RAF_Louvert 101 Posted December 27, 2011 . Greetings All, I hope everyone enjoyed the Christmas holiday, I know I did. In amongst the festivities and the visiting I was able to log a bit of stick time in OFF, and did some twekaing to my system settings in the process, (an ongoing thing for most of us I imagine). During the course of this I noticed that when I had put in a pair of new hard drives many months ago that I had installed my Track IR on the 'C' drive. Normally I have my paging file, FRAPS, and Track IR on my 'D' drive, while OFF is installed on my 'C' drive, as this helps with overall performance. Now, rather than deleting and reinstalling Track IR to correct this I wondered what would happen if I simply copied the entire 'naturel point' folder and pasted it into the 'D' drive, then create a shortcut to the new folder. Well, it worked like a charm, and garnered another 8-to-10 fps in OFF. I then renamed the original folder in the 'C' drive 'ORIG natural point' so that Windows won't go looking for it when I launch Track IR, (but also so that I could fall back to it should I need to for any reason). Easy peasy. So for those of you with multiple hard drives who are running Track IR, I recommend the same trick. Cheers! Lou . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Creaghorn 10 Posted December 27, 2011 and it really makes that difference? hard to believe. must try that. thanks for the tip Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Olham 164 Posted December 27, 2011 (edited) It should make a difference, yes, simply because it mustn't all be read/written by just one arm for one drive disc. I always used to have even my games on my D: drive (or any drive, which doesn't contain Windows and Programs). What should also make a difference is the use of quad core CPU. CFS3 was designed before that, and I don't think it could make use of all four CPU cores - two perhaps? The other two cores can now provide all other necessary stuff, like driving TrackIR or FRAPS. The ultimate experience in gaining performance should be a SSD harddrive. They are a chip instead of a disc with a read/write arm. I will get me one in the new year hopefully, and report how much performance it will gain. Edited December 27, 2011 by Olham Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DukeIronHand 8 Posted December 27, 2011 Alrighty I am all about performance gains but to what do you attribute this gain to? I have two drives...a "C" drive (Windows, page file. Track IR) and a "D" drive (Games including OFF). So I was trying to translate or convert your idea to my system and realized that I am not sure why its working well for you? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
RAF_Louvert 101 Posted December 27, 2011 . Duke, I'm not really sure myself. I assume that with Windows and OFF on 'C' drive, and Track IR, FRAPS, and the paging file on 'D' drive, the system can respond more quickly. This would make sense since OFF seems to be all about speed when it comes to how well it will run. For further reference here are my system specs: CPU: Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0ghz Wolfdale 6mb 1333fsb 45nm with Arctic Cooler, (OC'd to 3.95) Memory: 8gb DDR2 PC2-6400 800mhz, (OC'd to 890 with volts set at 2.1) Mobo: ASUS P5QL Pro Hard Drive: 2 Western Digital 640 GB Caviar Black SATA Opti Drive: LG 22X DVD+/RW Dual Layer SATA Rewrite Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX+ 512mb PS: Corsair 850HX 850 watt Windows XP Pro 64-bit OS LG 22" flat screen LCD monitor Three large case fans Using the nVidia control panel I have the following settings, (and I am going by memory here as I am not at home right now): Anti-Aliasing "16x", Anisotropic Filtering "16x", Vertical Sync "Force On" and use Triple-Buffering, Texture filtering "Quality" and use Supersampling, Negative LOD Bias "Clamp", Prerender Limit set at "3", CPU Multi Core support checked. Using RivaTuner I have the graphics card speeds bumped to the following: core clock 820, shader clock 2040, memory clock 1275, (with the fan at 75%). With these current settings I can fly in a large dogfight on a sunny day over a busy part of the front, with sliders at 5-4-3-5-5, and it is beautiful, with FPS in the 68-to-80 range, (after moving Track IR to 'D' drive). We of course all know that every system is different, so the tweaks will never be exactly the same. But moving the TrackIR on mine did make a pretty significant improvement. Lou . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Olham 164 Posted December 27, 2011 It only works, when you really have two seperate drives, I guess. If you have only one harddrive with the partitions C: and D:, it wouldn't gain anything. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+SkateZilla 49 Posted December 27, 2011 Fraps doenst really touch the CPU, Fraps saturates the HDD bandwidth though w/ writing a video file in uncompressed format (well the video file has a FRAPs Codec signature in it), a 1280x720 AVI already well into taking up a big chunk of the available bandwidth. and i know almost everybody games at resolutions higher than that. the only thing that saves the bandwidth is dropping the FrPS from 60 to say 30. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Parky 8 Posted December 27, 2011 Hmmm.....it occurs to me that all that information (particularly an uncompressed video file) being written to the HDD would put a fairly significant load on the CPU. Not that it would really matter with today's central processing units.... Lou, Thanks for sharing this tip. I currently have BHaH installed by itself on an SSD. My "C" drive is comprised of four 1T drives in RAID 1-0, which is where FRAPS currently resides. I do have a 36 Gig Raptor with just my paging file on it. I wonder if it'd be worth throwing FRAPS on that drive to see if there'd be any difference? Cheers, Parky Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
