Games Load 3x Slower, Experts Needed.

Ocean

Ocean

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 19, 2003
Messages
4,927
cliffs:
•all my games now load 3x slower. ut2k4, half life 2, guild wars, call of duty 2, etc.
•absolutely no spyware, malware, and viruses on my system. and less than 20 processes at startup.
•happened after a completely fresh install to a new larger 7200.10 sata hdd, load speeds compared to older eide drive.
•all chipset, videocard, and sata drivers are installed, and reinstalled
•directx is up to date
•framerate and effects run the same.

long version:
i previously had the games on a secondary fat32 partition on a primary ide drive. now i have them freshly installed on a secondary ntfs partition on the system's primary sata drive. games now take forever to load. but play fine, i also noticed my cpu isnt stressed 100% during loading. im clueless, normally i can fix everything myself, but i am really stumped on this. it must be something i am unfamiliar with. my tested throughput of the new drive seems to be faster than the old drive. any recommendations for programs for good hdd testing, or system monitoring during loading would be nice.

things ive tried and have failed:
•installing the games on a fat32 sata partition.
•installing the games on a fat32 partition of the original ide drive.
•updating directx - graphics drivers - chipset drivers
•changing all graphical settings to lowest

system info:
•winxp pro sp2 updated
•7800 gs w/256megs
•3200+ barton
•512 ram in dual channel
•Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo

the only anomalies i can find in my system:
•both of these hidden devices are not working / installed correctly
errant.jpg


•anyone know what this highlighted cache information refers to?
ramusage.jpg
 
I can't see the pictures you linked to, here at work (the Air Force blocks them), but it sounds like you have either lost your paging file or is is set too small. The other possibility is that you SATA port is operating in some compatibility mode because of a BIOS setting. Other things to check are that DMA is working on this drive, and that drive is defragmented. Is the SATA drive new or used? Did you install of Windows go without error?

for HDD testing: IOMeter for speed/seek/read/write times, HD Tach is also used frequently (gives detailed results),
 
Run a WesternDigital HDD diagnostic extended test on the HDD you just installed.

Maybe have bad sectors, ect.
 
what os is that you are running? whats taking 100% cpu usage there?
 
brand new drive. according to SIW, it has been powered on for 1140 hours. the old drive was powered on for 20,000 hours.

i ran HD tach, here are the results, i don't know if they are good or bad. keep in mind i have a 1st generation sata mobo:
hdtach.jpg


processor usage seems to indicate dma is on, but i can't find out how to check that from windows for the sata drives. seems like it is from the SIW info.

the western digital test is a pass on everything.

everything is defragmented.

im running winxp sp2, the 100% usage is due to UT2k4 being played in the background, i was monitoring memory usage, my ram is being maxed out, and i dont understand what the cache info represents.

here is info from SIW pertaining to the drive.

Code: 
Property	Value
Type		Fixed hard disk media
Vendor		Seagate
Model		ST3320620AS
Interface		SCSI SATA
Serial Number	5QF3TE7P
Revision		3.AAK
Size		320 GBytes
Removable	No
Location	Bus=0, Logical Unit=0, Port=2, Target Id=0
Controller Buffer Size on Drive	16 MBytes
Capabilities		DMA, LBA, IORDY_Disable, IORDY
PIO Mode Support		0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
DMA SW Mode Support	Not Supported
DMA MW Mode Support	0 - 1 - 2
UDMA Mode Support	0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 (ATA/66) - 5 (ATA/100) - 6 (ATA/133)
Current UDMA mode	5 (ATA-100)
Support NCQ		Yes
Support IFPWRMNGTRCV	No
Temperature		42 ºC (108 ºF)
SMART Support		Yes
	
