Will a M.2 Drive allow DCS to run smoother?

[ouseler]

I just upgraded to an i9-9900K and Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Pro mobo in hopes of "smoothing out" the game play. I have 32GB of DDR4 2400 RAM and am running it on a Cuda 2TB SSD. You can see my system in its entirety in the signature block.

 

I am running DCS stable and am seeing frequent pauses in the game. I'll be flying along and the graphics will freeze, but the sound will continue even in the middle of a radio transmission. Then the graphics will continue on after a pause of up to 2 seconds at times. The frequency is random, but frequent enough to be annoying. I so much hoped that the upgrade would correct this issue, but it seems it has not.

 

I attempted overclocking my GPU (EVGA GTX 1080 8 GB SC2), but found out that it was, most likely, overclocked out of the box; thus the SC2 designation. When I overclocked it any further (using Afterburner or the EVGA overclocking software), it causes DCS to crash. So that was a dead end.

 

I ran a system performance manager while I flew and when it paused. I jumped over to the manager quickly to what the system was doing at those times. It appeared that the CPU and GPU were dropping out and activity spiked on the SSD. Could this mean that I have a bottleneck somewhere that is causing the DCS to read from the SSD from time-to-time? Could the SDD not be fast enough? Is something wrong with my graphics card? Because I know it is not the processor. My board drives the CPU at 4.7 GHz right out of the box. I didn't not do any OC to get it to that speed.

 

A friend suggested maybe getting an m.2 drive and running DCS on that.

 

What do you guys think?

[Gladman]

Load times are decreased, game performance is not increased. I've had an M2 NVME for better than a year. Your mileage may vary but I doubt it.

[zildac]

Hi,

 

 

I have an older NVME drive on my system (it wasn't purchased for DCS but just for games generally that need to load/stream textures). I have to be frank, my system specs are lower than yours apart from I have a 2080ti and 3600 DDR4 and I haven't had any noticeble stutters, but I will caveat this by saying I don't play MP that much at all, other than with a friend in CoOp missions for example. Most of the 10x and 20x series really don't benefit from manual OC's they kind of do it themselves within their thermal limitations. I would perhaps look at a more fundamental tuning of Windows itself, first. I have a Predator X34P so not quite 4K and can comfortably get 75-90FPS on SC on the deck and up to around 110-140FPS in the air with many of the "heavier" campaigns. I don't really notice any stutters. The 9900K has very good single core performance, I only have a 6700K O/C to 4.6. I am also on the OB but at this point in time they are the same as far as I understand. I'm not sure that an M2 drive would solve your particular problem, but I may well be wrong. Maybe start by looking at what else is running in the background, RGB controller apps for example can be a complete pain in terms of their spikey CPU usage, AV any other non essential services. I would exhaust these options first as your system spec is good, maybe not 4K good at High settings, but good enough to not have stutters. And of course, yes your DCS graphics settings will have a big impact. The behaviour you are explaining would almost tend to suggest some kind of background task consuming system resources at a regular'ish interval.

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

Z.

Edited July 28, 2020 by zildac

[ouseler]

Ok, I'll look at that. I have IR Tracker and Voice Attack running in game, but those should not be causing the problem.

 

I have thought that maybe the 40" 4K monitor maybe a little much for the GPU to handle, but I hope that is not the case. I really love the res.

 

My DCS setting are pretty well maxed out, but all anti-aliasing is turned off. It was causing frame rate problems. I'll look at knocking some of those settings back some.

 

Would Norton/LifeLock anti-virus be a problem? I know anti-virus software screws with other programs sometimes.

[Mars Exulte]

Tldr

M.2 is a form factor. It comes in both SATA and NVMe versions. A SATA M.2 is no faster than any other, NVMe is. Having a ''M.2'' drive is irrelevant. You can have whatever form factor you please.

 

As to whether you will benefit from a NVMe drive, the short answer is no. Nothing you'll do in normal usage will ever approach those stated speeds, and in normal usage it works about the same as every other drive.

 

Conclusion : save your money and buy a SATA SSD, or better yet buy a larger SSD.

 

 

 

I own a 3.5/3.0R/W NVMe drive. Was a waste of money. The PC I'm building for my brother has a 2TB SATA SSD as primary now, no platter drive (which no longer have a use, tbh) and no NVMe (which are pointless). And before somebody says something HODOR about SSD's being unreliable, that has not been an issue for many years... if it ever was, which I doubt. Regardless a SATA SSD will last millions of hours before failure, rendering all concerns moot. You will discard for something better before it dies.

[reece146]

If there is a technical issue with your system it is likely the RAM. 2400MHz and likely high CL numbers is not doing you any favours - bit of mismatch to your CPU and motherboard.

 

As zhukov032186 suggests, your 2TB SSD is more than fast enough.

 

I'd try testing some other configuration things first though...

 

1. Turn off your page file.
   
2. Make sure there is no "crapware" like Logitech or keyboard widgets or any other background garbage running. This includes virus scanners.
   
