On my ongoing quest to avoid flying and to spend time playing 'Cliffs over Optimization' I thought it would be fun to try seeing if a 'really, really fast disk' would help framerates, or rather consistency of play.

Here's what I did:

- Use the most excellent SuperSpeed's RamDisk Plus product (they do a 15 day trial and if you run databases and need a /tempDB mount I recommend it, otherwise the $60 is probably not that good a deal for normal people).

- Set up, say, a 5GB RAM disk, i.e. this is a NTFS volume that appears to Windows like any other, but it's in RAM. You can 'save' the image to file on shutdown/startup too, although obviously a little voilatile so don't put your weddings photos up there in a lightening storm. I have 8GB of memory in this Win 7 x64 box in-front of me, which is sort of the minimum to try this.

- Do a Steam 'backup' (Properties in the Steam menu) and keep your big download somewhere safe.

- Don't forget to 'deactivate' the product first (sigh) by the usual 'Uninstall' windows control panel. You can use the backup to put it back for the next step.

- Shut down Steam.

- On your new RAM drive, say G: follow these instructions:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7710-tdlc-0426

i.e. create a little tree of empty folders on your new RAM drive, copy the 'Steam.exe' across, your 'profile-name' directory, any of the .ncf files with 'Dover' in them and the common/il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover directory.

- Double-click the 'steam.exe' on the new drive. Steam will wake up, look around it's new home and start to sort itself out. It'll be quick (this is in RAM afterall).

- In your (new) Steam library then don't forget to turn back off Cloud saving and Steam overlay.

- In your games library start COD. It will reactivate and do some setup things, but basically just start up.

So in summary, the game files are coming from RAM, while Windows O/S files, the paging are all just as normal. It's sort of a poor mans tiny but faster SSD.

I'll type up some more results, but apart from loading the level in about 4 seconds it doesn't make a massive amount of difference on my setup here, but then my CPU and GPU are maginal so for others it might really help. I can fly over London at about 30 FPS, but I still get pauses that make combat very hard. Dogfights over water are smoother, but it's subjective I think.

In game, with the 5GB disk I see 7.6 GB of physical RAM used, i.e. still some head-room on a 8GB setup. The COD install is about 4.3 GB in size, so you could even squeeze the RAM disk down a little.

Ok, after playing with from RAMdisk for a while I can tell it's better, not 'wow - all fixed!' better but certainly a noticeable improvement.

The cores are all used (remember a Q6600 doesn't support hyper-threading) but still at a fairly low-level, i.e. < 30%. By looking at what the threads per-core are doing (and guessing from their file handles/IO) it seems that sound, and texture loading are definitely multi-threaded and core affinity is ok.

The RAMdisk still cause I/O glitches (it'll be faster than a SATA3 SSD), so it's not a case of resources backing up but more what the Sim does with them once it's got them, i.e. we'd need a code change in the caching algorithm or some optimization. I imagine a SSD would only help if you have green > GTX 500 Series or a red > 5700 plus i5/7 at > 3 GHz as otherwise you're chasing the wrong bottleneck.

GPU wise is really odd, in that it doesn't seem to actually use all of the VRAM for textures, and gets the same ones from disk - this happens a lot of towns. It's like it doesn't understand the full DX CAPS info on what to use (bug - dunno).

Right - off on a work trip for a couple of weeks tomorrow so can't play anymore and probably won't be able to read/post, so please someone water the Tree, give Werner a hug and all try to be good. Cheerio!

Thanks for the info. Have fun, i'm sure by the time you get back everything will be sorted....it says here.

Yeah maybe you'll have a patch to look forward to when you get back! I think I'll buy an SSD tomorrow and see if that has any effect on performance. I was gonna get one anyway, might as well get one now.

Thanks for all your effort FearlessFrog. It seems behind all that tweaking-patching badly needed there we have the best flight sim to date. Yeah, I feel optimistic, until now they always keep upgrading and fixing ting on the Il-2 series.so I giving them some credit.