Attribute Name				Attribute Value     	Threshold Value     	Raw Data
Raw Read Error Rate (01)	          	114                    006                    1225118
Spin Up Time (03)	          		096                    000                    0
Start/Stop Count (04)	          		100                    020                    72
Reallocated Sector Count (05)	          	100                    036                    0
Seek Error Rate (07)	          		072                    030                    86003
Power On Hours Count (09)	          	099                    000                    1140
Spin Retry Count (0A)	          		100                    097                    0
Power Cycle Count (0C)	          		100                    020                    72
<unknown> (BB)	          			100                    000                    0
<unknown> (BD)	          			100                    000                    0
Airflow Temperature (BE)	          	058                    045                    1966122
HDA Temperature (C2)	          		042                    000                    42
ECC On The Fly Count (C3)	          	081                    000                    12109747
Current pending sector count (C5)		100                    000                    0
Off-line uncorrectable sector count (C6)	100                    000                    0
Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate (C7)	          	200                    000                    0
Multi Zone Error Rate (C8)	          	100                    000                    0
Data Address Mark Errors (CA)	          	100                    000                    0
 
Blackstone said:
Format your system drive and do a clean install of windows.
Click to expand...

QFT
Make sure to clean the harddrive.. not just get rid of one partition.
Keep in mind, partitions aren't the brightest idea if you are going for speed. Your hard drive still has to do the same amount of work.
Want better speed? Get 2 hard drives instead of just partitioning 1.
 
lloose said:
QFT
Make sure to clean the harddrive.. not just get rid of one partition.
Keep in mind, partitions aren't the brightest idea if you are going for speed. Your hard drive still has to do the same amount of work.
Want better speed? Get 2 hard drives instead of just partitioning 1.
Click to expand...

I agree with this guy. what's the point? We only run things on other partitions when they're on separate hard drives because the second hard drive won't be spinning trying to read things for the OS, so all of it's power can be allocated to processing that one.

I'd say get another hard drive and do your partition thing and clean this hard drive up and make it 1 partition.
 
2 Partitions on one drive only serve one purpose. To save the data when you have to format the windows partition.

I have a 120gig drive and a 500gig drive that I use. I partition the 120 gig drive into 2 partitions for one reason. disk1 partition1 holds just my OS and system files, disk1 partition2 holds documents, pictures etc. Disk2 is just 1 partition that houses all my games and my paging file.

This is the best thing to do. Breaking apart 1 disk with multiple partitions gives you no speed benefits at all and can actually lower access times.
 
i have 2 partitions on 1 drive.
50 gigs for windows and programs and games
then the rest of the hdd for backupped data.
and then an additional hdd for backupped stuff.
ive also tried 2 paging files on 2 seperate physical drives.

the fat32 partition was just for games from a time when 15gigs of fat32 was faster than ntfs according to several articles. i just tried to duplicate the orginal conditions for speed. fat32 was part of that.

but so far i have no reason to think that my habit of keeping my installed running applications seperate from 250gigs of data is what has broken my games load times. and im pretty certain i dont want to delete 250 gigs of files just to test that out.

but i will consider reinstalling windows, since i keep my data and installs seperate.

xp pro sp2, im running ut2k4 and looking at my memory usage to see if i can see something odd.

so yall are saying i need to erase all of my media library and change my 300gig drive to one partition in order to decrease my games' loading time by 66%?
 
I think it's a driver issue, combined with the fact that FAT32 is a really horrid filesystem by today's standards.

Why is this in the video cards forum?
 
silent-circuit said:
I think it's a driver issue, combined with the fact that FAT32 is a really horrid filesystem by today's standards.

Why is this in the video cards forum?
Click to expand...

lol. Oh yeah... I just realized we're talkin about this in the video card section.... lol.
 
Looks like to me that the SATA drivers aren't actually installed.

What motherboard is it?

