PA and SSD

Hi Guys,

Can someone with knowledge please reply with an answer? My question is: does PA take advantage of SSD in a running game? Does the game stream data from the hard drive in game as you play or is it a load once at start and that’s it?

Wow thats a hard one i dont know about the specific informations about the game however have you searched the faq and the forums? surely there is somenthing there... if not i suggest just sticking with this Thread and wait for a vanguard or brian(basically a vanguard) to come cause these guys are the walking library of pa

Welcome Spriggan43,

PA won't take advantage of an SSD everything is generated when you start up again. There's nothing streaming from the disk.

When you click on planet in system editor first time PA read it's assets (for generation) from disk, but in-game there is no disk I/O activity.

What's already been said. Up front loading may speed up a bit for any local data, but that's not really where the majority of the slowdown is.

Mind you, SSD's are awesome on all other sorts of fronts, but we're simply not disk i/o limited.

Thanks for the quick and friendly manner in your answers.

You're welcome.

That's what I thought would be negligible if any.

Except all of the textures ever, if I am understanding this virtual texturing right. Should be a pretty massive boost too, most of my perf drops right now after they added better particles seems to be from the virtual textures streaming.

I would still load PA on an SSD if you have the space anyway, it'll speed up performance a little bit, especially when thigns start getting messy end game with 1000s of units on the planet, though you will see that mostly when the game goes local, not really going to see a lot of performance increase while the games main core files are still server side. I personally, have seen a slight bump in overall smoothness though. (just bought an SSD a week ago)

Possible I misunderstand you, but I think you understand it wrong.

All assets for planet generation loaded from disk into RAM before generation started. E.g in system editor it's happen when you click on planet in bottom bar before and before it's appear. I pretty sure players with slow HDD notice there is little lag/freeze, task about that: PA#2757

Then before rendering started those assets pushed from RAM to VRAM and then all actual planet textures generated directly on GPU and stored in VRAM. In normal situation they're never unload from VRAM, but as long as I understand if all video memory used textures will be pushed into system RAM and this will cause serious lags.

The way virtual texturing usually works is you have an atlas in vram, use some fancy shader to figure out which texture coordinates are currently on screen, and stream only those textures in from disk. If you have more memory than it takes to load those textures then you just keep old ones cached until they are overwritten as new textures are needed. PA uses a slightly modified approach but I believe they still stream things.

The end result is that total memory usage actually goes down but if the caching isn't tuned correctly then you can get lag, or blurry textures as you saw in rage.

Right now 90% of my lag stems from when a new texture is loaded, such as a structure footprint, unit I haven't built before, or explosion marks on the ground.

Well, that and when the unit count gets silly.

Nope:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/question-to-devs-about-vram-usage.51325/#post-785890
http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/planetary-annihilation-engine.html

Well I don't know what is causing it then, but a new texture in the world causes a massive slowdown for me.

Without information about your hardware it's hard to tell, but in general texture generation it's heavy process I think.

My GPU is pretty good and is generally not under any kind of significant load unless I'm trying to play Crysis. And after the texture is done loading in it goes right back to being smooth.

GPU/CPU model or DxDiag.txt will be more helpful.

Is more information than "it isn't showing any particular load when running PA" required?

It might not be showing any load- but it could be limited on V-Ram..? Also it could be CPU load that's the issue (remember at present PA only really uses 1 thread so if your CPU is quad core, 25% utilisation equates to full load of 1 core i.e. the cpu is becoming the bottleneck. Also PA loves system ram, so again if you're running on say 4gb of main ram that is probably the bottle neck. Imo 8gb ram is a must for PA to run smoothly with more than a couple of planets).

my advice is if you want an ssd get one. if you have a rig good enough to run this game then you would hamstring it if it was saddled with a spinny. i havent used a spinny for OS for about 5 years.

I have a mixture of machines and its surprising how not slow non ssd machines can be in use... The trick is with windows 7 + is to have lots and lots of ram.

Windows 7 and newer automatically use spare memory as a ram disk so if you've got say 16gb of ram in a machine it will load all the system files into memory and keep everything ticking along nicely. It can't benefit boot up times though and I'm with you that SSD drives are preferable.