Battlefield 3 total system resource benchmarks.

[Gregster]

Very childish. If I put you on ignore, I can't see how you mislead people.

In all my time as a member of this forum, I have only seen one person who constantly argues with everybody.

You have issues and feel that berating any and everybody makes you a big man.

That signature wasn't just random you have was it? It is from where you get people wound up with your barrage of constant lies.

 

[Nigel014]

If Andy could just respond to my post after the 3rd time posting the same thing instead of arguing.

As I said in my previous post, the latest patch was released after the thread here was made:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=360411
He has 1GB VRAM and is running without a pagefile BEFORE the patch that fixed the crashing was released. And he has no problems..

Would be nice to see a response to this Andy.

 

[The_Baron]

Been playing at Ultra 1440p with 8gb ram without the Page File for a month. No issues.

 

[MANFACE]

Been skimming through the posts.

Gotta say Andy, well done for you observations, and very well written explanations of your findings.

Pity the thread is getting off topic with stupid comments from peeps who don't appreciate the time and effort you have spent.

 

[ALXAndy]

Very childish. If I put you on ignore, I can't see how you mislead people.

In all my time as a member of this forum, I have only seen one person who constantly argues with everybody.

You have issues and feel that berating any and everybody makes you a big man.

That signature wasn't just random you have was it? It is from where you get people wound up with your barrage of constant lies.

You're the only one doing the misleading.

Here's the deal. Run the tests, post the results, be honest. Stop posting irrelevant crap trying to force your point home. Do what you need to do to prove me wrong. Because all I've seen all day is rubbish.

As for my sig? found it on Sickipedia and it made me laugh because, you know? it's funny.

All day you have been trying to argue over my OP without actually doing what I did in the OP.

You do realise that makes pretty much everything you have said pointless?

As for me being ignorant? funny, it's the same three people who keep bleating on about that. Yet, oddly enough I seem to be able to communicate with others perfectly well.

Enough to have them run the tests and post the results.

How strange.

Been skimming through the posts.

Gotta say Andy, well done for you observations, and very well written explanations of your findings.

Pity the thread is getting off topic with stupid comments who don't appreciate the time and effort you have spent.

Sadly it seems to be a case of thread rage.

I've pointed out that I don't know 100% for sure if my suspicions are correct. The only way to find that out would be to ask DICE. How does the saying go?

I got 99 problems but DICE won't fix one

All of the evidence (aside from the side ways crap a few have posted) points to the fact that BF3 uses loads of texture ram and thus, caches not from physical memory (we already knew that*) but from your paging file.

* If it wasn't a problem why did Nvidia have the excellent idea and innovation to cache from physical memory when vram runs out? LOL.

I've said before that it's a really good idea. Mostly because for once having 2000mhz DDR3 will actually help out.

Yet some have their knickers so bunched up their bottoms that they think I posted this thread to bash on the 680.

LOL.

 

[haelio]

OK, there's a lot of misunderstanding going on here and I'm going to try and clear things up as much as possible.

To start:

1) I'm a GPU driver architect. I do this sort of thing for a living. I don't work for NV or AMD, but for a little British IP company in Cambridge whose products all of you on this forum use.

2) I could be wrong so please educate me if you think I am

3) I'm not familiar with BF3... not played it yet.

OK here goes:

1) A user space process (such as BF3) can't control how paging is handled directly on Windows. As far as I know, an application can hint on the 'pageability' of memory it allocates, but can't forcibly page memory. What I'm saying is that the page file is handled by the OS, and the user space process only sees memory without knowing whether it is paged or not -- this seamlessness is part of the OS's mandate.

2) If you have enough memory there is very little reason to have a page file. Some processes use the page file for heuristic based memory allocations, but otherwise it isn't needed. Without a page file, however, if you run out of memory you will have processes' memory requests denied causing all kinds of issues. Most code will simply bug out if a memory request fails since often there is no error path that can recover from such an issue. So maybe your torrent client called malloc for the next piece of a file and this resulted in BF3's next allocation returning NULL...

