Win7 Pro 64 bit

[Bandy 3]

Did a keyword search for the title above and nothing came up in this forum, so not sure if this has been discussed.

 

I've been running Win7 Pro 64 bit (picked up at edu price $29) for a few weeks now and just installed BHAH, did all the config adjustments, CCC tweaks, and default folder maxfps=30, etc. It runs FANTASTIC! My fps is now in the 50's and 60's with drops in heavy furballs to mid 20's perhaps. This is substantially (!) better than when running on XP, same 3 year old(ish) hardware with some upgrades (4 x 2.66 GHz xeon, 11 GB 667 RAM, XFX 4870 1GB).

 

Despite following all the tweaks posted, and having great fps, I still get occasional annoying stutters with no apparent loss in fps when they are occurring. Any advice appreciated. I'm currently running 3's on game graphics, shadows off.

 

Running the sim from within the program folder (there are 2 program folders, one for old platform) is a PITA, as it will not allow edits despite the user is Administrator, and applying such permissions to the folder sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. Also the sim cannot write screenshots unless you give the exe admin rights. There is no simply way to turn this off, and if there is, please do tell.

 

Also, when I open the programs/microsoft games/ folder, all I see is the installed CFS folder, the OFF-BHAH folder is not within that folder, or within the CFS folder, or at least not visible. I cannot find the OFF-BHAH folder anywhere on the HD and have searched both visually and file search.

 

While some adjustments need to be made, the payoffs are worth it.

Edited November 30, 2009 by B Bandy RFC

[+Polovski 460]

There are plenty of people mentioning Win7 64 it in here.

Stutters can occur in any sim for a million reasons unfortunately. For example a slow HD access on new areas loading etc. Apart from graphics settings - updating sound card drivers, defrag, faster HD, faster vid/CPU, minimising background tasks, disable AV if offline etc can help.

 

What name are you searching for the folder? I installed in Win7 with no problem and I see the folder and data fine.

 

Win7 (and Vista) have a habit of moving data for apps to different folders. "ProgramData" is one.

Also it locks down read/write to those areas not great for some programs.

 

I have Win7 64 and that can't write a file from a graphics package randomly to a folder, permission issue, then I click save and it saves it. Think that's a Win7 bug.

[Von Paulus 8]

Look at this:

 

http://forum.combatace.com/topic/48844-windows-7/

 

For reducing the stuttering you can try a few things.

First I would disable Windows indexing. ( http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/17854-index-locations-add-remove.html )

Second I would check the compatibility tab for cfs3.exe and offmanager.exe. I would tick "Run as Administrator", Disable Themes and Desktop Composition (this will disable the aero themes).

Thirdly I'd uninstall just CCC (not the drivers) and try ATI TRay Tools. ( http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=275077 )

ATI Tray Tools will give you more options to control your ATI card. One setting that might (or not) reduce stuttering is the "Flip Queue Size". This is option is similar with Nvidia "Max Frames to Render Ahead". It has more performance impact when VSynch is turn ON that can cause some mouse lag. But people once in a while report better performance when they change the default value (3 or Undefined). It will really depend on your system and with different games one can expect different results. ( http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_9.html ).

[Bandy 3]

Thanks fellows! Great leads provided, apologies if this is old news in a new thread...

[77Scout 3]

Also, when I open the programs/microsoft games/ folder, all I see is the installed CFS folder, the OFF-BHAH folder is not within that folder, or within the CFS folder, or at least not visible. I cannot find the OFF-BHAH folder anywhere on the HD and have searched both visually and file search.

 

Since Phase 3, the game normally installs to c:\OBDsoftware on a clean install. See if maybe you find it there.

[Tamper 9]

Not at all to hijack the thread here, but this touches on something I've tried (usually, without much success) to explain before: Frame rate numbers by themselves aren't an indication of how "smooth" somthing runs, regardless of how big the FPS number is. It's funny to me to see people going on and on about "I get (insert number bigger than the other guy here) FPS!" All this really boils down to is internet 'chest pounding'.

 

There is a lot of information about stuttering out there; some good and a lot of bad (for instance, one of my old favorites is that SLI causes stuttering...which is absolute balderdash, on an otherwise healthy, properly configured system). But here's a little scientific fact for you:

 

The thing about FPS is this (echoed by the OP's comment "stutters with no apparent loss in fps"): Even at 60+ frames a second, you can have discernible stutter. Assume a system running at 60 FPS, that's 16.7 milliseconds per frame. But therein lies the issue: there is nothing that guarantees that those 60 frames will be evenly distributed such that one occurs every 16.7 milliseconds.

