What is it with DCS and freezing your hard drive

[Shibbyland]

So after 2.5 came out, I bought the spitfire, Normandy and Epsom campaign. I got horrendous crashes on a regular basis.

 

 

I decided to buy a brand new SSD and HDD to take some load off. It worked really well for ages. I had my operating system and some important programs on my SSD and everything else running from the HDD.

 

 

Now I've just gotten back into DCS and its back to freezing, crashing etc. I've got heaps of space left but yea just at random it'll freeze up, constant blue hard drive light. The worst one happened when I crashed an F15 at high speed.

 

 

What more can be done, I'm not going to go out and buy an even bigger SSD just to have DCS installed on it.

[Aluminum Donkey]

So after 2.5 came out, I bought the spitfire, Normandy and Epsom campaign. I got horrendous crashes on a regular basis.

 

What more can be done, I'm not going to go out and buy an even bigger SSD just to have DCS installed on it.

 

 

Is DCS installed on your hard drive? If so, move it to your SSD if you have enough space. DCS constantly loads huge graphics textures while flying around, and the mechanical hard disk isn't really fast enough to keep up.

Really bad stutters (long pauses) are a result of running out of RAM, and DCS will start swapping huge graphics textures to your hard disk pagefile.

You should post your system specs in your signature (CPU, memory, graphics card) so we can easily tell if there's an inherent system limitation.

Finally, DCS is always a work-in-progress. Even the 'release' version. It's just the way it is, and I'm not a programmer, but the sim seems to have major shortcomings in how it manages assets and memory. It's been that way for years and will probably never change, so you pretty much have no choice but to tolerate lots of small stutters during combat.

 

 

So, post your specs and maybe someone here can help you out.

 

 

AD

[Shibbyland]

I have the following:

 

 

Intel i5-6600k at 3.5 GHz. 16GB RAM (can't remember the type but it's maybe 2 years old). Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB.

 

 

I have a 128GB SSD and a 2TB HDD. Unfortunately given the size of my SSD I need to leave DCS on my HDD. I'll upgrade in future but that's where I'm at for now. I didn't used to have this issue running with what I have, it's a relatively recent thing.

[BitMaster]

If DCS remains on a HDD you have lost before you even hit the start button.

 

 

get it on a SSD, it's not an option, it is MANDATORY.

[Aluminum Donkey]

I have the following:

 

 

Intel i5-6600k at 3.5 GHz. 16GB RAM (can't remember the type but it's maybe 2 years old). Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB.

 

 

I have a 128GB SSD and a 2TB HDD. Unfortunately given the size of my SSD I need to leave DCS on my HDD. I'll upgrade in future but that's where I'm at for now. I didn't used to have this issue running with what I have, it's a relatively recent thing.

 

 

Shibby,

 

 

I have a similar system to yours, but I'm using a GTX 1070 vid card with 8GB of video memory.

 

 

If you absolutely can't/won't fork over the cash for another SSD, then put Windows on your mechanical hard disk, and wipe the SSD and put DCS World on that instead. It's the only way it'll work decently.

You also might want to put your Windows pagefile on the SSD as well. Not absolutely necessary, but it'll be faster.

 

 

DCS needs so much transfer speed it isn't funny, and running it from an SSD is the only way to go. Windows will work fine on the hard disk. You're also using a 4GB video card which is very marginal, so a much heftier one is in the future unless you run on all low textures.

 

 

AD

[Goa]

you can find ssd sata6 250gb for 50 euros nowadays.... :)

 

Crucial MX500 CT250MX500SSD1 SSD Interno, 250 GB, 3D NAND , checkit out on amazon

[Mordant]

On 9/15/2018 at 11:26 PM, Aluminum Donkey said:

DCS needs so much transfer speed it isn't funny, and running it from an SSD is the only way to go. Windows will work fine on the hard disk. 

 

I have a similar situation to the og poster, i have 500gb HDD and a 128gb SSD. The only thing that confuses me is that DCS runs awesome on singleplayer but the second i move to Hoggit GAW for example the entire thing dies. I have made a few relatively demanding missions in the mission editor and they have run flawlessly. Why the change?

Rest of the computer specs:

Asus Tuf X570 WI-FI

 

Ryzen 5 3600

 

Gtx 1650 4gb(I run dcs on minimal settings, it looks good enough for me there)

 

16gb DDR4 3200mhz RAM(2 x 8gb)

 

650 Watt EVGA PSU

 

 

I am really intrigued why multiplayer is so finnicky compared to singleplayer.... To further confuse me, both the mission I made and GAW are both on Caucasus Map and I flew in the same areas although on GAW I never get off the ground before DCS crashes....

[Worrazen]

One key thing I noticed compared to how I played singleplayer most of the time, is that MP missions tend to use almost the whole theater on every given map, even tho there may be some with lower amount of units and activity. While units definitely count because of the expensive aircraft livieries taking a lot of memory, but mainly because of the area, it takes more RAM/VRAM because the game has to load a lot more terrain textures, even tho your resources should only be tied to your position/camera and not others. I would also assume there's some extra memory needed for networking and multiplayer-sync (coherency), though I'm not sure how much, among other things.

Perhaps it also depends on amount of players and their variation of liveries used, all of those liveries for all player and AI aircraft have to be in RAM at some point, hopefully they're not all loaded at all times when you're not looking at them but they could be for precisely the purpose of avoiding laggy texture pop-in.

 

Most of the time I only use 1/4th of the map when playing my own missions in SP, and with only 1 player that's only 1 custom/additional livery, with AIs usually sharing those liveries which I hope doesn't duplicate the memory footprint of each one (just reference the same memory area I think) so you get lower usage there.

 

The other thing is, which may even be more important is how much does the game need to keep cached in RAM/VRAM anyway, half of that is just cache to avoid disk reads, it doesn't actually need to be in RAM for the engine to work, technically there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of memory management in a lot of aspects in general for games, not just DCS world, this is a constant battle for game devs.

 

Try lowering Preload Radius or Visibility Range in the options and see if that helps, I think it should.

But your issue may be different I think you should create your own thread.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Worrazen