Is GPU or SSD cause of stuttering/slow draw textures 5970 trifire

[Jacky60]

Just installed ocz vertex 2 ssd and reinstalled windows 7 64 bit on separate samsung spinpoint hdd 320. Put favourite game Arma 2 (this game is more demanding than crysis on both cpu and GPU) on SSD to allow smooth lovely gameplay. A week ago it was painting the scenery before I could see it so to speak (Arma 2 takes massive volumes of textures off the Hard drive (several GB reportedly). At first it was amazing but after only a week its drawing the scenery in front of me like my old hard drive. Why has my SSD's performance deteriorated so quickly??
Should I install or do something to keep it happy? I can't find any updates on ocz website -is trim something I need to activate or is the problem GPU related though I can't quite see how OR do OCZ and other ssd's only last this long??

Couldn't install windows on ssd as kept getting Disk boot failure error msg.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Did you try unplugging the 320 GB HDD and then installing Windows on the SSD? It sounds like your HDD priority order was still set to try to boot from the HDD first, or something.

No idea about the stuttering.

 

[mhouck]

Why didn't you install the operating system on the SSD?
What sort of FPS are you getting?
have you tried v-sync to eliminate screen tearing?

 

[GlacierFreeze]

You installed Win7 on a 5400rpm drive? lol

 

[Keysplayr]

Where is your swap drive located? Conventional disk or SSD? In other words, where is the location of your systems virtual memory. The place where data greater than the size of your physical RAM is swapped back and forth from disk to RAM?

 

[Jacky60]

You installed Win7 on a 5400rpm drive? lol

Thanks for the adult positive input

 

[scooterlibby]

Thanks for the adult positive input

He's got a point. Why would constrain an otherwise great rig like that?

 

[faxon]

Thanks for the adult positive input

the thing is, that's probably the problem. ARMA is probably using the mechanical HDD for swap disk since he, for reasons we cant yet figure out, put his OS on it instead of his SSD, where it belongs. even without trim an SSD wouldnt degrade in performance that fast in general use, so chances are the only thing slowing him down is that mechanical HDD. ARMA2 is a hog plain and simple lol

ed: to clarify, what he is describing is textures and polygon models loading on the screen in front of him in real time, instead of being there already the way they should be. this was a common problem for me in everquest 2 when i played it regularly before i moved to an SSD, due to the sheer volume of model data being loaded into RAM. i needed 8GB of ram to dual box smoothly, and it sometimes used up to 7.2gb of it before they did some optimizations which decreased memory usage due to fixing a couple leaks, but it was still hovering around 6.4gb after. he's probably experiencing a similar problem, that is, loading world data off the drive and into ram. the game should have preloaded this into the swap file for quick access, the only problem his his swap file is on a mechanical HDD, so its slow as balls

 

[Jacky60]

I can't figure out myself why I can't put windows 7 onto ssd everytime I try and boot from windows 7 cd and install onto ssd I get disk boot failure message. It's my first ssd (yes I've set bios to boot from cd) and I lost patience. I've moved my swap file to a third 1tb caviar black which I know is also super slow in comparison to the vertex 2 and if I can figure wtf is going on with my windows intal I'll do a fresh one onto ssd. What I don't understand is how it was all working beautifully or at least very well last week and isn't any longer.

 

[Keysplayr]

Windows will utilize swap space wherever it can get it. I don't know if Win7 has an option to manually set swap drive location and size like the older OS's did, but you want the swap drive location to be on the fastest drive you have. If your SSD runs out of space, Windows is going to look for other disks that have adequate room for it's required swap space or virtual memory. And, in this case, if it's that 5400rpm drive you mentioned, that will surely show immediate degredation in performance over having the swap on the SSD.

I would remove all drives except the SSD. Reset your CMOS after you do. The boot disk failure message usually appears when the wrong drive is selected in BIOS to be the first boot device, or first hard drive.

Remove your variables, (all other disks besides the SSD) and reinstall Win7 on it. Then install ARMA2 on the SSD. Observe performance.

By the way, what size is your SSD?

 

[ViRGE]

Swap space is a red herring. He has 6GB of RAM, Arma2 can't be using any more than 4GB of that (and that's if it's large address aware), so nothing of significance should be swapping.

If the game is as texture heavy as is implied, then I would strongly suspect that his problems are VRAM related. AT has already noted that the 5800 series can come up short on Crysis, especially in CF mode.

 

[Termie]

Can you tell us what the boot failure message said? I'm betting you didn't have your ahci set correctly. That would cause a boot drive failure. Ahci has it's own boot priority menu that you'll need to set. And if you're not running in ahci mode you're not running with trim. So I think those are your problems in addition to potentially using the old drive for the swap file.

 

[Jacky60]

Can you tell us what the boot failure message said? I'm betting you didn't have your ahci set correctly. That would cause a boot drive failure. Ahci has it's own boot priority menu that you'll need to set. And if you're not running in ahci mode you're not running with trim. So I think those are your problems in addition to potentially using the old drive for the swap file.

DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK
You're right changed from ied to ahci in bios now i have win7 on ssd and I can't keep up-its not very relaxing having your pc way ahead of you but instal all mind bogglingly quick. going to keep swap file on ssd and installing arma 2 right now will update results asap thanks very much everyone!

 

[faxon]

when you installed win7 was AHCI enabled? if it wasnt enabled when you installed then that's your problem, you're missing the AHCI driver. without AHCI enabled you also loose TRIM, so you wanna get that fixed asap

 

[Adul]

Are you doing raid 0 with the SSD? Be sure to load the raid driver when you install it,check the boot order, enable AHCI after you installed windows 7.

 

[Jacky60]

Are you doing raid 0 with the SSD? Be sure to load the raid driver when you install it,check the boot order, enable AHCI after you installed windows 7.

Thanks Girlfriend