 

In fact, if we take an extreme example (just to illustrate the effect), I could have 60 frames per second that actually all fall into the first half-second, followed by an entire half-second of a frozen screen. Couple that one second with even ten minutes of a test run, and 'on average', your FPS will still be near or exactly 60. Even if you tested for days on end, and - during the split-second (literally) of the stutter, there were still 60 frames that occurred in the time sampled by a test utility, you average frame rate is unchanged.

 

This is why FPS really means little to nothing when it comes to overall smoothness - something our OP is confronting, and something that I think is related to loading textures (as Pol pointed out above).

 

What did I do about it? Well, for one, I noticed a lot of it was a lot better with P3 (as compared to P2). I had actually figured out that the Airco DH2 was the *worst* in P2 (or at least among the worst). Every time I'd load up QC, and start getting close-in on the tail of a DH2 (about the range where you'd start firing) - BAM - the screen would almost freeze; a bad stutter on the order of a good half-second or so. I also noticed that with closing range (i.e., the textures becoming more detailed as the planes get closer), there were also slight pauses (again, most noticable in my experience on the DH2). All while showing reasonably normal average frame rates. So, at least as far as the DH2 goes, that looks to be gone in P3 (thanks to the talented lot at OBD).

 

About the same time, I also decided for a few reasons it was time to install SSD hard drives. I bought two 30G OCZ drives for $100 each after rebates, and set up a RAID0 array. I kept my old drive and loaded other, less speed-sensitive junk on it. Now, the load times for everything (Windows, right on down) are dramatically reduced. (I would say that the "other" WW1 combat flight sim load times were greatly improved - God knows they were horrible...but I never re-installed it; do your own math).

 

Anyway, am I suggesting that everyone should go out and buy SSD's? Nope. If you can and want to, good - I think it's a good price/performance ratio by now, and eventually everything will be solid-state anyway. But it's still comparatively pricey, per unit of storage space. What it does tell me, though, is that a lot of the 'stutters' come from loading things. So, even if you don't want to buy SSD's, look at your hard disk. Maybe consider a couple of inexpensive platter-based drives in a RAID array; or maybe even a fast single drive. Do some research and you'll see there are reviews and benchmarks all over about disk speed. Maybe de-frag, or even re-loading everything 'clean'.

 

I also tried the W764 RC; didn't seem to make a big difference from XP32, at least for me - although there could be many reasons for this.

 

I don't use ATI cards - and, truth be told, to this day I still fiddle with settings, drivers, sliders, and whatever else just to see if I can make things a shred better (or completely d*ck things up lol). But I can't say that any of this seemed to have changed things nearly as much as getting P3 and getting the SSD's did. Mostly because I don't think anything was 'wrong' with my graphics cards/config, so all the jacking around in the world with these settings didn't improve a lot. I think they make a lot more difference if you're turning things *down* for lesser cards; I use a GTX260/216.

 

I hope this helps in some way.

[Von Paulus 8]

Yes I can agree with Tamper, a lot of times, stuttering is related with texture loading.

Its beneficial to have a hardisk dedicated to OS and another for the game. You can always add a third for the pagefile. That can help smooth a little.

The great bottleneck of our system nowadays are the hardisks.

SSD will help a lot, but will not be the final solution, I think. There are still some problems related with the longevity of SSD.

I might be wrong but RAM will be the key.

[Siggi 10]

Yes I can agree with Tamper, a lot of times, stuttering is related with texture loading.

Its beneficial to have a hardisk dedicated to OS and another for the game. You can always add a third for the pagefile. That can help smooth a little.

The great bottleneck of our system nowadays are the hardisks.

SSD will help a lot, but will not be the final solution, I think. There are still some problems related with the longevity of SSD.

I might be wrong but RAM will be the key.

 

I have three drives, OS on C, OFF on D, pagefile on E. I still see very tiny jerks and stutters. I think it's more to do with background tasks unrelated to the game sticking their oar in though, stuff that simply cannot be avoided, unless one desires to close down all possible processes before an OFF session. They're so minor (the stutters) as to be practically un-noticeable though.