3) BF3 might be using more VRAM than it needs. Just like Windows caches portions of the filesystem and so on in system RAM, BF3 might be caching textures that it might need in the future to prevent it needing to load it via memory. This is a form of lazy flushing -- why spend time deallocating memory when you might need it later? Just deallocate when you need the space...

4) If BF3 had to halt and wait for memory to come back from the page file via a disk access, your framerates would be effectively 0. Once the data is in VRAM, however, your framerates will be back up again. Compare memory bandwidth of VRAM/RAM and a HDD/SSD to see what I mean. If games are running into VRAM bandwidth issues at around 190GB/s imagine what happens when you rely on something only as fast as 6GB/s (SATA 3 theoretical max)... Not to mention all the layers it needs to go through to get to your VRAM (SSD -> South Bridge -> Memory -> PCIX -> GPU).

Although I think Andy's assumptions are wrong and stem from a misunderstanding of how these aspects of drivers/OSs work, I commend him for taking the time to write a post with some figures and incite and interesting discussion. There's no need to start flaming each other, we're all gamers after all, aren't we?

 

[Gregster]

check post 112.

You will all see where he was going.

 

[ALXAndy]

check post 112.

You will all see where he was going.

Another utterly pointless post from you. Seven hours and it's still the same.

Shame. Simply because you have a 680 and I am very interested in seeing if they get the same sort of boost the 7970 does.

Instead you're just focused on something only you seem to understand.

 

[Gregster]

But this thread was never about that. It was about displaying how 1gb and 1.2gb vram is not enough for BF3 and possibly? the future, and how it most certainly uses your paging file to cache textures.

And if you still don't get it then I feel very sorry for you.

Did you not state that 1GB is not enough to play BF3?

 

[Nigel014]

As I said in my previous post, the latest patch was released after the thread here was made:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=360411
He has 1GB VRAM and is running without a pagefile BEFORE the patch that fixed the crashing was released. And he has no problems..

Would be nice to see a response to this Andy.

 

[ALXAndy]

OK, there's a lot of misunderstanding going on here and I'm going to try and clear things up as much as possible.

To start:

1) I'm a GPU driver architect. I do this sort of thing for a living. I don't work for NV or AMD, but for a little British IP company in Cambridge whose products all of you on this forum use.

2) I could be wrong so please educate me if you think I am

3) I'm not familiar with BF3... not played it yet.

OK here goes:

1) A user space process (such as BF3) can't control how paging is handled directly on Windows. As far as I know, an application can hint on the 'pageability' of memory it allocates, but can't forcibly page memory. What I'm saying is that the page file is handled by the OS, and the user space process only sees memory without knowing whether it is paged or not -- this seamlessness is part of the OS's mandate.

2) If you have enough memory there is very little reason to have a page file. Some processes use the page file for heuristic based memory allocations, but otherwise it isn't needed. Without a page file, however, if you run out of memory you will have processes' memory requests denied causing all kinds of issues. Most code will simply bug out if a memory request fails since often there is no error path that can recover from such an issue. So maybe your torrent client called malloc for the next piece of a file and this resulted in BF3's next allocation returning NULL...

3) BF3 might be using more VRAM than it needs. Just like Windows caches portions of the filesystem and so on in system RAM, BF3 might be caching textures that it might need in the future to prevent it needing to load it via memory. This is a form of lazy flushing -- why spend time deallocating memory when you might need it later? Just deallocate when you need the space...

4) If BF3 had to halt and wait for memory to come back from the page file via a disk access, your framerates would be effectively 0. Once the data is in VRAM, however, your framerates will be back up again. Compare memory bandwidth of VRAM/RAM and a HDD/SSD to see what I mean. If games are running into VRAM bandwidth issues at around 190GB/s imagine what happens when you rely on something only as fast as 6GB/s (SATA 3 theoretical max)... Not to mention all the layers it needs to go through to get to your VRAM (SSD -> South Bridge -> Memory -> PCIX -> GPU).

