Area Load Stutters = HDD? : V - Skyrim

» Sat May 26, 2012 3:55 pm

So your telling me the Drop in performance, when i added a Physix card to my board was not due to droping the Bus speed?
.....
So my Problem was because I put my 8800 GTX in the second slot on my Board. And that if i were to get a Second GTX 560ti it would work good?

I've read (a while ago), that adding a slower 2nd videocard for physx could drop framerates, compared to not adding a card. The reason supposedly was that the "game loop" for 3D rendering, and for physx are tightly coupled. So when the physx card is doing heavy physics calculations, and can compute only 20 "situations" per second, your rendering framerate on your main videocard is going to adept to that. And your main videocard will not render more than 20 frames/sec in that situation. I believe the rule of thumb was to not go back more than one generation. And even then, it can be counter-productive to add a 2nd card.

» Sun May 27, 2012 12:15 am

I agree - caching is superior if you have a ton of it. Unfortunately, most people building a gaming rig (or buying one outright) don't know a lot about RAID, and that it can take advantage of multiple drive caching and large stripe sizing to buy performance enhancements. That leaves them with one fast drive that can't fill the pipe adequately, and hence becomes their bottleneck.

SSD is superior for seek times, very much so over a conventional drive. But they have problems of their own if not used right (repeated writes kill their lifetime quick). They can approach RAMdrive speeds when in their own RAID 0 stripe, and are extremely fast in that configuration. But again, that requires knowledge that a lot of people don't have, and a single SSD drive only solves half the problem (fast seeks, limited throughput).

If I had unlimited cash for Skyrim, the easy solution would be a 24gb RAMdrive and just skip SSD altogether. Barring that, I'd put 3 SSD into a RAID 0 stripe and just plan on them dying in a couple years (or less), and call it my gaming drive. Unfortunately most of us can't go with either route, and RAID 0 on conventional SATA drives is the next best thing - slightly higher seek times, but much higher throughput.

Hopefully the next generation of SSD-style drives will get around the problem of destroying their own sectors due to excessive writing. At that point, they will kill old conventional drives for anything except large storage.

I still firmly believe the OP was suffering from disk-subsystem bottlenecking, and barring any change in hardware the amount of data being transferred was the culprit. Memory can help combat repeated reads, but only so much. Still going to get long loads for areas and assets not cached.

Sorry to burst your bubble here but i'm in IT too, speciality in hardware and "repeated writes kill their lifetime quick" is another myth perpetuated by data from "2005" where the technology was becoming more popular and people unsure to upgrade to it a.k.a FUD..

My SSD stats (S.M.A.R.T. data);

Throughput
11589GB Data Read - 8396GB Data Written Yup Terabytes!
Work time 11338 hours, powered on 546 times, (bought March 2009)

Estimated lifetime 8 years 2 months, (March 2020), pretty much outdated way before it dies.

Still runs 260mb/s read 200mb/s Write from Stock values

Good read http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

Just my 2cents

oh and yes i've had HDD RAID setups before, not going back.

» Sat May 26, 2012 4:43 pm

You must be right, I know absolutely nothing about performance or PCs. I should fire everyone and sell my IT business, and I should give up producing performance mods for games.

I don't normally feed people who are trolling (posting to incite argument without contributing at all to the thread), but you get this one for free.

Now where's that darn Ignore button...

That's right, everything you just claimed about SSDs is completely false. I don't care if you work in IT. You can't back anything you claim and you're conspicuously not showing any video of your .5 second load screens you get due to the fact that you use mechanical hard drives.

RAID 0 gives minimal performance boost. And even with the boost it doesn't sniff SSD speed. You're carrying on about throughput and sustained reads/writes, and everything you claim there is false as well. Not to mention that video games aren't doing sustained reads/writes in the first place. So even if your claims were correct they wouldn't even matter.

If you want to talk about lifetime wear on a drive, then you should look at the fragility of mechanical drives in RAID 0. If either one fails it's a total loss across both drives. And mechanical drives with moving parts are going to fail long before flash memory, especially when you have double the chance of something failing in RAID 0. And of course SSDs don't suddenly fail. They slow down *slightly* over time. But even with a lot of wear, it's still way faster than a mechanical drive.

I'm not trolling in the least. You're just here spreading misinformation that you heard from someone else or fabricated on your own, and I called you on it. If you'd like me to hit you up with throughput comparison of your mechanical hard drives and a gen-2 or gen-3 SSD, let me know, LOL.

