FPS Map hard drive type.

[UN9249]

Good day. I noticed that the FPS of the phantom drops very much depending on what type of hard drive the map is installed on in DCS. For example, if I have a map of Syria installed on an SSD, then the FPS is normal. If I have a map on a regular hard drive, then the FPS is very small, and levels out only when the radar is turned off. Is it possible to do something about this? And does such a dependence really exist?

[MAXsenna]

You really shouldn't use spindles for gaming anymore. That's the solution.
Cheers!

Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk

[Grundar]

I'm no tech guru, but from my understanding, you need the transfer speeds of an SSD device for DCS (and arguably for all of modern gaming - depending on the genre).  The retrieval speeds are significantly faster than a standard HDD = faster and more stable loading of data.  As Max points out, old style spinning plate HDD's are too slow, you simply will have delays loading in all that data and you see that reflected in the differences between the drives and your games performance.  You turn the radar off and it improves a bit and that is because less data is having to be retrieved.

If you are stuck with a HDD you can perform a defragmentation of it to clean it up (Don't defragment a SSD device though!) and maybe speed it up some.  It won't hit anywhere near SSD performance but it might help some.  Another thing you could review your pagefile and move it to the SSD if required, you could also increase the size of it if needed. While this gives you theoretical "extra RAM" it may give you a performance increase, especially if your pagefile is on the HDD instead.   

Other things you could try (I'm not entirely sure if it is useful with DCS)  but with some games increasing some display settings to higher settings will push workload onto the GPU and off of the CPU which can help increase general performance at times, if the CPU is under constant high loads.  There are some DCS performance guides around a quick search reveals this one: 

I haven't used it myself so not sure if it would be beneficial to you or not.

 

Long Story short, get another or a larger SSD if you can and shift DCS and it's maps to SSD drives only. If you can't maybe some of the above can ameliorate some trouble for you. 

Edited September 4, 2024 by Grundar

[UN9249]

Thank you for this guide. I need to read it carefull.

However the problems with standart HDD occurs with phantom only. So i decided to double check if it depends on drive's speed. And if radar peaks real terrain data, maybe heatblur will advise something. 

[Kalasnkova74]

6 hours ago, UN9249 said:

Good day. I noticed that the FPS of the phantom drops very much depending on what type of hard drive the map is installed on in DCS. For example, if I have a map of Syria installed on an SSD, then the FPS is normal. If I have a map on a regular hard drive, then the FPS is very small, and levels out only when the radar is turned off. Is it possible to do something about this? And does such a dependence really exist?

Yes. You ditch the HDD for the SSD. 

There are some optimizations that can be made, but none will overcome the inherent hardware limitations of an HDD vs SSD.

[intruder11]

In 2024 the only reason you should use a spinning hard drive is if you need to archive large amounts of rarely accessed data (and your scale is too small to justify using tapes instead). They should be avoided for gaming use.

This article is _fifteen years old_ and even back then the benefits of SSDs were easily worth the cost. And today, they are affordable commodities, not premium items like they were back then.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-state-of-solid-state-hard-drives/

[UN9249]

Ok, guys, thank you for letting me know. But let's talk about the question. I knew that ssd is better, but i don't have any free slots on my pc to install any new disc. And the problem with one aircraft only. And i have space available only on HDD. So, am asking if there is anything can be done to make phantom radar to use smaller resources like other planes. Maybe heatblur will made some options for people like me. Maybe they will add some fake data option for terrain idk. Why i can't ask

[Zabuzard]

If your problem is the radar, you can try enabling the "Radar Performance Mode" option.

That causes the radar image to be slightly less detailed, as the radar will not be operating at its full potential. I suspect this would also lead to the radar making less raytracing/terrain collision calls to the DCS engine.

[Grundar]

2 hours ago, UN9249 said:

Ok, guys, thank you for letting me know. But let's talk about the question. I knew that ssd is better, but i don't have any free slots on my pc to install any new disc. And the problem with one aircraft only. And i have space available only on HDD. So, am asking if there is anything can be done to make phantom radar to use smaller resources like other planes. Maybe heatblur will made some options for people like me. Maybe they will add some fake data option for terrain idk. Why i can't ask

If you go to the options in DCS (the cog on the main menu screen) and select the Special tab and then select the F-4E-45MC down the bottom at the page that appears you can select a reduced radar mode - which may improve things for you.