3. Make sure the Nvidia driver and Windows OS configuration is set to performance mode(s) and not power saving and/or quality.
   
4. Make sure your add on peripherals (USB) are solid and not "winking out" and making the OS re-initialize them during game play. Sloppy/loose USB ports... There is a way to disable USB bus checking in the DCS autoexec.cfg.
   
5. Turn down pre-load radius and tree visibility.
   

I'm not going to give instructions on how to do these things - do some searching and it should be easy enough to find.

 

My "pet theory" is that stutters is caused by system or video ram latency when DCS bangs against the limit of either one and the system does not have data ready to refill the queue.

 

Try those things and see where it leads.

Edited July 28, 2020 by reece146

[Buzzles]

I agree with zhukov032186, performance benefits between nvme and sata are not important for DCS which does the vast majority of loading from disk into memory during mission load, and basically does 0 writing.

Sure, nvme might shave a little bit of time off the initial load, but we're not talking much.

 

For perf, if you're on 16gb of RAM, you'll get a boost going to 32gb and that's where you should spend your money. Obviously doesn't apply to OP as he's already on 32.

 

Now, *IF* DCS ever starts streaming terrain data from disk rather than loading it all in at mission load, then you'd maybe see some benefit, but that'd depend on pre-load radius, and then you'd only notice if you were going extremely fast or rapidly switching locations (f2 to friendly/enemies) and that data hadn't been pre-loaded.

[schurem]

also, get fast RAM. It helps.

[reece146]

Btw, screen size is irrelevant. Screen resolution is what can affect performance.

 

 

 

If you are running 1440p then you are probably good but 4K on a GTX1080 (non-Ti) is non-optimal and I'd expect to see some slow frame rates at times.

[ouseler]

Thanks, I'm running 32GB of RAM now, but its 2400MHz. Maybe too slow?

[macedk]

I just upgraded to an i9-9900K and Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Pro mobo in hopes of "smoothing out" the game play. I have 32GB of DDR4 2400 RAM and am running it on a Cuda 2TB SSD. You can see my system in its entirety in the signature block.

 

I am running DCS stable and am seeing frequent pauses in the game. I'll be flying along and the graphics will freeze, but the sound will continue even in the middle of a radio transmission. Then the graphics will continue on after a pause of up to 2 seconds at times. The frequency is random, but frequent enough to be annoying. I so much hoped that the upgrade would correct this issue, but it seems it has not.

 

I attempted overclocking my GPU (EVGA GTX 1080 8 GB SC2), but found out that it was, most likely, overclocked out of the box; thus the SC2 designation. When I overclocked it any further (using Afterburner or the EVGA overclocking software), it causes DCS to crash. So that was a dead end.

 

I ran a system performance manager while I flew and when it paused. I jumped over to the manager quickly to what the system was doing at those times. It appeared that the CPU and GPU were dropping out and activity spiked on the SSD. Could this mean that I have a bottleneck somewhere that is causing the DCS to read from the SSD from time-to-time? Could the SDD not be fast enough? Is something wrong with my graphics card? Because I know it is not the processor. My board drives the CPU at 4.7 GHz right out of the box. I didn't not do any OC to get it to that speed.

 

A friend suggested maybe getting an m.2 drive and running DCS on that.

 

What do you guys think?

 

First overclocking is a gamble, like running on a highway blindfolded in rush hour.

 

Simple, the culprit could be hardware or software.

 

Turning 70 different dials at the same time to fix something will get you nowhere, just as a racecar team :)

 

U might fix one thing and brake 10 other things and so on. Just ask the dcs coders, And during a long life of just working, i've seen things that are not explainable, power off and on and all is good, a solution with no feedback great ;).

 

I run (look at my specs) a constant setup, hardware wise. And in my 30 years or so dealing with computers, I have done the 70 dial thing and came up short.

 

There might not be an easy fix and you have to accept that before you gun down x y or z :)

 

Frustrating ...oh yes and hell raising pissed off level, check, but it works or it doesn't and sometimes it is out of your hands.

 

I've been blessed with "slow performance" and a new a b or c made it better.

I've had one faulty motherboard in 20 years or I didn't understand how ram config worked.

 

So if you out of the box try to stress hardware, you will get the gremlins as well.

 

Two major points are overclocking and wifi and do them both and I'll leave ya as fast as you can say why ;)

 

In short hehehe it might be a dcs thing or a hardware setup thing. In dcs defence, yes the coders are saying in secret "we should have made this on a fixed hardware setup like the ps4

or xbox".

 

The dcs software seems to behave well with hardware at this moment, is the software bugged, seems to be and dcs is suffering more bugs than other multiplayer companies.

 

Dcs needs to be playable even if not great at all times. Wait are they doing the 70 dial thing too ? if so I'm out :)

[Leaderface]

Surely you can put your own memory at 3200 in the bios. And see at what latency cost and test like that.