[Von Paulus 8]

Siggi you can always run Process Monitor and look what is running when you're playing.

Try to see if your AV or Windows indexing is messing up.

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

[Guest Eject]

Siggi you can always run Process Monitor and look what is running when you're playing.

Try to see if your AV or Windows indexing is messing up.

 

http://technet.micro...s/bb896645.aspx

 

I was discussing Win7, latest VISTA, and XP SP2 with an experienced, yet self-learning young chap when he did a fix on my Laptops. I asked him if it is true when we have 4MB RAM/SDRAM (depending on the system), yet we use an XP SP2, it would be a waste of money for the 4MB RAM, because the XP SP2 (and most XPs with 32bits) will only use a max of THREE MB of the RAM.

 

Instead, he informed me that I would better use a VISTA (64bits) or the newest WIN 7.

 

I would be thankful to anyone really familiar with such issues who kindly give me some light on it. Thank guys.....

 

BTW, will soon paste an important Link re NoteBooks for gamers. Stay tuned.

[Tamper 9]

I was discussing Win7, latest VISTA, and XP SP2 with an experienced, yet self-learning young chap when he did a fix on my Laptops. I asked him if it is true when we have 4MB RAM/SDRAM (depending on the system), yet we use an XP SP2, it would be a waste of money for the 4MB RAM, because the XP SP2 (and most XPs with 32bits) will only use a max of THREE MB of the RAM.

 

Instead, he informed me that I would better use a VISTA (64bits) or the newest WIN 7.

 

I would be thankful to anyone really familiar with such issues who kindly give me some light on it. Thank guys.....

 

BTW, will soon paste an important Link re NoteBooks for gamers. Stay tuned.

 

 

If I may, I think you meant to say 4G (although I do remember the first machine I ever built, and getting 4M was a 400% upgrade!).

 

What you were told is essentially true. A 32-bit Operating System, by nature of it's design, can only "read" memory up to a certain address range (which is expressed in, you guessed it, 32 bits). This would apply to *any* 32-bit system, so it's not just a "Windows problem". It's not exactly 3G you see, but it won't be 4. It'll fall somewhere around 3.5G, depending on a lot of other technical crap. Still, not a total waste, at least up to 4G.

 

The 64-bit OS, by comparison, can access a far (far) greater address range, so you 'recover' anything beyond that roughly 3.5G.

 

The thing is, and I've actually run both Vista and W7 64-bit versions, at 4G, you're not really gaining that much extra - and the 'overhead' associated with these two newer OS's (in my opinion) outweighs the benefit of the extra 0.5G. If you were to get 8g, it would probably be a different story. But, again in my opinion, RAM still suffers today what it always has - there is an amount, adding up to which is always a great idea...but anything beyond that and you get into 'diminishing returns". I doubt, for instance, a 'typical' desktop machine of today with a 64-bit OS would benefit much from anything beyond 8G - and certainly not in proportion to the added cost.

 

Again, just my $.02

[Tamper 9]

SSD will help a lot, but will not be the final solution, I think. There are still some problems related with the longevity of SSD.

I might be wrong but RAM will be the key.

 

:) I doubt anything we know of today will be the "final solution" in terms of technology!! Yes, SSD's are still in their infancy, relatively speaking. But the second-gen devices now have far better 'wear-leveling algorithms', so much of the performance deterioration and longevity you refer to have been overcome (although unless the basic technology changes, there will always be a limited number of read-writes on an SSD, and therefore, the overhead associated with wear-leveling).

 

RAM is much faster, but the nature of RAM is such that it's 'volatile' - power goes off, memory clears. It basically uses capacitors that can only hold a charge for so long with no power applied. And it's been that way for as long as memory (as we know it today) has existed. So, I don't know that RAM - again, as we know it today - will be practical.

 

Maybe something more like batteries, less like capacitors...? Well, probably not, because batteries also take a lot longer to charge (thus, making 'writes' very slow).

 

Maybe something like a cross between batteries, caps, and junctions that latch...now we're talking...

 

(lol If I could solve that little issue, I'd be buying a real Dr1, not flying one on my PC...)

[Guest Eject]

If I may, I think you meant to say 4G (although I do remember the first machine I ever built, and getting 4M was a 400% upgrade!).