Are the chipset drivers installed?
 
hardc0re said:
is teh sata channel set to the correct transfer mode? check in device mangler...
Click to expand...
how can i verify this? ^^ does this info from a previous post answer the question?
Controller Buffer Size on Drive 16 MBytes
Capabilities DMA, LBA, IORDY_Disable, IORDY
PIO Mode Support 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
DMA SW Mode Support Not Supported
DMA MW Mode Support 0 - 1 - 2
UDMA Mode Support 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 (ATA/66) - 5 (ATA/100) - 6 (ATA/133)
Current UDMA mode 5 (ATA-100)



chipset drivers are installed and updated. the motherboard is an asus a7n8x deluxe with a 7800gs and 3200+ processor.

and please, everyone get off the fat32 issue, it was to test something out, that is all it was for.



the reason it is in the videocard forum, is because the loading time effects only games, not system startup or other programs, or even benchmarks for hdd performance. that made me think it has to do with the system not being able to load stuff into the videocard fast enough. this is also why i updated dircetx. and honestly video card forum members seemed to be the most game-performance-related savvy individuals.

im going to update, (clean and reinstall) new nvidia drivers.
 
have you checked all your BIOS settings to make sure they're appropriate for the drives you're using?
 
for the third time in this thread. the 100% processor usage is due to unreal tournament 2004 running. i was monitoring ram usage while the game was running to see if i could see anything odd. the highlighted cache of ~120 megs was odd to me.

ive checked bios settings. nothing seemed to be drive specific other than on/off and boot order. ive also tried different agp aperature sizes. nothing happened. any ideas if there is a specific bios setting i should look for?

running some more tests.
half life 2 lost coast benchmark runs at 45fps, but takes 3 minutes to load.

anyone have a way to check the videocard's ram usage?
 
Ocean said:
chipset drivers are installed and updated. the motherboard is an asus a7n8x deluxe with a 7800gs and 3200+ processor.
Click to expand...

You may already realize this, but just to make sure, that motherboard uses a Silicon Image 3112A Serial ATA RAID Controller whose drivers are not part of the NForce drivers.

LINK to the drivers: http://www.siliconimage.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=63&cid=3&ctid=2&osid=4&

Either way, reinstalling them if you haven't already tried it, may fix your problem.

I have that motherboard myself and it's now running my other PC that my kids play on. I ran a Mobile Barton 2500 at 2.65Ghz on it for years and still am. That motherboard is one of the best boards I have ever owned. Great board.

EDIT: Can you take a screenshot of your partition info from the Disk Management Console. You said that your games slowed down when you moved them off a second drive to a partition on your primary drive. If you can, try installing one of your games on your primary partition and see if it exhibits the same slowness on loading. There may be a chance that this partition you are using has something odd with it such as a small cluster size or something. (just throwing out ideas..)
 
asus didnt have that newest updated driver on their site. its giving me warning after warning. but ill install it anyway. if i dont post back soon. i fried it. here goes.



edit: :( :( :(
it crashed, repeatedly.
last known good configuration worked though, anyone know how to wipe those bad drivers completely now? eh nm they seem to be gone.

Met-AL said:
You said that your games slowed down when you moved them off a second drive to a partition on your primary drive. If you can, try installing one of your games on your primary partition and see if it exhibits the same slowness on loading.
Click to expand...

thats not exactly what i said, ive have tried installing games on both system sata and primary channel eide drives, same issue no matter where the games are installed.

the games were faster when i my now-secondary-non-system-eide drive was my primary-system-drive before i ever got a sata drive.

timeline:
1 big ata drive (with games and windows working harmoniously) and 1 little ata drive for extra storage
then i was running out of space so now i have
1 bigger sata drive (with games and windows not working good) and 1 big ata drive for extra storage
i then tried installing the games to the now-secondary 1 big ata drive to see if that fixed it. it did not.

disk management shows everything healthy, is there a more detailed view i should be screen capping?
 
Ocean said:
asus didnt have that newest updated driver on their site. its giving me warning after warning. but ill install it anyway. if i dont post back soon. i fried it. here goes.
Click to expand...