Thanks - yes, it gives glimpses of an amazing air combat experience. Should be fun as things move on.

I'm interested in this RAM as an HD test. I did this way back in the days of Quake lol.

I didn't really want to start a new thread for this so I thought I'd add to this one.

This is the kind of CPU usage I'm getting with ProcessAffinity set to 0 in ini.



Not sure if you can see but I'm over London. All 4 cores are spread pretty evenly. My framerate stutters quite a bit though (seems a lot of swapping is going on). I'm easily in single digits at times and up to 40 others. I'm just one step below maxed out but experienced similar play on max.

Anyways all the worrying about CoDo (we should call it this instead of Clod lol) not being threaded for multiple cores seems to be baseless. Without the stuttering I have a feeling this game will run very well. I'm not even maxing out on a single core over London. Of course adding more planes/AI into the equation would change that, but it seems promising. My only other concern is that I have 4gig of memory waiting to do something. CoDo is not touching it at all from what I've seen. The 32bit addressing seems to be correct. Other than that I'm having fun .

Any thoughts?

Thanks for the info.. this, along with Luthiers latest report should help clarify some points that are being consistantly rammed down our throats.

Very interesting thanks Calgary!

How is the terrain bump-mapping? Can we get a shot please?

Can we adjust colour saturation anywhere? Easily

Ming

Hopefully FearlessFrog doesn't mind me updating here. I can always add to a screenshots thread after this.


That should let you see some of the different types of road. They blend in quite nice together most the time. Sometimes they get to a river and just stop. Other times they blend in quite nicely with a bridge.
All in all though the effect is quite good.

Very nice shots thanks Calgary of the BBC and possibly Chingachgook

By the look of it, high levels of anisotropic filtering will be useful (draw distance)

Ming

Frog - can you throw on some file monitors and determine if it's file access that's causing the stutters or shunting of textures from main to video memory?

I did try, and will zip up and post logs, i.e. a filemon run when I can remote log in back to the machine (I'm away at the mo)

The file access actually didn't seem that bad (especially on a Ramdisk), which is pointing more at textures shuffling or rather something caching/processing on the textures back and forth poorly. I don't think it's using the GPU's VRAM correctly but haven't looked at that in detail yet.

With the Aussie etc release live now hopefully lots more people will jump in with details of what they are seeing.

Cool. Still waiting on the steam release before I can run any diagnostics on it.

If it turns out to be file access causing the issues I might grab two SSD's and stripe them.

I installed my SSD and put Windows on it today, but now they've sorted out the EFFIT on our version I'm not installing the russian one again. I've ordered the Steam version (grinds teeth ).

Holy crap though, how fast is the SSD? Ten minutes, I kid you not, to install W7-64.

Regardless of the wee pretend planes thing we chat about, once you go SSD you never go back. On a balanced system it makes everything feel nicer.

I steered clear for a long time after hearing about how the memory-blocks burned out pretty quickly on them. That and the price. I've still put the page-file on a different drive though (not sure it'll get much use anyway, with 8GB of RAM).

Within Windows it makes a hell of a difference.

Since we're talking SSDs, here comes a minor hijack:


What kind should I get?

I was thinking about the OCZ Agility 2 with 60 or 90 GB. (depending on budgetary considerations ). Both sound fast enough at 285 MB/s read and 275 MB/s write. Also: I wasn't planning on upgrading my OS just yet and don't want to reinstall Vista. Would I still get a noticable performance-bonus if I just used the SSD for games and leave Vista on my 7,200 rpm Samsung HDD?


S.

Any game that needs to grab stuff on the fly from the HD will benefit from an SSD. Identifying those games is the issue, vis a vis what hardware you already have.

The newly released sata 3 ssd's, with the 2nd generation controller are faster.

Read this review:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vertex-3-sandforce-ssd,2869.html