 

What you were told is essentially true. A 32-bit Operating System, by nature of it's design, can only "read" memory up to a certain address range (which is expressed in, you guessed it, 32 bits). This would apply to *any* 32-bit system, so it's not just a "Windows problem". It's not exactly 3G you see, but it won't be 4. It'll fall somewhere around 3.5G, depending on a lot of other technical crap. Still, not a total waste, at least up to 4G.

 

The 64-bit OS, by comparison, can access a far (far) greater address range, so you 'recover' anything beyond that roughly 3.5G.

 

The thing is, and I've actually run both Vista and W7 64-bit versions, at 4G, you're not really gaining that much extra - and the 'overhead' associated with these two newer OS's (in my opinion) outweighs the benefit of the extra 0.5G. If you were to get 8g, it would probably be a different story. But, again in my opinion, RAM still suffers today what it always has - there is an amount, adding up to which is always a great idea...but anything beyond that and you get into 'diminishing returns". I doubt, for instance, a 'typical' desktop machine of today with a 64-bit OS would benefit much from anything beyond 8G - and certainly not in proportion to the added cost.

 

Again, just my $.02

 

Thank u for ur inputs. Now, kindly go to the General Discussion Thread as I just posted an important LINK re (not only) RAM, SDARM, VRAM etc. U will like the Link .

[Von Paulus 8]

(lol If I could solve that little issue, I'd be buying a real Dr1, not flying one on my PC...)

Eheheh.

[almccoyjr 7]

Tamper, on 01 December 2009 - 09:02 AM, said:

 

"I doubt, for instance, a 'typical' desktop machine of today with a 64-bit OS would benefit much from anything beyond 8G - and certainly not in proportion to the added cost."

 

AH! We're not typical though. We fly BHaH and demand the very best. XP64 can fully support 128GB and W7, 192GB.

 

Von Paulus Posted Today, 02:29 PM:

 

"I might be wrong but RAM will be the key."

 

I don't think you're wrong. I think you nailed it.

 

The point is to get the sim to run flawlessly and to do that, ram is the key, not pulling data from page file, MFD or "waiting" for the v_c buffer to flush and fetch texures.

 

Awhile ago, I ran a test to see how BHaH would run in a VRD environment. OvS "knew" it wouldn't be successful, but that was then. Since that endeavor, I've gone to XP64, 8GB of G.Skill PC-6400 now at 4-3-4-9 2T and have "dumped" programs up 4GB in size into the VRD and the results are absolutely astonishing. The program and v_c memory reside in the VRD kernal. There's no data pulled from the hd.

 

To get BHaH to run like that would require at least 24GB of ram. On a board that supports it, that's six 4GB modules. That is doable >IF< DDR2 pricing goes down. I haven't even looked at triple channel!

 

What I'm hoping is that SSD technology really takes off and some of that will spin into DDR2 pricing, however; I do understand the economics and that's unlikely from a manufacturing standpoint.

 

And that's my .05 cents...lol

 

plug_nickel (Al)

[Von Paulus 8]

@almccoyjr

I know that with ARMA II people are trying to use RAMDISK with excellent results.

Probably you don't have to load all files in RAM. Maybe we don't need 24GB of ram.

 

Here is the thread at ARMA's forum about the use of RAMDISK

http://forums.bistud...ead.php?t=88388

[Bandy 3]

This sounds like it really has potential! Thanks for the link.

 

As I posted in the other OS thread, that hardware evaluation utility in win7 has recognized that my HD is the bottleneck by far, and as mentioned it is the likely culprit in stutter because fps is not lowered when I experience stutter.

 

Not sure when I'll get around to trying Ramdisk out, maybe this weekend, but I have the available RAM and will report back.

[almccoyjr 7]

@almccoyjr

I know that with ARMA II people are trying to use RAMDISK with excellent results.

Probably you don't have to load all files in RAM. Maybe we don't need 24GB of ram.

 

Here is the thread at ARMA's forum about the use of RAMDISK

http://forums.bistud...ead.php?t=88388

You actually don't need all 24GB, but I'd like to "dump" the whole program into the kernel. Thanks for the link! I've tried the earlier version when it first came out, but not since. I think I'll take a gander and see what's up.

 

plug_nickel (Al)

[Bandy 3]

Just found a good link to a free ramdisk driver for XP to Vista. There seems to be quite a few out there, and I haven't found a definitive choice to run with, or solid advice to draw upon... Much research to do.

 

LINK HERE