Another thing is to make sure you are running the latest BIOS for that board. ASUS along with changing and improving the motherboard's BIOS also inluded BIOS updates for the SATA controller as well.

Back in the day, http://www.nforcershq.com/, was the place to go for info on that board. I am not sure if there is much about that board anymore on the forums over there, but at one time, you could find all kinds of modded BIOS and drivers that were pretty good over there.
 
Ocean said:
for the third time in this thread. the 100% processor usage is due to unreal tournament 2004 running. i was monitoring ram usage while the game was running to see if i could see anything odd. the highlighted cache of ~120 megs was odd to me.

ive checked bios settings. nothing seemed to be drive specific other than on/off and boot order. ive also tried different agp aperature sizes. nothing happened. any ideas if there is a specific bios setting i should look for?

running some more tests.
half life 2 lost coast benchmark runs at 45fps, but takes 3 minutes to load.

anyone have a way to check the videocard's ram usage?
Click to expand...


Why is UT pegging your CPU? That should be checked out as well. Maybe a fresh install.
 
BTW,

Asus drives have been BAD lately.. like as in BAAAAAD!
I built an AM2 media center box with their hdmi-out-of-the-box motherboard and right on the cd it said "Vista drivers included". I tried installing the video drivers for the hdmi card.... and got the error that they were not vista compatible. :rolleyes:
 
Proxy said:
Why is UT pegging your CPU? That should be checked out as well. Maybe a fresh install.
Click to expand...

it always has maxed the cpu, even after 3 or 4 system reinstalls over the years. i run at absolutely max settings at 1680x1050. also im most familiar with the load times of ons-torlan, so i jumped into an instant action cpu-intensive-bot game of torlan. also it is a rather old cpu. single core, 200mhz fsb (400 for ram) but it has always been plenty fast on my system for the games i play.

as for the mobo bios drivers, i am one revision behind the newest. the newest makes the system more stable. my system has never EVER crashed. id like to leave it be.

i will likely reinstall to my old ide hdd, and use the new sata as a secondary drive. but i still would like to at least quantify the issue, so i can avoid it on the next install.


i would still like whatever videocard diagnostic utilities yall may know about. i would like to make sure all 256 of vcard ram is being used and id be curious to see if the agp bus is being maxed out during load times. and ill repeat, cpu usage is next to zero during loading, and that seems suspicious.
 
Ocean said:
it always has maxed the cpu, even after 3 or 4 system reinstalls over the years. i run at absolutely max settings at 1680x1050. also im most familiar with the load times of ons-torlan, so i jumped into an instant action cpu-intensive-bot game of torlan. also it is a rather old cpu. single core, 200mhz fsb (400 for ram) but it has always been plenty fast on my system for the games i play.

as for the mobo bios drivers, i am one revision behind the newest. the newest makes the system more stable. my system has never EVER crashed. id like to leave it be.

i will likely reinstall to my old ide hdd, and use the new sata as a secondary drive. but i still would like to at least quantify the issue, so i can avoid it on the next install.


i would still like whatever videocard diagnostic utilities yall may know about. i would like to make sure all 256 of vcard ram is being used and id be curious to see if the agp bus is being maxed out during load times. and ill repeat, cpu usage is next to zero during loading, and that seems suspicious.
Click to expand...

RivaTuner 2.0 will check your actual RAM usage, if someone hasn't already told you.
 
It looks like you're running REALLY low on memory. Are you running software now that you weren't before for the old install?
 
nope. but im beginning to wonder if maybe all those other installs i was just lucky somehow.

but after playing with rivatuner it seems loading up a ut2k4 onslaught torlan match takes up over a gig of ram. im wondering how i used to play it at all way back on a 9600 pro.

ive even tried memory cleaners, and i can easily free up 85% of my physical ram. and it ran smoothly last install with only 60% free. same settings and everything. ive even killed all the skinning and such and stripped windows down. to where windows xp pro is only using 84 megs of ram. still takes forever to load.

