Fastest Loading Times Ever?

[Commander Gizmo]

In an effort to speed up SH's loading time, I set out to test a virtual ram drive to see what difference it might make. For those of you that aren't geeks like me, a virtual ram drive means using part of your system's fastest memory as a virtual, or fake, hard drive where files can be loaded from. That means the fastest possible rate at which the game can grab the files.

For those that are interested, here are my results so far:

The Test System
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3GHz)
Mem: 8GB OCZ Reaper DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12 @ T1 timing
Mainboard: DFI BloodIron P35-T2RL (Duel Memory Channels)
Video Card: PCIE 1.0 x16 EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB (Overclocked)
OS Drive: OCZ Core SSD SATA3
Game Drive: Samsung HD501LJ SATA3 7200RPM 16MB cache
OS: Vista x64 Ultimate custom bulid + fine tuned for SSD w/no caching or paging file whatsoever.

Obviously my gaming system is a bit faster than some of the ones you guys have mentioned using, so my base times are a bit over the top already. You'll just have to take the results and guesstimate what it might do for your system.


SH3 Mods
GWX3.0
PT SoundPack V3.2cg
Large Gramophone Library (shouldn't matter since they aren't preloaded)
CA's Offericer Icons
Integrated Orders
Aces Hi Res Uniforms & Medals MK II
Church Obs Periscope (customized slightly)
Community Units
St Naz and Schluese & Other Units
Seafloor SF V3 Final
Thomsen's Ships V4.1
Waterstream + Exaust Combi V2.3
Torpedo Damage Final V2
OLC's Modified Searchlight Beams
M.E.P v2
Anzacmick's Damage Immersion
SH3Speech (heavily customized)
High Res Skins for IXB (switched as desired)
Many various minor graphics and other changes that do not effect file size.


Career Used
Patrol: At sea during patrol 6.
Boat: IXB
Port: Lorient


Folder Access List
According to my debugging software, SH3 accesses files for loading from the following folders while loading this saved game. The same saved game was used for each test.


Sound
Textures
Air
Campaigns
Crew
Env
Interior
Land
Markings (no custom markings here!)

menu
Misc
Movies
Objects
Sea
SingleMissions
Submarine
Terrain

These folders total 3.457 GB on my system. The game appears to only load 1.9GB of data to the system RAM and according to the file access list, this is about right. (Most texture data is placed in the video card and does not appear to be doubled in system RAM.) Most of the files in these folders are not loaded, especially the sound folder where only some of the most commonly used sound effects are preloaded. Only one single mission is loaded (why?), while the single movie seems entirely unnecessary since it is only used on the main menu. Sea, Terrain, and interior seem to make up the bulk of the size with Sea coming in at an incredible 1.6GB all on it's own.


The Test
I created a 4GB virtual memory drive on my system and then transferred the above listed folders into it. Using NTFS junction points, I redirected my data folder from SH3's install drive to the virtual ram drive. The game would now get all the data to load the career directly from the system memory rather than a hard drive. It should be noted that all prefetching (including superfetch) along with the paging file have been entirely disabled. I only timed the career loading as it is fairly simple to speed up the main menu screen loading and it is already plenty fast enough. Each time was from the moment of pressing 'yes' at the load screen to the moment the "Not so long ago..." disappeared.


The Results
As stated above, my test results are probably a bit less impressive than on a less optimized system. Mine is very heavily optimized and extremely fast as that is what I do for a living. I used the same saved game for each loading of the career. I also ran 5 tests of each scenario and averaged the times. That didn't prove necessary though as the game loaded with the exact same time in each scenario all 5 attempts. (Can I build a stable system or what?) Here are the results of the test.


Standard SATA Drive: 2:34:057
SSD SATA Drive: 2:22:567

Virtual Ram Drive: 2:08:324


The Review
Yep, that's right. I saved a whopping 26 seconds by loading directly from memory. Hardly worth setting aside 4GB of the systemmemory (that's half folks) just to load a game a smidge faster. On the other hand, 2:34 is a scream'n fast loading time for SH3+GWX in my opinion. On a system with a slower drive or a less optimized setup I can imagine a much greater improvement. As it stands, even with my severely overclocked and ultra wide memory bus I was unable to achieve a massive increase in loading time over my standard SATA hard drive.


