Borg textures

posted on February 12th, 2011, 5:05 pm

When loading borg textures (or meshes or something technical) the game hangs for a few seconds. the devs are working on ways to improve this, but i would like to tell everyone a temporary way of improving the time.

you may have noticed recently in a replay that my borg things loaded quickly, i was bemused as usually they take longer. then i remembered that i have a usb key plugged in and being used for readyboost and have run the games several times since plugging it in.

for those who havnt seen it, win vista/7 can use any fast enough usb key as a temporary cache, kinda like ram, but not as fast. running fleetops with readyboost and a key appears to improve loading time for borg. possibly because the necessary data was written to the readyboost cache.

its not a complete solution, nor is it available to those who dont have a key or win vista/7 but i hope it helps some people out there.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 5:25 pm

Thats cool, I will have to try that.  I don't know why i never decided to do that.  I always just ignored the feature tbh.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 10:27 pm

I've noticed some performance boost, but my USB drive didn't have enough space on it to make much of a difference.  Either that or my computer was that slow.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 10:39 pm

I have a similar feature on my linux machine that streams data off a high speed rotating disk, but one that is faster than a typical USB key. Basically it loads the game off one disk, and the common files synchronously off another disk.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 10:44 pm

a rotating disk that is faster than a usb key. it depends on how you define fast. any hard drive nowadays is faster over long periods of access, compared to a usb key.

what matters is how fast it is to access a small amount of cached data, i cant believe that any hard disk would have a faster access time for small amounts of data than flash memory. thats the whole basis of readyboost.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 11:00 pm

I doubt it improves anything at all, unless more people test then well never know altho i really doubt it would.
All readyboost does is use the memory on the usb as extra paging file memory and i believe the reason for the lag is the high textures which are dealt with by the users graphics card so more page file memory isnt going to help at all.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 11:09 pm

Hmm, would a pre-load be a solution? Wait, until everything is loaded and THEN starting the game? Dont know, maybe this increases the time until start in multiplayer, but I think the RAM of every machine here should be large enough to handle those textures.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 11:09 pm

firstly optec said the lag is caused by loading meshes not textures, dunno exactly what a mesh is lol, but from the way he said it, its not textures.

secondly i never said it will help everyone, i said it has helped me.

it is understandable how having a copy of the necessary borg files on a high speed usb would be a good thing as loading time from USB for these files is faster than loading time from hard disk. especially when making a replay the hard disk is already busy with the writing of fraps video data, which really does tax it.

Hmm, would a pre-load be a solution? Wait, until everything is loaded and THEN starting the game? Dont know, maybe this increases the time until start in multiplayer, but I think the RAM of every machine here should be large enough to handle those textures.

i think optec said that such a preloading workaround is being considered.

[kainalu]

posted on February 13th, 2011, 6:14 am

Last edited by kainalu on February 13th, 2011, 6:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, the disk is a SATAII 10,000 RPM HDD with a max throughput of 3 GBPS, the USB Flashdrive's max throughput is 480MBPS. The drive is only used for swap space, and some latency sensitive data. Not only that, the data is organized to be streamed off in one chunk, as opposed to random seeks (one file at a time). The OS watches my activites, and puts data there that the OS detects the system frequently has to wait on.

For most activities, USB flash type memory is MUCH slower than a spinning disk, (however INTERNAL flash is MUCH faster than spinning disks) if the file system and disk are efficient. I actually have 7-8 disks on my PC, most on their own buses, so I never really run into bandwidth problems.

posted on February 13th, 2011, 11:25 am

if the data is all in 1 block and you are loading a lot of it then that will be faster.

usb drives are slower (much slower) on the long haul but faster for a quick small amount of data as there is no movement needed or anything.

the point of readyboost is that it uses the usb drive for small quick access things.

[Kestrel]

posted on February 13th, 2011, 3:37 pm

Last edited by Kestrel on February 13th, 2011, 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

firstly optec said the lag is caused by loading meshes not textures, dunno exactly what a mesh is lol, but from the way he said it, its not textures.

secondly i never said it will help everyone, i said it has helped me.

it is understandable how having a copy of the necessary borg files on a high speed usb would be a good thing as loading time from USB for these files is faster than loading time from hard disk. especially when making a replay the hard disk is already busy with the writing of fraps video data, which really does tax it.

i think optec said that such a preloading workaround is being considered.

Well in that case, thats still dealt with by the graphics card not the paging file.

