Slow game loading

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Gawd
Joined
Jul 12, 2008
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717
I just bought 3x Western Digital Caviar RE3 320 GB which I put in Raid0. On them I installed my OS and a few games, including Modern Warfare 2. Anyway, while windows seems to be loading very nicely, the map loading in MW2 seems to actually be slower than before. 'Before' being with a three year old Seagate Barracuda 500gb. Obviously I didn't expect that, since in HD Tune Pro my Raid0 setup is getting about 300MB/s read and a 6.1s access time, while my Barracuda is getting about 80MB/s read at 6.8s access time.

So I kept HDTune running while loading three different multiplayer maps in MW2, and found that all of them maxed out at 55MB/s load, a sixth of the potential. Does this mean I've completely messed up with my 32kb data strip size?
 
What RAID engine/controller do you use? That's the key issue here.

Also, could you download CrystalDiskMark (latest version) and post a full benchmark? It will show you the differences between random I/O and sequential I/O, and also the effect of RAID on random reads (the qd32/64 score will scale with RAID0; the qd=1 score will not).

Also, note that with a proper RAID0 engine, lower stripesizes favor large files, while higher stripesizes favor random I/O or smaller files.

Due to HDDs being very slow when they have to seek, having your OS on a separate disk so your game doesn't get slowed down by system disk accesses, is also a setup to consider. The best would be a modern SSD of course, since it barely loses speed due to seeks; it is purely transfer capped, when properly used.

Once you post your CrystalDiskMark score, i hope i can shed some light on your potential issues.

Good luck!
 
It's just a built-in Intel Matrix Raid controller on the Maximus Extreme X38 board with a ICH9R Chipset, so nothing fancy there. I realize I'm probably not getting as much out of it as with a dedicated Raid controller, but when I ran Raid0 on my two standard 150gbRaptors( both which crashed ) a year ago, the game loading times were very decent, so I really expected more than this. And like I said, it actually feels slower than on the old Barracuda( except Windows, which boots very quickly).

Anyway, here's the bench. Write-back cache is disabled, though enabling it seemed oddly enough only to decrease my scores with this bench.


Code: 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :   297.595 MB/s
          Sequential Write :   311.844 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    52.151 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :   103.172 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.704 MB/s [   171.9 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     3.837 MB/s [   936.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     3.906 MB/s [   953.5 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     5.435 MB/s [  1326.8 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [D: 5.7% (45.1/796.6 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2010/07/11 18:39:45
    OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)
 
l00segravel said:
Looks like you are not the only one. I do not see any fixes for this issue though. maybe try different stripe sizes?
Click to expand...

Ugh, that's disheartening. He's even got the same on-board raid controller as me(Intel ICH9R). Looks like he has the exact same issues, actually. He was using strip sizes of 16KB, compared to my 32KB. When he changed it to 128KB he cut the loading times in half... Maybe I should go for 256KB, though I'm really getting tired of reinstalling everything.
 
You can try enabling the Write Caching option. It does put the data at risk when you encounter a crash or power failure, though. So only use it for not so important data or when you have a really good backup.

With the write caching, please look if the random 512KB read score is higher than 52MB/s. If you don't mind recreating & reinstalling, you could also test the performance of a single drive without RAID, to compare with.
 
Write-caching didn't improve my 512KB read, but it cut my 512KB write down to 40MB/s from 100MB/s.

Yet another guy having the same problem here: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=323191
Strangely enough that was MW2 too, even though I wasn't specifically searching for that game.
I know what your problem is You have killer average read speeds BUT you've dramatically increased your random access times 4 drives all seeking for tiny bit of information i reckon is 30-40ms at its very worst. Don't sound too bad but when you factor in 100's an 100's random files for each map it all adds up, it's why single drive beats you ain't the average read, it's factor of latency/lag your 4 drives add.
Click to expand...

Maybe this just wasn't a good idea, but I definitely remember seeing several benches/tests where Raid0 setups would improve loading in games. Maybe it's just this game in particular that loads faster on a single disk than on Raid0 arrays.
 
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