could afford better components that would make getting an ssd irrelevant as it wont really improve performance in the game.
you both made good points, leave it at that as there isnt a point to keep arguing over nothing.
semp
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Sorry semp I just have to correct bad information when I see it and Ripley is a good provider of just that! :D
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Sorry semp I just have to correct bad information when I see it and Ripley is a good provider of just that! :D
It's quite the other way around mr. Tri-sli :D
It's absolutely laughable to make statements like a SSD won't improve the computers performance. Any computer with a good ssd and sata3 will feel like it's turbocharged on daily operations. Everything I've said so far is a verifyable and 100% fact where Chalenges opinnions are just opinnions, he cannot provide _any_ backing for them.
Chalenge fails to see the correlation between the claimed need for defragmentation in order for AH to run properly and i/o speeds.
Let's look at the fundamentals (simplified):
A physical hard drive is based on spinning platters which contain the data. The data must be read by metal stick(s) that follows the platter(s) physically. Even though the stick is very light and is controlled by very strong magnets, it has serious limitations on moving from platter position to another. While moving it must also wait for the platter to spin to the correct position before read can start (which by the way is one reason why a faster rpm hard drive of the same capacity is usually the faster one, a 5400 rpm large drive can be faster than a 7200rpm smaller drive but that's a whole another theory lesson there).
This is where fragmentation comes in. The physical drive can only be efficient in reading data if the data being read is stored in a continuous row on the platter, enabling the drive to keep reading 1 line without moving the head. Unfortunately NTFS and FAT file systems are built in a way which makes it possible for files to be spilled all around the platters depending on the use of the drive when the data is being written.
This leads to file fragments all around the drive and is called fragmentation. The drive now has to move the reading head 1-100... times in order to read that single file. Since every head movement will 1) Stop the reading of data and 2) Take a few milliseconds of time, drive performance suffers noticeably and you hear that 'brrr clickety click' dance from your harddrive. The problem is extrapolated when multiple different processes require disk access at the same time. Now the read head has to perform a breakdance all over the platters, and each process waits for the others to finish seeking and reading data. This can be partly avoided by Chalenges advice of saving data on a separate hard drive so it can read parallel to the system drive without the interference of other data being read and seeked. With many small files the read head moving (seek time) is actually more than the actual time to read the data :)
So the action of a hdd requires massives amount of waiting to move between points at platters, searching data etc. This inherent fault is known to the manufacturers which is why modern hdds all have cache memories. The cache memory is a little bit like tiny ssd inside the hdd. The hdd stores the data that was read but not yet required by the system at that moment in hope that this data would be required next. If it does happen, cache is hit and the hdd can for a very brief moment 'burst' data at SSD equivalent speeds. But this burst can only cover 8-32 megabytes of data that happens to be cached, nothing else.
Now lets compare this to a SSD. SSD has no moving parts. It has no spinning platters, it has practically speaking no seek times because it's based on memory chips controlled by a controller chip. A SSD can read fragmented files just as efficiently as non-fragmented ones.
This combined to the fact that a SSD can produce 3-4 times higher sustained output to begin with, make SSD a superior choice for anyone who hates waiting while starting operations on the computer. Or for AH if it needs to read a texture mid-flight, the file access is going to take 100x less time using a SSD compared to a fragmented HDD.
Chalenge is right that once you've started some app once it resides in ram - that is untill ram is filled at which time the cache will be dumped. This however does NOT mean that your computer will run only from ram from that point on. You're free to experiment how long it will take for windows to crash while unplugging your drive whilst using some application :) Windows will constantly write temporary files and apps will constantly access data that does not reside in ram in the program binary - like AH which is "started" but still loads textures on the fly when need be. And this is where a SSD continues to give speed benefits.
It won't affect game FPS generally speaking, other than minimizing the chance of microhiccups or stutters caused by i/o. The SSD however will generally speaking make the computer perform much much faster, starting from the moment of bootup. I/O is the base of everything that happens on the computer.