That is also not true about the usb being faster the max speed for usb2 is 480mbps but you never actually get that speed the most i get from my usb sticks is about 5mbps max, but i get almost 100mbps from both my external drives which are 5400rpm using usb2.0, most harddrives in pcs nower days are 7,200 rpm so the usb is going to be a million times slower, the only advantage i can think of that supports your case is that the usb is almost empty compared to most peoples harddrives which are full of crap but even so....

posted on February 13th, 2011, 4:06 pm

That is also not true about the usb being faster the max speed for usb2 is 480mbps but you never actually get that speed the most i get from my usb sticks is about 5mbps max, but i get almost 100mbps from both my external drives which are 5400rpm using usb2.0, most harddrives in pcs nower days are 7,200 rpm so the usb is going to be a million times slower, the only advantage i can think of that supports your case is that the usb is almost empty compared to most peoples harddrives which are full of crap but even so....

you have missed the point, usb flash drives are faster for accessing a small amount of data. the larger the amount to read, the better the hard disk is. but for when you need to access a small amount of data, a usb flash drive can do it faster than a hard disk. thats the entire idea behind readyboost, if hard disks were always better then readyboost would never have been made.

now the the meshes, they are on the hard disk, they have to get into some type of volatile memory like VRAM. having a cache of these meshes on a readyboost usb means they can be read faster. ergo readyboost improves loading time for borg meshes. readyboost isnt extending VRAM/RAM, its making it easier to get things into those volatile memories.

posted on February 13th, 2011, 9:21 pm

you have missed the point, usb flash drives are faster for accessing a small amount of data. the larger the amount to read, the better the hard disk is. but for when you need to access a small amount of data, a usb flash drive can do it faster than a hard disk. thats the entire idea behind readyboost, if hard disks were always better then readyboost would never have been made.

now the the meshes, they are on the hard disk, they have to get into some type of volatile memory like VRAM. having a cache of these meshes on a readyboost usb means they can be read faster. ergo readyboost improves loading time for borg meshes. readyboost isnt extending VRAM/RAM, its making it easier to get things into those volatile memories.

The point in readyboost is to give a slight performance increase to people with 1gb of ram or less.

Using it on a pc with more than that would actually damage performance.

Your theory is both ilogical and unlikely, try it then and provide real data and proof of performance increase rather than just more posts telling me im wrong.

posted on February 13th, 2011, 9:42 pm

lol kestrel u just cant accept you are wrong, u have to argue. readyboost gives significant boosts on pcs with less than 2gb.

on a 512 barely vista ready computer it will give HUGE boosts, on a 2gb win7 pc it gives a good boost.

and you clearly display a lack of knowledge of how readyboost works, if u have for example 4gb of ram and use readyboost then nothing will get written to cache instead of ram, the only thing that would then go to cache would be stuff that normally would sit on a hard disk. what would be the point of loading stuff into cache with loads of free ram to spare? you wont get much of a performance boost but it certainly wont slow you down lol.

im not gonna run benchmarking software and go through a lot of hassle just to show you some proof you are wrong. i dont give a toss whether you believe me or not  if u wanna let your pride get in the way of a possible improvement for yourself then fine dont try readyboost on your pc, but dont put it in the way of other people trying readyboost by rubbishing it repeatedly, we know you dont like it, thats your opinion.

and my theory isnt illogical and unlikely at all. its pretty simple but clever (readyboost's idea that is, i didnt invent it)

its simple:

some data that isnt huge is on the hard disk, it needs to be put in RAM/VRAM

having it in a readyboost cache makes it faster to access, hence faster to put into that RAM/VRAM.

posted on February 13th, 2011, 9:51 pm

Nobody here seems to know ANYTHING about the principles of flash memory vs traditional platter based storage.

Random access of modern flash memory (like USB drives and SSDs) is orders of magnitude faster than even the fastest spinning hard drives. This is because on a normal hard drive the access is mechanical and the data storage is linear and becomes fragmented. To access data, the read head must move MECHANICALLY to the point on the disk where the data is stored and then physically read that data.

Comparatively, flash storage is not affected by fragmentation. It does not matter where data is stored logically within the flash architecture. Therefore, access of random rather than constant linear data is much faster.

I have an Intel SSD as my system drive. Windows 7 boots to the desktop with all programs loaded within 30 seconds of pressing the power button. That is because the system is accessing lots of data randomly in order to load multiple programs and different data sets into memory. Performance when copying a large file, however, may be slower compared to the fastest traditional hard drives.

Readyboost will NEVER cause performance to be lower. In fact, Windows has built in diagnostic routines to detect whether the device being used for ReadyBoost has suitably fast access times. If it doesn't, it won't allow you to use the device for Readyboost. It does make a difference, and arguably any data, be it a mesh or a texture that might be loaded into a page file COULD be accessed faster using Readyboost. So instead of just saying what you think you know, but obviously don't, you're best off doing a bit of homework first. Both about readyboost technology and also the fundamental differences between flash and magnetic storage technology.

I have not compared myself, so can't say either way, but what the topic starter is saying is perfectly within the realms of possibility.