Took 13seconds off of Q3TA load times! and other interesting experiments.

[Dug]

I was screwing around with a memory manager program and stumbled accross Disk Cache settings. Just for fun I set it to Gaming System which is MinCacheSize 1024kB, Max 8192kB, Chunk Size 256.

For testing I used the first timedemo on Q3TA and a stopwatch. Q3TA was at 1152x864 every setting maxed out. Now I know this isn't scientific, but it will give you an idea of the difference in settings.

From the time I hit the green button to activate the timedemo until the demo actually starts playing took 38seconds. Avg fps=57.

I then switched the Min and Max to 129024 and chunk size to 512 and rebooted.

I timed this again. Load time for the timedemo went down to 25seconds. My avg fps=63.

I did this 3 times going back and forth between settings and rebooting between each one. The results were the same give or take a second. Quite an amazing improvement. I am using 384mb of ram so I don't believe setting the disk cache size this high will effect anything else I'm doing.

 

[Vrangel]

Interesting. What OS are you running?
If it works for win98 where do I find this program?

 

[Dug]

Runnin WinME. You don't really need a program to change your disk cache settings. Go to Start, Run and type in system.ini. Then look for [vcache]and add the following lines. The numbers you enter should reflect how much ram you have to spare. I picked high numbers because no game will use up my 384mb of memory, so I might as well use it for something usefull.
MinFileCache=129024
MaxFileCache=129024
CHUNKSIZE=512

 

[mHubs]

Does this work for Win2k?
'Cuz it doesnt havea [Vcache] thing in system.ini..

 

[Dug]

Have no idea about Win2k. I don't play games on it.

 

[zippy]

Wow, good job Dug. I'm gonna have to try this and tell my friend to try this!

Thanks!

 

[Dug]

I just picked 129024 out of the blue. I don't have the time right now, but it would be interesting to see what the optimal numbers would be for min and max and chunk size. I hope some of you guys try this out a report back here. Later on I'm going to try this on 1 drive (right now I've only experimented on 2 IBM's on Raid0.)

It would also be very interesting to see if this works with a scsi drive. I'm especially interested in this as I just ordered a Seagate x15 last week and should be here soon.

 

[Shazam]

Did you restart your computer after every change?

 

[Dug]

Yes, I rebooted after evey setting change.

 

[apacide]

In Win98 I set my "Typical Role Of Computer" under File System to Network Server. That seems to help everything a bit. Hopefully that's not old news to all of you..

 

[Dug]

That's for file cache, not disk cache. Setting it to Network Server increases your Name cache to 2729 and your Directory cache to 64.

I'm talking about reserving 128m of ram for disk cache.

 

[Dug]

Just tried Q3A this morning. Here's some amazing results for load times.

demo1 with WinME default settings-
22 seconds

demo1 with Min,Max set to 129024 chunk size 512
8 seconds!

1 player skirmish Q3DM18

28 seconds before
13 seconds after

 

[duragezic]

Wow that's pretty amazing. Is that only for people with a lot of ram like you have?

 

[Shazam]

Sounds good, will have to try myself. Thanks Dug.

 

[Dug]

I would suspect that you wouldn't want to do this if you would be dipping into ram that is needed by the system or game. Then you would just be hitting your swap file. If you have 256m I'll bet that even setting aside 64m for your disk cache would work too.