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Game perf. crap when HDD reads

F

fiveoh

n00b
Joined
Aug 9, 2004
Messages
9
Specs:
Athlon64 3400
512 Corsair 400mhz
(2) Baracuda 120's in RAID 0
9800XT 256
XP SP1


Running Doom III or FarCry my system cranks smoothly at max graphical settings. But, whenever the HDD reads (which is pretty frequently in Doom), it gets very choppy. I don't think I've seen the door animation in Doom III once! Every corner you turn, new enemy popping up, or door opening causes HDD activity, which drags the frame rate down to 1 fps for between 2-5 seconds. I'm defragged and no other programs are running. Help me out guys!


Thanks,
Lars
 
Raid 0 raises access times about 30% to 50% above the access times of a single HDD. So if a cuda drive has a access time of 9 mls by itself. It will go up to around 12 to 15 mls in a Raid 0 setup. There is no way to improve this eather. Raid 0 was made for movement/handling of large files. Small random access patterns like gaming and normal windows use is the worst case for it.

A single drive is better for gaming / normal windows operation.
 
Nah, I'd still bet the RAID combined with too little memory. 512MB just doesn't cut it.
 
512 MB IMO is more than enough to keep Doom 3 playable. That is unless you didn't properly tweak your OS for full dedication to gaming. Now that would explain some problems. Besides this, I would be inclined to believe that the RAID 0 set up could be affecting this. Double drives sure do increase the ms a bit. I would assume one drive is better than two. No need to random search to load anything.

-J.
 
no,

i would check drivers though, i had the same issue with my promise tx4 slowing down my entire system for no reason and it was as simple as bad drivers.
 
I'm up to date on my motherboard, sata raid, bios, video card. Any other ides?
 
geforcex, 512, although, adequate in some cases, is not enough to run doom3. if you use windows nt kernel os's you can see the peak usage during or after an application is used. doom3 1024x768, high quality, 128m agp aperture (since using high quality on a 128m video card) used 923 megs of my 1gig of memory. now, this was after termination of doom3. also if you note it does state that 400megs of hard drive is needed for the swap file along with the size required for install (bottom of box). snuggle, is on point.
 
Interesting, but based on my experience, it wasn't actually much of a detrimental effect on the game and or even the experience through playing it. I get a couple of slow downs but it's back on its' foot before I knew it. I used the same settings as yours except at medium quality. That may explain the difference. And yes, I realized I saw 400 on that page file. I had mine set at static 512 mb and everything ran fine, even after playing it. Then again, I tweaked my OS so bad that it's 99% secured and you can't run so many Windows apps (because they have been removed/disabed).

-J.
 
Today I disabled VM and tried to load Doom. It barely got to 25% loaded into a save before running out of memory. But, I also think that having to access the HDD during gameplay is going to happen and shouldn't cause such a bottleneck. There is another thread about poor SATA perf. with a similar setup to mine.
 
honestly, i would not use raid0. i would segregate the two drives. one for os and swap and the other for archives and games. i have three drives that i use in this manner. to note my c drive is sata. also nother note, i have played and completed doom with not one issue at all.
 
I just kicked my res down to 800*600 and turned off AA hopeing to free up some memory and make things a lttle more smooth. I found out how memory hungry Doom is! Peak total mem usage.... 1,096 MB vs. around 119 MB idle usage. Wow! I need another stick. :eek:
 
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