Good Performance Hunting

[torminater]

hey guys

what do you think of these vids?

[video=youtube]

[video=youtube]

[MontyMM]

IMHO, they don't add much to Frihyland's installation guide, and some of it is a bit redundant. His tips on memory are bit random. 8GB RAM isn't necessarily justified - Skyrim won't use more than 4GB (and rarely makes full use of that), and Windows shouldn't hog another four. For him to say that with less than 8GB SKyrim will be a stuttering mess is misleading. He also tells people which sockets to install their DIMMs in, but that is going to vary according to motherboard, and the setup of dual or triple channel memory, etc. He also repeats the old myth about page file size.

 

I'd personally also be a bit worried about telling people to overclock their GPU as a standard practice.

[z929669]

Ditto Monty's post.

[stoppingby4now]

In regards to the first video, I agree with Monty as well. His advice is random in a couple of spots. I do think he was trying to infer that if you had less than 4GB of memory that you would incur stuttering. I'm not aware of anyone running with less 4GB that can report. But, when you consider that the Windows kernel reserves 2GB of RAM initially to itself and then releases upon demand to applications that need it, you could get into a situation where you have very bad performance with less than 4GB. In today's age, there's no reason to recommend less than 4GB, and with the changes in memory management with Vista+, more is better and not going to break the bank.

[frihyland]

I plan to do something similar in a couple months after the guide has been revised and refined to a work of art. First though graphics will start appearing here and there.

[torminater]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I didn't want you to think about what he said exactly, but about the idea to make a video like this :)

also those vids where uploaded before Skyrim was released (two days before) so of course the content of the video is pretty dubious ;-)

---

I found a rather interesting thread: https://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=699856

the last post says:

It worked, better than I ever expected. The glichy-superlag caused by

loading from and caching to the same drive is not just reduced, it is

almost completely gone (~80% reduced).

 

 

 

Anyone that is running out of VRAM on their GPU needs only move the Steam client to an internal drive

other than the one that your OS is running on. This allows Skyrim to

load from the second hard drive, and cache to your OS's hard drive,

instead of doing both on the same drive.

 

 

 

I would assume that this can apply to virtually any game.

What do you think of that?

I MOVED Skyrim on to my SSD (SteamMover) which has windows on it, but my steam client is still on my HDD. So if I install Steam onto my SSD and move all the other games onto my HDD, this would probably have the same effect as the guy described in his post, wouldn't it?

[Bealdwine]

So if I install Steam onto my SSD and move all the other games onto my HDD' date=' this would probably have the same effect as the guy described in his post, wouldn't it?[/quote']

Not really, what he is aiming to do is have Steam + Game files on one drive seperate from the OS and it's cache on a different drive (so that your PC isn't trying to simultaneously read from AND write to the same drive).

If you have the Win OS (and Windows cache?) and steam/game on your SSD you are back to step one.

[torminater]

Hmm... so this trick is useless for my setup? :(

well I found this nice article with really much infos in it. https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Steam

it may already be known around here, but I found the tips quite interesting! :)

[MadWizard25]

Cheers for that torminater, that contains some useful info for the troubleshooting and maybe SIG guide.

[frihyland]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I didn't want you to think about what he said exactly, but about the idea to make a video like this :)

also those vids where uploaded before Skyrim was released (two days before) so of course the content of the video is pretty dubious ;-)

---

I found a rather interesting thread: https://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=699856

the last post says:

 

It worked, better than I ever expected. The glichy-superlag caused by loading from and caching to the same drive is not just reduced, it is

almost completely gone (~80% reduced).

 

 

 

Anyone that is running out of VRAM on their GPU needs only move the Steam client to an internal drive

other than the one that your OS is running on. This allows Skyrim to

load from the second hard drive, and cache to your OS's hard drive,

instead of doing both on the same drive.

 

 

 

I would assume that this can apply to virtually any game.

 

What do you think of that?I MOVED Skyrim on to my SSD (SteamMover) which has windows on it, but my steam client is still on my HDD. So if I install Steam onto my SSD and move all the other games onto my HDD, this would probably have the same effect as the guy described in his post, wouldn't it?

 

 

This advice has been in the Skyrim Installation Guide since day one and the intent to do videos and graphics was written into the description.