UK_Widowmaker 571 Posted December 27, 2011 Does it not give you the option to install it on another drive?...or is it the copying across that makes the difference? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Creaghorn 10 Posted December 28, 2011 it works indeed. everything a little bit more crisp and fluid. good tipp my friend. not too much visual difference because it hardly makes a difference if it's 50 fps or like now 60 fps. but the moments like when beeing at your drome or low over a raging battlefield, there have been some slight occasional hickups and fps to maybe low 30ies. now also there it is perfectly fluid. and that with maximum density etc. great Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
RAF_Louvert 101 Posted December 28, 2011 . That's great Creaghorn, I'm glad it worked for you too. WM, TrackIR does give you the option of installing it to different locations. However, when I reloaded everything after the HD installs I forgot to place it on the 'D' drive, so I just copied and pasted the folder to see if it would work, and it did. You should have the same results by initially installing TrackIR to a drive other than the one OFF is installed to. . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
UK_Widowmaker 571 Posted December 29, 2011 . That's great Creaghorn, I'm glad it worked for you too. WM, TrackIR does give you the option of installing it to different locations. However, when I reloaded everything after the HD installs I forgot to place it on the 'D' drive, so I just copied and pasted the folder to see if it would work, and it did. You should have the same results by initially installing TrackIR to a drive other than the one OFF is installed to. . Ah ok m8.... thanks Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
UK_Widowmaker 571 Posted December 29, 2011 I am also VERY happy to report, that TR5 software, now supports TR3!...and very good it is too!!! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
almccoyjr 7 Posted December 29, 2011 And for those that are running everything on one drive, one partition, set OFF/BHaH/HitR on the outer most track followed by TIR and then the Swap File. If you really want to be "anal" and squeeze the living daylight out of the setup for performance, disable indexing and then find one of the downloads that will allow you to change the order of files/folders and arrange them in alphabetical order. This will help in sequential reads. I used to do the latter back in the W98SE_beta 5 days and continued up to XP_32, but no longer. plug_nickel Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
TSmoke 2 Posted December 29, 2011 Will have to give this a try, every little bit helps, thanks. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tranquillo 10 Posted December 30, 2011 This is weird. I wanted to try this but my TrackIr won't work in OFF when I put it on another HD. It starts fine and everything functions as it should in the preview screen but once i start OFF then Track stops working. I've got OFF on my C drive and I copied the Natural Point folder to E drive (my other drive is partitioned). Even tried it on the D drive with the same results. Any ideas anyone Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Creaghorn 10 Posted December 30, 2011 This is weird. I wanted to try this but my TrackIr won't work in OFF when I put it on another HD. It starts fine and everything functions as it should in the preview screen but once i start OFF then Track stops working. I've got OFF on my C drive and I copied the Natural Point folder to E drive (my other drive is partitioned). Even tried it on the D drive with the same results. Any ideas anyone maybe after copying the naturalpoint folder to the other HD, you should rename the first folder on c to naturalpointoriginal or something. maybe because you didn't rename it the system is confused which one to use. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tranquillo 10 Posted December 30, 2011 Yep, I did that, Creaghorn. I just can't understand it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
RAF_Louvert 101 Posted December 30, 2011 . Tranquillo, try this. Go into your original TrackIR folder on your 'C' drive and launch it from there, (not from your old desktop shortcut, assuming you haven't already deleted the old shortcut). Check to see that TrackIR is working fine, (without going into OFF), then close it out and make sure it has completely closed by launching your task manager and checking in the processes list for any incidents of it still running, (if TrackIR is there close it from the task manager). Now, launch TrackIR from your new desktop shortcut that opens it from the copied folder on your other drive. You should only have to do this procedure the one time and not each time you wish to launch TrackIR from it's new location. Let me know if this cures it for you Sir. Lou . Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tranquillo 10 Posted December 31, 2011 Thanks, Lou. I did as you said: started TracIR from my C drive - all worked fine. Shut it down (checking Task Manager to make sure) then started it using my new shortcut to the other drive. Once again all worked fine. Started OFF and it failed to notice that TrackIR was in use - it wouldn't work. The camera light was on and when I exited OFF and brought up the TrackIR screen, all was working as it should. Shut down TrackIR and restarted it using the original folder on my C drive, started OFF and everything is fine. It just doesn't want to work with OFF when launched from another drive :suicide2: Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
tranquillo 10 Posted December 31, 2011 Hooray, fixed it. My original TrackIR (version 4 running with version 5 software) was running in XP service pack 3 mode and as administrator. I noticed that the copied version had reverted back to normal and once I'd reset it to run in XP mode and as Administrator it worked in OFF I've got to go out now so will try it out fully tomorrow. I've left a drink for you in the mess, Lou Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