Future Tests?
I might find the time to install this massive game and spend the 12 hours it takes to set it up properly on one of my other systems that is a bit less optimized. That is, if there is any interest at all to begin with. Anyone who has the expertise to set up a virtual ram drive probably has a ton of memory and an optimized system, yes?

Please post your feedback, if any. I'm curious if any of this is even of interest to the folks in these parts. If anyone feels like timing their load times and posting them here it might make for some interesting comparisons.

[FIREWALL]

Very interesting Cmdr Gizmo.:salute:

Will watch this thread.

[flakmonkey]

Interesting read, i must say though 2min+ seems a little high concidering your crazy high specs (8Gb ram should chew up and spit out sh3 without even blinking).

I have a rather more feeble 3Gb ram,core2duo (2GHz), 250Gb SATA HDD on my laptop and get similar load times to you (2.24 last i checked) with GWX:gold.
I guess maybe it depends on home port/sub type as to how much junk has to be loaded.

On a side note, my old winXP system with its 512Mb ram would take 12-15min to load sh3.... kind of reminded me of having to load games from cassette tapes back in the day!

[Mopy]

Good test :yeah: That's an expensive 26 seconds.

[Firebird]

Ouch... that means an SSD is not worth it at all. Guess loading is so inherently inefficient that nothing will really fix those load times. Should be better in SHV :).

[U2222]

I think his SSD is solely for the OS

I have a small SSD on a Vista64 machine
It's purely for the OS which has no caching or page filing.
General OS booting and operation are vastly improved.

Game load speed on my m/c is probably largely down to the sata game drives (raid 0) read/write speed, ram speed and graphics card

[Hitman]

Thanks for the testing, however the results are surprising to me :88)

My current system is

P4 dual core 2.6 GHZ
2 GB DDR3 RAM
2 SATA disks (One for data, the other for Operating system)

and I get a campaign mission in GWX3 loaded in about one and a half minute, and a loaded game from 2 to 2 and a half minutes ...

Shouldn't you be getting faster loading times with that system? :hmmm:

BTW: Where is the time needed to load all files to the virtual drive computed?

[Dowly]

Have to join the choir and say those loading times are a wee bit long for a rig like that. :hmmm:

I have somewhat similar setup (AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000 Dual Core 3.0GhZ, 4GB of RAM and a GF9800GT 512mb) and my loading time is 1½ minutes. :doh:

[U2222]

I run SH3 / GWX3 via SH Commander on a pc with XP32 OS
Spec: Intel X6800 2.93 Ghz / Asus P5N-D / 2 GB 800 mHz DDR2 RAM / 2 x Nvidia 9600GT 1GB in SLI.
Game loading time 2 min 20 sec

[Commander Gizmo]

I believe most of the difference you note in your loading times and mine must be the mods used on my system. I have several high res texture mods in place as well as a massive sound pack. Can anyone with similar or faster load times for a career confirm or deny this?

BTW: Where is the time needed to load all files to the virtual drive computed? BTW: Where is the time needed to load all files to the virtual drive computed?
This data is robocopied to memory at start up. It typcially finishes copying before I feel like launching the game as this system rarely needs to restart. On the bright side, a restart takes 47.5 seconds from clicking the mouse to being able to use the PC again.

[Commander Gizmo]

For those that are interested, I updated the OP with the results of a test on the SSD for a time of 2:22:567.

[Commander Gizmo]

Ok, now that my latest patrol is finally over I have dropped down to just GWX and loaded again to see how much the extra hi res mods were adding to the time. Here are the new load times:


Standard SATA Drive: 1:24:428
SSD SATA Drive: 1:09:217

Virtual Ram Drive: 0:47:676

Still not an amazing improvement over an SSD, but about 1/4 the time over standard SATA. Guess that is not bad.

[U2222]

The gamers who would most benefit from this are those using slower hardware.
Unfortunately, these rigs don't have or cannot utilise the RAM (because of OS limitations) required to make this work.

[Commander Gizmo]

I think the computer that would most benifit is a laptop with 4-8 GB of ram on Vista x64. The reason for this is that most laptops come with slow 5400- RPM drives and Vista sucks at file reads/writes on the ATA bus. This is most laptops out there on the market right now.

I would like to test this is on such a laptop, but I don't have one handy that I can devote to the test for the two days it takes to setup. Maybe next week. Most of mine have 7200 RPM drives.