» Sat May 26, 2012 1:25 pm

Some basic benchmarks can be found here.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/65
For comparison's sake, there are benchmark numbers for Velociraptor disks.
Velociraptors are HDDs, made by Western Digital. Before SSDs, they were known as the fastest HDDs around.
The Velociraptors lose in every test. Delay and throughput.
HDDs can not compete with SSDs in any aspect. Except price.

Again, the OP's problem of stuttering is unlikely to be because of his HDD.
I also don't believe it's because of PCIE 16x vs 8x.
The most likely explanation is that his gtx560tis are running out of VRAM.
I have not heard any other plausible explanation here yet.

» Sat May 26, 2012 9:03 am

Bethesda Softworks games going back to Morrowind always stuttered for me big time. The stutter was at its worst with oblivion and FO3. After buying two Intel SSD and utilizing raid I no longer stutter. The problem is completely gone.

» Sat May 26, 2012 11:08 pm

Well there seems to be some heat in the thread, so I will add my 2 cents... Iam running a single SATA 3.0 250Gig 16MB cache HDD and I have never had an issue with studdering. I have played Oblivion, FO3 and New Vegas and they are all still stored on this HDD and I play them each often. This is just my opinion but, should we be looking at programs running in the background? Windows resources at a critical level? If you go into task manager how many processes are running?

» Sat May 26, 2012 10:58 am

*raises hand* yah I was getting that initiate 'must wait for game to settle' when switching areas and yah I'm running one of those ungodly high resolutions too (5760x1080), its definitely a combination of using 3rd party higher resolution textures and the vram getting a little cramped and yes disk access time really helps. Initially I was booting skyrim off of a 2x7200RPM raid0 but yah the seek time blows, shifted the game over to my vertex2 SSD and make a symlink back to the original spot in the steam folder: really dropped the wait time down to about 5 seconds from yah 10-15 seconds before. More recently I pulled out all the stops and tried this fun toy: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

For those of you with gobs of extra ram its just a stellar way to give it some purpose. At this point I still get that wait while first showing up in drastically different areas but its really down to like a second or two at most. That tool will let you have a 4GB ramdisk for free and if you like it its only 15$ to use as much as you want instead. I love that little guy and since DDR3 is so cheap its just a rather effective trick to keep your favourite game in that thing. We're talking 9000MB/sec read/write times here, no traditional storage method comes close to that.

Btw there's a lot of FUD about SSDs, at this point any good OS has trim support and yah with controllers like the sandforce based ones we're talking dozens of years of 24/7 full writing before sectors will go dead, they're good now and they're awesome.

» Sat May 26, 2012 3:13 pm

For those slow mechanical drives, don't forget about the 10k RPM Raptor drives. They've mostly been replaced by SSDs nowadays, but I've found similar load speeds on my "Budget" OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD RAID0 compared to my 300GB VelicoRaptor RAID0 without unpacking the BSAs. With unpacked BSAs, the SSDs do win out. As I have 12GB of RAM I'm also using the SuperCache program, though I have yet to see any noticeable improvement in gaming from it.

Note that if you're using a FPS Limiter either through the patched d3d9.dll or ENB Series, the transition load times (from one area to another, such as exterior<->interior) seem to be drastically effected by it.

» Sat May 26, 2012 10:14 pm

Again, the OP's problem of stuttering is unlikely to be because of his HDD.
I also don't believe it's because of PCIE 16x vs 8x.
The most likely explanation is that his gtx560tis are running out of VRAM.
I have not heard any other plausible explanation here yet.

Yeah, a good way to be sure about it is with GPU software like GPU-Z/Process explorer, for me it shows +-700MB used/1024mb (Whiterun city) and i have landscape/clothes/armor/body/faces texture packs. I do not experience that kind of problem.

But i play@1920x1080, he could be well over his vram available running 2560x1440 and any other tweaks + AA, AF etc..

He could also just "move" the "textures" out of the Skyrim folder to figure out if that's the high-res textures causing the problem.

Edit, whoops just re-read OP, he "added" the textures packs and the problem occurred, most likely out of VRAM or buggy textures.

» Sat May 26, 2012 10:47 pm

Hmm, I didn't really read the OP's post close enough...this game has memory fragmentation problems, especially with VRAM. See here for in-depth issue from the wonderful ENB: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1302016-to-bethesda-bsods-fix-tech-info/

When a program says it has X free memory, it doesn't take into account how fragmented that memory is. You can use a program like VMMap to see the fragmentation in RAM...not sure how with VRAM.

