Joseph Ferano Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Hello everybody! First post here and just starting to get into the game. I am playing the demo and will beging to play the full game soon. I have a question slightly non game related as my first post. Im sure to start many more game related ones since this game looks might interesting. Anyway, can anybody provide loading times for a level in this game? Preferably the demo mission. Reason being, I have a fairly high end RAID 0 setup and I want to crossreference with you guys here to see if my speeds are up to par. Basically, im a little worried that the stripe size I chose (32k) is a little too small, so if anyone can help me out here, id appreciate it greatly. The load time of the German mission in the demo from the press of "Start Battle" button to the load of the level is 36 seconds by stop watch. Thanks for the help!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomm Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Just a guess, but I think that during map loading the computer does a fair amount of de-compressing, pre-processing of terrain data, or something. I do not think the loading times are entirely related to file transfer, because they are much too long for that! Best regards, Thomm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr.Jones Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Not to mention, the game has to load from compressed SFS (filesistem) files, for each file. br. Dr.Jones Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FinnN Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 RAID isn't going to do much one way or the other due to the large file sizes (the SFS archives). Looking at filemon you'll see the game is looking through lots of files that aren't actually used. I doubt in the bigger picture it has much effect on total load time, but it does point at this area not being as efficient as possible. Have fun Finn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnasher Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 The striping will most certainly help loading times in so much as the data can be read from disk faster from striped disks than RAID-Nothing disk. I would think a 32k stripe size a little small as well & would probably go for 128k depending on the drive type & speed. You may well find that memory then becomes the bottleneck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FinnN Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 I'm sure there's more information out there on this, but here's a quote from the wikipedia RAID entry: Even running the latest, greatest, and biggest drives in RAID-0 is unlikely to boost performance more than 10%, and performance may drop in some access patterns, particularly games.I have a RAID 0 array amongst my drives and I have to say that the above matches my experience comparing games on one drive to another, and I've read several articles that give more detail with the same conclusion. The only one where I personally have noticed a significant difference was in the MS Flight Sim games where the game is constantly accessing lots of small files. Any games where it's accessing big files I see no or limited boost to either loading times or performance. Have fun Finn Oh and I should add the fastest drives I have are in the RAID-0 array. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnasher Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Agreed RAID 0 won't help much as this is read intensive activity, RAID 1 mirroring would produce better results but is way more expensive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joseph Ferano Posted June 20, 2007 Author Share Posted June 20, 2007 Thanks to everybody for responding. First of all, we can all make educated guesses, but the fun part would be to actually do the benchmarks and test out the levels. RAID 0 is just as fast as RAID 1 when it comes to read speeds. It isnt just made for write transfers. The only thing that could possibly be faster than a RAID 0 in reading is a RAID 5, cause usually you have 3 HDs or more accesing the data. RAID 0 doesnt do well at small sizes and bad on larger ones. Thats all dependant on the stripe size. The smaller your stripe size, the better for smaller files, the larger the size, the better for big files. I plan on purchasing the game today, so if anybody wants, just record your favorite mission, hopefully one that takes a while to load, and then, as soon as I purchase the game, ill test it out myself. Itll be fun. Take care! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnasher Posted June 20, 2007 Share Posted June 20, 2007 Not quite right Joseph. RAID 5 incurs a write penalty to write the parity info to an alt disk & is by far the slowest of the resilent RAID levels. RAID 0 is the fastest at writing but is not resilient & RAID 1 is the fastest on read because it can take the block of data from whichever disk device responds quickest. If you really want max performance together with resilience then you should use striped & mirrored RAID 0+1 or RAID 10 as some manufacturers call it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joseph Ferano Posted June 20, 2007 Author Share Posted June 20, 2007 You are right, but I never said anything about the write speeds of RAID 5, which obviously, because of parity, is one of the slowest at writing. I was refering to the read speeds only, which is the important factor when loading a level. RAID 5 is probably one of the best for read speeds. Fault tolerance is not a concern of mine right now, or what you call resilience. I did my setup with performance in mind. All my important files are safely stored in a seperate 500gb HD with an external as a mirror. You have a good point, RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 are excellent for performance and fault tolerance. Care to do the benchmarks? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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