[ouseler]

OK, many have been talking about RAM. And I admit, for a high powered processor and mobo as I have, the RAM is a little underwhelming. It was from the older processor/mobo (I was on a budget).

 

So, what would you guys think is the best RAM (32GB - 2x16GB sticks) for my system (review my signature block)? Mind you, my BIOS has the ability to OC the memory with XMP.

[Svsmokey]

I just upgraded to an i9-9900K and Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Pro mobo in hopes of "smoothing out" the game play. I have 32GB of DDR4 2400 RAM and am running it on a Cuda 2TB SSD. You can see my system in its entirety in the signature block.

 

I am running DCS stable and am seeing frequent pauses in the game. I'll be flying along and the graphics will freeze, but the sound will continue even in the middle of a radio transmission. Then the graphics will continue on after a pause of up to 2 seconds at times. The frequency is random, but frequent enough to be annoying. I so much hoped that the upgrade would correct this issue, but it seems it has not.

 

I attempted overclocking my GPU (EVGA GTX 1080 8 GB SC2), but found out that it was, most likely, overclocked out of the box; thus the SC2 designation. When I overclocked it any further (using Afterburner or the EVGA overclocking software), it causes DCS to crash. So that was a dead end.

 

I ran a system performance manager while I flew and when it paused. I jumped over to the manager quickly to what the system was doing at those times. It appeared that the CPU and GPU were dropping out and activity spiked on the SSD. Could this mean that I have a bottleneck somewhere that is causing the DCS to read from the SSD from time-to-time? Could the SDD not be fast enough? Is something wrong with my graphics card? Because I know it is not the processor. My board drives the CPU at 4.7 GHz right out of the box. I didn't not do any OC to get it to that speed.

 

A friend suggested maybe getting an m.2 drive and running DCS on that.

 

What do you guys think?

 

Is that a ssd or a sshd "hybrid" drive ? I've heard references to the latter not performing well in dcs .

[Leaderface]

OK, many have been talking about RAM. And I admit, for a high powered processor and mobo as I have, the RAM is a little underwhelming. It was from the older processor/mobo (I was on a budget).

 

So, what would you guys think is the best RAM (32GB - 2x16GB sticks) for my system (review my signature block)? Mind you, my BIOS has the ability to OC the memory with XMP.

Try to buy Gskill or HyperX modules that are easy to find with CL14 (at 3200 Mhz) and at good price.

Or maybe 3600 Mhz with CL16 (Don´t double the prize on CL14 3600 Mhz modules because you will probably end up on 3200 with your system).

Anyway there are people that assure that Intel won´t use that bump in memory speed inside their CPUs.

Your testing will be of help for other people in the forum.

[unknown]

I just upgraded to an i9-9900K and Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Pro mobo in hopes of "smoothing out" the game play. I have 32GB of DDR4 2400 RAM and am running it on a Cuda 2TB SSD. You can see my system in its entirety in the signature block.

 

I am running DCS stable and am seeing frequent pauses in the game. I'll be flying along and the graphics will freeze, but the sound will continue even in the middle of a radio transmission. Then the graphics will continue on after a pause of up to 2 seconds at times. The frequency is random, but frequent enough to be annoying. I so much hoped that the upgrade would correct this issue, but it seems it has not.

 

I attempted overclocking my GPU (EVGA GTX 1080 8 GB SC2), but found out that it was, most likely, overclocked out of the box; thus the SC2 designation. When I overclocked it any further (using Afterburner or the EVGA overclocking software), it causes DCS to crash. So that was a dead end.

 

I ran a system performance manager while I flew and when it paused. I jumped over to the manager quickly to what the system was doing at those times. It appeared that the CPU and GPU were dropping out and activity spiked on the SSD. Could this mean that I have a bottleneck somewhere that is causing the DCS to read from the SSD from time-to-time? Could the SDD not be fast enough? Is something wrong with my graphics card? Because I know it is not the processor. My board drives the CPU at 4.7 GHz right out of the box. I didn't not do any OC to get it to that speed.

 

A friend suggested maybe getting an m.2 drive and running DCS on that.

 

What do you guys think?

Which nvidia driver are you using? If you use a 45x.xx driver try an older one. For example the latest 451.67 whql driver from nvidia has following issue:

"Several games randomly freeze for a few seconds during gameplay. Affected games include Assassin's Creed Origins, Planetside 2, Assassin’s Creed III, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. [3038632]"

[Slug72]

Mind you, my BIOS has the ability to OC the memory with XMP.

 

Enable XMP. ;)

[ouseler]

No, just an SSD.

[ouseler]

XMP is on.

[ouseler]

I am using Nvidia driver version 446.14.

[macedk]

The new shite is that enableling xmp actually over volt's the cpu, as the memory controller is in the cpu. So if u are unlucky you will fry the cpu.

 

Source:

Edited July 29, 2020 by macedk
fact edit