ENB's patched d3d9.dll can increase stability (and performance) along with the LAA (4GB) Launcher, the latter of which gives much more room for the memory to become fragmented and seems to allow the heap enough room to breathe on Ultra settings (especially with HD texture mods), although ENB has shown if the game engine tries to allocate enough memory too quickly it'll still crash, even at the main menu (he posted a "LAA Test" a while ago).

Edit: If it wasn't mentioned before, if you're getting the stuttering when new cells are loaded/unloaded, here's something to tweak in the INI:

Go to My Documents->My Games->Skyrim->Skyrim.ini and add or set "uExterior Cell Buffer=72" under the "[General]" section at the top. Directly beneath what you just added, also add or set "iPreloadSizeLimit=268435456".

Fiddling with uGridsToLoad is not necessary for this change.

You will probably want the LAA Injector (4GB Launcher) with this fix as memory requirements will have increased: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1013

» Sat May 26, 2012 3:19 pm

Note that if you're using a FPS Limiter either through the patched d3d9.dll or ENB Series, the transition load times (from one area to another, such as exterior<->interior)

seem to be drastically effected by it.

I am NOT talking about load times! My load times are about 2 seconds. This is not the problem. I actually would not even mind if my load times went up to 15 seconds if it

would solve this stuttering problem.

Hmm, I didn't really read the OP's post close enough...this game has memory fragmentation problems, especially with VRAM. See here for in-depth issue from the wonderful ENB:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1302016-to-bethesda-bsods-fix-tech-info/

When a program says it has X free memory, it doesn't take into account how fragmented that memory is. You can use a program like VMMap to see the fragmentation in RAM...not

sure how with VRAM.

ENB's patched d3d9.dll can increase stability (and performance) along with the LAA (4GB) Launcher, the latter of which gives much more room for the memory to become fragmented

and seems to allow the heap enough room to breathe on Ultra settings (especially with HD texture mods), although ENB has shown if the game engine tries to allocate enough

memory too quickly it'll still crash, even at the main menu (he posted a "LAA Test" a while ago).

Edit: If it wasn't mentioned before, if you're getting the stuttering when new cells are loaded/unloaded, here's something to tweak in the INI:

Go to My Documents->My Games->Skyrim->Skyrim.ini and add or set "uExterior Cell Buffer=72" under the "[General]" section at the top. Directly beneath what you just added, also

add or set "iPreloadSizeLimit=268435456".

Fiddling with uGridsToLoad is not necessary for this change.

You will probably want the LAA Injector (4GB Launcher) with this fix as memory requirements will have increased: http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1013

I already have Cell Buffer tweaks, the ENB Patch, and the LAA Injector.

put this in your skyrim ini under the papyrus section

[Papyrus]
iMinMemoryPageSize=100000
iMaxMemoryPageSize=5000000
iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=1800000000

I have to doubt the validity of these tweaks. I have found no reliable data on their use. Somebody is going to have to put benchmarks under my nose before I believe that

these do anything. They did nothing for me. This is probably why they were omitted from the Skyrim Tweak Guide.

Again, the OP's problem of stuttering is unlikely to be because of his HDD.
I also don't believe it's because of PCIE 16x vs 8x.
The most likely explanation is that his gtx560tis are running out of VRAM.
I have not heard any other plausible explanation here yet.

I think you are probably right. When I set my SLI configuration to run in single GPU mode, then the stuttering goes away. The FPS is down, but the stuttering is gone. I

think in single GPU mode the SLI configuration uses the second GPU has VRAM overflow space. This would corroborate the idea that my SLI configuration using both GPUs is

running out of VRAM.

*raises hand* yah I was getting that initiate 'must wait for game to settle' when switching areas and yah I'm running one of those ungodly high resolutions too (5760x1080),

its definitely a combination of using 3rd party higher resolution textures and the vram getting a little cramped and yes disk access time really helps. Initially I was

booting skyrim off of a 2x7200RPM raid0 but yah the seek time blows, shifted the game over to my vertex2 SSD and make a symlink back to the original spot in the steam folder:

really dropped the wait time down to about 5 seconds from yah 10-15 seconds before. More recently I pulled out all the stops and tried this fun toy:

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

For those of you with gobs of extra ram its just a stellar way to give it some purpose. At this point I still get that wait while first showing up in drastically different

areas but its really down to like a second or two at most. That tool will let you have a 4GB ramdisk for free and if you like it its only 15$ to use as much as you want

instead. I love that little guy and since DDR3 is so cheap its just a rather effective trick to keep your favourite game in that thing. We're talking 9000MB/sec read/write

times here, no traditional storage method comes close to that.