[z929669]

 

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I didn't want you to think about what he said exactly, but about the idea to make a video like this :)also those vids where uploaded before Skyrim was released (two days before) so of course the content of the video is pretty dubious ;-)

---

I found a rather interesting thread: https://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=699856

the last post says:

 

 

It worked, better than I ever expected. The glichy-superlag caused by loading from and caching to the same drive is not just reduced, it is almost completely gone (~80% reduced).

 

 

 

Anyone that is running out of VRAM on their GPU needs only move the Steam client to an internal drive

other than the one that your OS is running on. This allows Skyrim to

load from the second hard drive, and cache to your OS's hard drive,

instead of doing both on the same drive.

 

 

 

I would assume that this can apply to virtually any game.

 

 

What do you think of that?I MOVED Skyrim on to my SSD (SteamMover) which has windows on it, but my steam client is still on my HDD. So if I install Steam onto my SSD and move all the other games onto my HDD, this would probably have the same effect as the guy described in his post, wouldn't it?

 

 

This advice has been in the Skyrim Installation Guide since day one and the intent to do videos and graphics was written into the description.

 

The bit about moving game and steam off of the OS drive makes good sense if pagefile.sys is located on the OS drive or yet another drive... does Skyrim page out by default or does it try to stay in system RAM??

 

 

 

Anyway, that poster's comment about "if you are running out of VRAM on your GPU..." makes no sense unless he is using this as a proxy to conclude that paging occurs at VRAM max (which also does not make sense to me).

 

Any comments on these observations?

[Vond]

Would it work to simply move the entire pagefile to another drive rather than reinstall Steam? I remember the Skyrim Installation Guide and figured I'd follow the part about keeping Steam on another drive than the OS when re-installing, but then forgot all about when I actually reinstalled windows and all programs last week.

[z929669]

Would it work to simply move the entire pagefile to another drive rather than reinstall Steam? I remember the Skyrim Installation Guide and figured I'd follow the part about keeping Steam on another drive than the OS when re-installing, but then forgot all about when I actually reinstalled windows and all programs last week.

 

 

An ideal pagefile would be split into two parts, each the size of your installed RAM (or 75% of RAM), and would be situated at the beginning of physical drives used solely for media storage (you can accomplish this by creating small partitions at the beginning of each drive). Even, better, you could use one tiny SSD I would think for your pagefile.

 

 

 

This keeps paging from thrashing your OS and game drives... however, with 8 Gb of RAM, I would think that paging out is rare.

The main thing is to get Steam and games OFF of the OS drive and onto something fast and physically independent from the OS.

[frihyland]

I wrote about this a while back in these forums I believe, best harddrive setup is 3 ssd's, 1: windows system, 2: boot files, temp files, and pagefiles, 3:games and intensive applications

Then have a couple 2TB hds for all the rest. Totally eliminates the fragmentation issues (and thus maintenance), and isolates the 3 systems that use hd the most so you don't have performance drops from competing demands. The same idea would apply to any 3 hd's, if you only have 2 you'll have to make some hard choices.

[Vond]

 

Would it work to simply move the entire pagefile to another drive rather than reinstall Steam? I remember the Skyrim Installation Guide and figured I'd follow the part about keeping Steam on another drive than the OS when re-installing, but then forgot all about when I actually reinstalled windows and all programs last week.

 

 

An ideal pagefile would be split into two parts, each the size of your installed RAM (or 75% of RAM), and would be situated at the beginning of physical drives used solely for media storage (you can accomplish this by creating small partitions at the beginning of each drive). Even, better, you could use one tiny SSD I would think for your pagefile.

 

 

This keeps paging from thrashing your OS and game drives... however, with 8 Gb of RAM, I would think that paging out is rare.

The main thing is to get Steam and games OFF of the OS drive and onto something fast and physically independent from the OS.

 

 

That's the prob, my 2nd drive is slower than the OS drive, and I don't have any SSD nor can I afford one in the near future. :) So I do want Skyrim on this drive for that reason, unless there would still be performance gains from putting it on the other (slower) drive just from having it on another drive even if slower?

 

The main drive is a 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda and the other one is a 5400rpm Western Digital Caviar Green