ill try going back to an older version of sygate personal firewall.

edit:
nope not sygate. down to 70 megs of ram, and still loads slow.
also all graphical settings to lowest and lowest resolution (320x240) still yields high load times. but about 5 seconds less.
 
ur hd's sata channel is probably running in PIO mode, check ur bios for the transfer rate and check ur drive's jumper, make sure it's set to master,slave or cable select
 
have you checked to see if any of your programs are not responding---task manager. I noted that you were playing with sygate firewall.This could be a issue
 
hardc0re said:
ur hd's sata channel is probably running in PIO mode, check ur bios for the transfer rate and check ur drive's jumper, make sure it's set to master,slave or cable select
Click to expand...

Ok, its not running in PIO mode, its a Serial ATA drive. Windows boots fine he said. Also, there are no jumpers on SATA drives as you only put one drive on a channel at a time. He has also confirmed the drivers are working for it as well.


We are down to a couple of possibilities.

1) There is a problem with just that partition, but not the drive or it's controller. Cluster size maybe?

2) There is a problem with just games which could mean its a problem with his video card, drivers, AGP drivers, video settings, AGP settings, etc.

3) Gremlins.
 
hardc0re said:
ur hd's sata channel is probably running in PIO mode, check ur bios for the transfer rate and check ur drive's jumper, make sure it's set to master,slave or cable select
Click to expand...

k, this post made me laugh. but i did consider there might be an autonegotiation issue when i first installed the drive. the 150 it should have defaulted to worked fine. and well, im using the drive for everything including games.

sygate is the only non-windows process that runs during gaming, and i uninstalled it (just in case the startup left a buggy remnant without the program running). still same problem.

ive installed the games to 4 different partitions, on 2 physical drives. same issue everywhere. which once again leads me to a belief it is between the mobo and its ability to communicate efficiently with the videocard.

i was also wondering if there might be a texture compression setting that is defaulted off in newest nvidia driver settings. and that without the compression, the textures are bigger, which results in slower loadings.
 
Have you tried it with the games on a separate physical drive from your page file? Copying data from one end of a drive to the other, rather than from one drive to another, will take a huge toll on the transfer rate. I've seen this triple load times before. Moving the page file off my Win98 system drive sent my boot times from 1:45 to 0:30.
 
check ur channel settings as per my screenshot.


Ultra DMA ATA 100 800 Mbit/s 100 MB/s <- This is you. you're running in ATA100 mode, look at the notes u posted on page 1.
Ultra DMA ATA 133 1.064 Gbit/s 133 MB/s
Serial ATA (SATA-150) 1.2 Gbit/s 150 MB/s
Serial ATA (SATA-300) 2.4 Gbit/s 300 MB/s <- this is where you should be, your drive is SATA 3.0 capable
 
my motherboard is NOT sata 3.0 capable. so it can't use autonegotiation and native command queueing.

but according to my tests my ata 100 speeds are matching your 133 speeds.

though i wonder why my mobo doesnt support 133, that i will look into.
 
Presumably you have the latest Video Card drivers installed, just wondering if they might not play nice with an older card.

Could be worth trying older drivers (if only for troubleshooting purposes)
Don't suppose you know what driver version you where running on your old setup? or even have the old installer package from your last install around somewhere?

I must have 4 or 5 sets of forceware in my d:\downloads\drivers folder, realy ought to clear up :D

I think I saw something about some AGP 7 series cards not playing nice with recent reference drivers, but i dont know the details of that so I won't comment further.
 
Ocean said:
my motherboard is NOT sata 3.0 capable. so it can't use autonegotiation and native command queueing.

but according to my tests my ata 100 speeds are matching your 133 speeds.

though i wonder why my mobo doesnt support 133, that i will look into.
Click to expand...


ATA 133 isn't a true standard so alot of stuff doesn't list it as being officially supported. It's like DDR500, it exists, but isn't a true standard like DDR400.
 
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