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but mrripley will and ssd make the game better for me? will it make it faster? how will it improve it? this is the silliness of both of you arguing over ssd. yes and ssd can make under certain conditions make data available faster and you are correct on that, on the other hand will it make the game better?
both of you are right and both of you are wrong.
semp
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but mrripley will and ssd make the game better for me? will it make it faster? how will it improve it? this is the silliness of both of you arguing over ssd. yes and ssd can make under certain conditions make data available faster and you are correct on that, on the other hand will it make the game better?
both of you are right and both of you are wrong.
semp
I already answered your question. It does not improve FPS but it will minimize the possibility of stuttering while AH loads textures or sounds mid-game.
The benefits for AH are quite marginal, the reason to get one is all the other use of the computer.
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AH on my new partition has improved, I have only download essential software like Track IR etc :old:
There no silly processes in background now :)
Other family members use my pc so it is probly better my stuff is on its own.
I might get a second drive though as its been stated that it is an improvement having a actual new drive :old:
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Zach Ripley is engaging in hyperbolic euphemisms to make his point. He is also dead wrong about stutters from a hard drive seeking textures. He thinks like this because he doesnt understand how the technology works and especially when it comes to SLI graphics cards (his chief hyperbole when it comes to me).
The primary reason you DO NOT want an SSD drive to play AH from is that the drive will lose significant time off its life when doing constant read/writes of textures and other small files. Skuzzy has mentioned this on many occasions and it is the primary reason I tell anyone that wants to use an SSD that they will need hard drives as well.
Take Ripleys advice at your own peril.
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Zach Ripley is engaging in hyperbolic euphemisms to make his point. He is also dead wrong about stutters from a hard drive seeking textures. He thinks like this because he doesnt understand how the technology works and especially when it comes to SLI graphics cards (his chief hyperbole when it comes to me).
The primary reason you DO NOT want an SSD drive to play AH from is that the drive will lose significant time off its life when doing constant read/writes of textures and other small files. Skuzzy has mentioned this on many occasions and it is the primary reason I tell anyone that wants to use an SSD that they will need hard drives as well.
Take Ripleys advice at your own peril.
Oh yes, so you think people should defragment their drives if stutters happen but a SSD is not going to affect the problem.. riiiiigghtt :)
I'm laughing with you on the SLI issue because you've advertised multiple times that you have built systems with three top end graphics cards using SLI and then say you can't afford less than a quarter of the cost on a SSD... SLI-ing cards is a massive waste of money for two reasons. First of all any game you run will need a SLI profile to gain any benefit. These profiles are not readily found for all games and bad profiles can cause anything from crashes to bad performance - second SLI does not scale up 100%, not even close. So for each new 580 you buy for 500+ bucks you're going to typically lose 20-30% of performance (compared to actual double speed) and thus your money. With dual sli you already lost one SSD price in relative performance due to the ineffiency of the technology :)
Of course if the top end card is not fast enough, SLI is the only way to go so I have no issue with that - except that when that someone starts to groan about a single SSD drive price.
Please explain how the technology works in your opinnion as it seems I'm not understanding it and you do. Skuzzys advice on the SSD can be taken with a grain of salt, while I respect him highly he is extremely conservative on many things.
Current SSD's are rated for 25 millions of writes for every day of the week for the next 5 years. To achieve that kind of load AH2 would have to write small files more than the maximum capacity of a regular HDD all the time you play with it. You may notice it's not doing anything to the sort. AH will write a 1000000x fraction of that and even with known problems with SSD block writes it's not going to matter. Don't take my word for it, read this for example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html
The previous generation of consumer-oriented SSDs used 3x nm MLC NAND generally rated for 5000 cycles. In other words, you could write to and then erase data 5000 times before the NAND cells started losing their ability to retain data. On an 80 GB drive, that translated into writing 114 TB before conceivably starting to experience the effects of write exhaustion. Considering that the average desktop user writes, at most, 10 GB a day, it would take about 31 years to completely wear the drive out. With 25 nm NAND, this figure drops down to 18 years. Of course, we're oversimplifying a complex calculation. Issues like write amplification, compression, and garbage collection can affect those estimates. But overall, there is no reason you should have to monitor write endurance like some sort of doomsday clock on your desktop.
Your sources of information were, what, Chalenge?