I bought an SSD specifically because RF2 took so long to load. Maybe it shaved a few second off, but it still takes an eternity. I'm sure it's not possible with their graphics engine, but I wish they'd only load in the pitlane area, start finish straigh and vehicles before letting us in. Once we're in game, then stream in the rest of the data. (I think that's how AC gets into the pitlane 5 seconds after clicking 'Start')
Interesting test I did here: The load is distributed nicely across all cores. Not a single core is pegged or even over 50% usage (and this is including OBS capturing video and encoding H264 on the fly). The disk usage is 0 in my test too. I have 8GB on this machine and I suspect everything was cashed (even though I closed and reopened rF before my test). But the load time was still slow even with everything cashed and not needing to hit the disk at all. I don't know where the bottleneck is.
TL;DR version: if you have rf2 on a small SSD, move it back to normal HDD.. you're just decreasing your SSD lifespan for no benefit
Noel when you say threading do you mean hyper threading? I have on ole i7 920 with hyperthreading turned off because in my arma2 days it ran better with it off. Does rf work with hyper threading? If so I gotta go turn that on DOH!
Basically if an app is threaded (which rF2 is) it is up to the OS to distribute it across all cores and when you have a CPU with hyperthreading, those are considered additional cores. But I seriously doubt you are CPU bound with that CPU so enabling more cores probably isn't going to buy you anything. But give it a shot, you never know.
I only have an 240 SSD, keep everything else on NAS (12TB UnRaid). Track loading times are minutely quicker, most of the time the drive is barely being accessed. I thought the loading times were more dependent on resolution and texture quality selected on your gpu driver, and therefore only could be increased by more processing power (cpu+gpu). If you use an SSD for virtual memory it could speed things up in the game (if you use virtual memory) yes over time they do lose performance, but in real world terms it isn't much. I cannot tell a difference in my laptop over the 2 years I have had an ssd in it. Yes it will need replacing but they are just getting cheaper all the time much like bigger faster HDDs are. I'll never go back.
Be carefull with the task manager graph. I think that even if app are developed to use only 2 cores windows will try to split the usage to all existent cores. For example, i don't know if you noticed in beanchmarking topic but 2 weeks before i was running a 780Ti in a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz. With that specs i get 68FPS (1080P) and task manager show me a graph similar to yours and not using 100% CPU. Now with a 3770K@3.5Ghz (stock speeds) i get 115FPS and once again with a graph similar, with less usage of course. Even with windows trying to split the usage to all cores i think that its not 100% effective. Btw i'm not developer so i'm not sure if the things happen like i'm thinking... Relative to SSD load times i tested it myself and the diference was from 50s loading a track in HDD to 40s in SSD. Not a big improvement anyway
Hmm.. That is interesting that you didn't show any pegged cores before yet a faster CPU and same GPU (assuming) is giving better framerates. I didn't see the thread you are referring to. I would love to read it. Do you have a link? Edit: Was it this thread: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/16951-R9-290-or-GTX-770-4GB If so... that is a long one. Hahaha
Yes, i have it and any load times for any aplication reduce 1/4 or less, but just load times, don't expect miracles.
Yap, that is thread that i was talking about and yes i used the same GPU. With the Q6600 i tried with several rams frequency too and that wans't the bootleneck so i assume that was the CPU itself and even with windows splitting the the usage for the all 4 cores it wasn't efficient. In new system i have now 16GB Ram @ 2133Mhz and i don't see any improvment from 1600Mhz.
With 16GB of ram you could set aside 6-8GB as a ramdisk and run rF2 from that? If that didn't improve loading times then it's all about the game engine & its scene/object/texture setup process.
Well just realize how many times SSD is faster than HDD and the difference made is next to none so I would assume ramdisk wouldn't help either. Comes down to game engine and track setup. Funny is that Targa loads more or less same time in rf2 as in rf1 so the tracks themselves might be the biggest part of the equation.
Well at last I see other people with the same problem, I've been having this issue since it came out. I moved from XP to Win7 and tried it on a couple of HDDs with no Improvement. I eventually got round to putting it on my SSD expecting it to benefit like all my other games and found it makes so little difference it will be moved back to a normal HDD soon. Is everyone suffering long load times or just some of us.
Tested with Primo Ramdisk Ultimate Edition v5.5.0 1680x1050 all maxed out, Silverstone, with 30 Marussia on track. If it worked correctly... OCZ Agility 3 - 29 seconds Ram Disk 7500MB/s - 27 seconds
29 seconds damn, I know when it first came out for me it was near 120 seconds. It has gotten a little better but I haven't checked for a long time.
Loading the game takes longer with an SSD, as the HDD has almost certainly powered down by the time I get round to firing up rF2 and on launch it likes to have a look at what disks I have. So I have to wait for it to spin up the HDD it can't read (Ext4 partitioned) before it launches. Once in, track loading is faster (I'm pretty sure - I haven't timed it).
