Need to know if my HDD is bottlenecking my system

[oldpainless 1]

Sup guys,

I have a fairly good computer:

Win 7

Intel i5 OCed to 4.0ghz

Nvidia 670

8 gigs of ddr3 ram

Asrock p55 pro motherboard

and finally.. my 500gb 7200rpm SATA HDD with my OS and steam folder.

I used this system to play shogun 2 with everything on ultra at great frames, along with BF3/skyrim/NS2.

I've read DayZ/ArmA 2 are very HDD based.

I recently installed DayZ Namalsk, as I wanted to play again after a break, but wanted a fresh map. My FPS is even worse than in vanilla DayZ. In woodlands, it's bad(30-ish), my fps in cities is terrible(20-ish and unplayable). My max is around 40 when staring at the ocan. As someone used to playing fps games at 60+ fps, this isn't acceptable and severly affects my will to play. I'm even considering buying a SSD drive just for this game if I have to.

So.. any ideas?

Edit: It makes almost no difference in my FPS if I have the game set to ultra high or ultra low. Except for object quality, which gives me about 5 extra frames if set to very low.

Edited November 19, 2012 by Old Painless

[rossums 2190]

It sounds like that would be your bottleneck.

Very CPU and I/O intensive.

The 2 lowest end parts would be your HDD and processor.

It's an 1156 socket processor, but clocked at 4GhZ should be more than capable.

That only really leaves the HDD (Unless it's a botched install or something).

A SSD is always a good upgrade anyway, if you are looking to upgrade anyway I'd 100% recommend you get a SSD.

The difference between a SSD and a HDD are night and day, it can't hurt - I'd never go back to a mechanical hard drive again.

[Pahvilaatikko 20]

Hard-drive doesn't affect FPS at all. It only determines how long the load times are, when it has to load up the map and other stuff.

I have a 640Gb WD Caviar Blue 7200 RPM SATA HDD, which has my OS and games installed (even though in seperate partitions) and I get a good +50 FPS on all maps other than Chernarus. In Chernarus my FPS varies from 30 to 50.

Edited November 19, 2012 by Pahvilaatikko

[oldpainless 1]

That's it, I'm getting a SSD! Thanks for the reply. I'm gonna try and let my processor last a bit longer.

Edit: didn't see the second comment. Officially lost again :)

Edited November 19, 2012 by Old Painless

[rossums 2190]

Hard-drive doesn't affect FPS at all. It only determines how long the load times are, when it has to load up the map and other stuff.

That is not true, any game that requires loading textures and data from files saved on the hard disk will be affected by the speed of the disk.

I recommend before you do anything you give your HDD a good defrag using a good tool like Defraggler (http://www.piriform.com/defraggler) - not the Windows one.

Unless it's a problem you are experiencing on many games, reinstall Arma II - it's very prone to breaking and a reinstall can fix a lot of problems.

[oldpainless 1]

Thanks, will run this overnight.

[blunt_zephyr 51]

Would your PCI-E 3.0 card bottleneck with your PCI-E 2.0 motherboard?

Sata3 (6gig'r) motherboard + SSD device = oh hell yeah, it's 'fast'

Check out the "Performance" options.

[Pikachu (DayZ) 9]

Would your PCI-E 3.0 card bottleneck with your PCI-E 2.0 motherboard?

Sata3 (6gig'r) motherboard + SSD device = oh hell yeah, it's 'fast'

Check out the "Performance" options.

Currently there isn't a single PCI-E card that can completely saturate the bandwidth limit for a PCI-E 2.0 slot. PCI-E 3.0 was made for a 3+ card system where all 3 cards combined will saturate the bandwidth completely. So no.

@ OP

As for the disk question, the ram is fine and I doubt that you are reading from the disk's cache when running ArmA 2. (HDD's cache are used for outrageous file sizes such as compressed folders or larger photoshop files as a inbetweener from HDD to RAM)

The Intel i5 is probably your problem child as it's usually a 2 or 4 core processor. Based on the lack of description for the processor I'll assume you're using a dual core with hyperthreading (2+2) as getting the top end i5's around 3.4ghz with 4 cores are usually comparable to getting an i7 (a price difference of $30-$60 and you get 4 cores plus 4 virtuals). The dual cores are clocked higher hence why you're able to clock at 4.0ghz (is this with turbo boost or without?) and ArmA 2 Hyperthreading support is a toss-up based on a google search. Some say it hampers the game, others say it doesn't affect the game's performance. I tend to agree that it does not affect performance.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processor-comparison/compare-intel-processors.html?select=desktop

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f440-pr-arma2-general-discussion/85195-arma-2-intel-quadcore-hyper-threading.html

A simple upgrade to an i7 would give ArmA 2 8 cores to use as opposed to your 4 (be they physical or virtual). Either way, the HDD shouldn't affect the games performance much. I haven't noticed a difference between my 2 systems (one using a platter HDD and the other a SSD)

My guess is the processor and the fact that you're probably trying to play the game at 1080 lower your resolution to 720 and anti-alias the hell out of the game (since this will use your GPU instead of the CPU)

tl:dr

Processor.

[oldpainless 1]

Sorry for the necro, but I just remembered this thread now. I actually bought a new motherboard and processor. Went with the ivy bridge i5 3570(replacing the old i5 750) and overclocked it from 3,8 ghz to 4,5.. It's officially made the game playable for me. Now I rarely drop below 50 fps. I'm still getting an SSD in a month or so, will be curious if it affects my fps in any way.

Edited December 3, 2012 by Old Painless

[nort0n 3]

Hmm so CPU was the issue, this is useful information for me as I'm trying to figure out my bottleneck as well (I'm guess its a little bit of both, but on low settings video card should become less relevant). Looking to get the same CPU, although I havn't seen any naturally clocked to 3.8. Only 3.4 Ghz (unless your referring to the 3.8Ghz turbo Boost).

Please clarify - thanks =D

[blunt_zephyr 51]

Sorry for the necro, but I just remembered this thread now. I actually bought a new motherboard and processor. Went with the ivy bridge i5 3570(replacing the old i5 750) and overclocked it from 3,8 ghz to 4,5.. It's officially made the game playable for me. Now I rarely drop below 50 fps. I'm still getting an SSD in a month or so, will be curious if it affects my fps in any way.

SSD? Most definitely. I bought one a few month ago and put windows on it. I still use use an olser sata 2 for apps/software but the gain both ingame and out..mai gawd! SSD SHOULD BE LAW! :lol:

[nort0n 3]

SSD? Most definitely. I bought one a few month ago and put windows on it. I still use use an olser sata 2 for apps/software but the gain both ingame and out..mai gawd! SSD SHOULD BE LAW! :lol:

So are you reporting actual FPS increases in game with the SSD?