Btw there's a lot of FUD about SSDs, at this point any good OS has trim support and yah with controllers like the sandforce based ones we're talking dozens of years of 24/7

full writing before sectors will go dead, they're good now and they're awesome.

Yes, finally somebody who knows exactly what I am talking about! RAMDisk and more VRAM sound like a good idea.

Yeah, a good way to be sure about it is with GPU software like GPU-Z/Process explorer, for me it shows +-700MB used/1024mb (Whiterun city) and i have

landscape/clothes/armor/body/faces texture packs. I do not experience that kind of problem.

But i play@1920x1080, he could be well over his vram available running 2560x1440 and any other tweaks + AA, AF etc..

He could also just "move" the "textures" out of the Skyrim folder to figure out if that's the high-res textures causing the problem.

Edit, whoops just re-read OP, he "added" the textures packs and the problem occurred, most likely out of VRAM or buggy textures.

Good idea, GrimElven. When I Alt-Tab into GPU-Z, I am seeing memory usage in the high 900's on both cards in the SLI. It does indeed appear to be full. However, I

experience the stuttering sometimes even without the high resolution textures, but there is far less stuttering without the textures.

My Conclusion:
Do you think it will work smoothly if I sell my two 1GB GTX560 Ti's and replace them with a single 3GB GTX 580, and then add 8GB of RAM to use as a RAMDisk for the Skyrim

files? Will a single GTX 580 have enough processing power to play on Ultra with high resolution textures at 2560x1440?

» Sat May 26, 2012 3:02 pm

My Conclusion:
Do you think it will work smoothly if I sell my two 1GB GTX560 Ti's and replace them with a single 3GB GTX 580, and then add 8GB of RAM to use as a RAMDisk for the Skyrim

files? Will a single GTX 580 have enough processing power to play on Ultra with high resolution textures at 2560x1440?

I'm thinking even the 1.5gb version would be 'enough' for yourself but when the dif between them is only like 70-80$... bah dooo it

I'm going for a trio of them myself the second I get confirms about a job offer I'm expecting this week

If you're going for one though I'm thinking that gigabyte one with the three fans working as a tunnel would probably be great noise wise since no single fan needs to spinning very high, they're unfortunately just extra wide enough that they're more then dual-slot so you can't stuff three together but as a single one it'd probably be the quietest way to use such hardware short of going into liquids. I'm aiming at the basic eVGA 3Gbs myself since they sandwich together comfortably, figure I'll cancel out the noise they produce with FUH-SO-RAHs!

Er right and yah since Skyrim doesn't seem to tax GPUs as much as expected I think having one bigger faster card with more memory would be a better fit then two mid-range cards with indeed inadequate vram for our resolutions. Using 3xGTX280s (1GB) myself so yah I definitely understand where the vram limit hurts and for me its a either 3rd party textures, decent shadows or anything over 2xAA.

» Sat May 26, 2012 3:10 pm

I suspect a lot of those texture mods out there, especially Skyrim HD - 2K Textures, aren't using the best available texture compression (4:1 instead of 6:1).

And even the author of Skyrim HD runs his system with 1GB of VRAM on slightly tweaked "High" settings. I would say the best trade-off for this particular mod would be to download both the "Full" and "Lite" versions, copy in "Full", then copy all the textures that apply to exteriors (mainly the folders inside landscape) from "Lite" overtop of them. A lot of mods have versions with different resolutions, you can mix-and-match this way.

This fixed my massive FPS problems with my twin GTX 470 Overclocked 1.2GB in SLI when using this texture mod. Really, the problem isn't just "your VRAM is too low for HD texture mods", it's that the game is so horribly optimized for PCs with high amounts of VRAM and RAM. It's coded around the memory limitations of the Xbox360 and PS3 which have 512MB shared and 256MB shared, respectively. The game's engine can't even seem to deal with its own "Ultra" settings without tweaking.

As other high-end games like BF3, Crysis 2, etc. seem to do fine on my system at their effectively-highest-settings-thoroughly-tweaked, I see no reason to upgrade until the next generation.