Although I think Andy's assumptions are wrong and stem from a misunderstanding of how these aspects of drivers/OSs work, I commend him for taking the time to write a post with some figures and incite and interesting discussion. There's no need to start flaming each other, we're all gamers after all, aren't we?

Amazing post. Thank you ! at last some clarity.

Given you know what you do can you understand why it is that BF3 seems to want to use the paging file for operations other than system ram?

IE - why is it that when you disable the paging file you run into problems with it but not because your system runs out of physical ram?

Or would that be something that DICE only know because they created FBII? Is it possible for FBII for example to operate in a different way? or is it like BASIC coding for example, all the same?

I know quite a bit about programming languages. I just don't know how they work

A couple of friends of mine are programmers of emulators, so I've been around it a lot.

I did read that it would not be possible to use, for example, ID TECH IV on Skyrim due to the enormous landscapes. Would I be right in assuming this is because ID TIV is so texture heavy? and would that mean that FBII can't do the same sort of scope in size?

Thanks for posting

 

[ALXAndy]

Did you not state that 1GB is not enough to play BF3?

No.

I said that 1gb was not enough to play BF3 without it using your page file to make up for the lack of vram.

 

[ALXAndy]

Nigel.I replied to it ages ago.

Eh? where did he mention updates?

He posted that about ten days ago. How do you know he was running it before the patch?

Jesus man, way to assume. No sorry, I've read over it four times now. And even though I am very tired I see no mention of anything you said there.

Do you know how long it takes to run the test? about ten minutes. Amazing how much people will dance around the issue.

Just run the test. If you think I am wrong then that's the way to do it, right?

Run FRAPS, record the FPS. I would find it more interesting if your game doesn't crash because what we don't know is how it affects FPS if it doesn't and you only have 1gb vram.

 

[Nigel014]

I'm not gonna bother posting anymore, it's pointless. He posted it 10 days ago....And the patch was not out 10 days ago. I give up.

 

[Gregster]

Yeah, and no mention of BF3.

Ed. And if you are too slow to work out why disabling the paging file makes your PC faster then you shouldn't be posting on internet forums.

It's only a problem if you lack system memory. IF the problem would be caused by running out due to an application using SYSTEM memory then adding loads more would help.

But this thread was never about that. It was about displaying how 1gb and 1.2gb vram is not enough for BF3 and possibly? the future, and how it most certainly uses your paging file to cache textures.

And if you still don't get it then I feel very sorry for you.

No.

I said that 1gb was not enough to play BF3 without it using your page file to make up for the lack of vram.

Sorry, I fail to see where in this post it states that?

 

[haelio]

Amazing post. Thank you ! at last some clarity.
Given you know what you do can you understand why it is that BF3 seems to want to use the paging file for operations other than system ram?

IE - why is it that when you disable the paging file you run into problems with it but not because your system runs out of physical ram?

BF3 can't control what is paged and what isn't. The graphs in Windows are misleading in terms of physical memory usage, btw. They show what is part of the working set (i.e. pages that are resident in main memory) but AFAIK don't include kernel cached pages and definitely don't include the disk cache usage.

When you run out of physical RAM, the OS will use the paging file and, depending on your settings, potentially expand the size of it to satisfy processes.

Note that BF3 could be killed even if it is not allocating any new memory -- Windows tends to like to kill the process with the most memory when scrabbling to keep your entire system from blue screening when starved of memory.

Or would that be something that DICE only know because they created FBII? Is it possible for FBII for example to operate in a different way? or is it like BASIC coding for example, all the same?

I don't think DICE have control over these aspects. In fact, much of these allocations will be made by the Direct3D driver on behalf of the app (i.e. BF3) when it makes calls to the driver.

I did read that it would not be possible to use, for example, ID TECH IV on Skyrim due to the enormous landscapes. Would I be right in assuming this is because ID TIV is so texture heavy? and would that mean that FBII can't do the same sort of scope in size?

Thanks for posting

Megatexturing was all the rage a short while ago I'm not sure of the details, but as an educated guess, I'd say that Skyrim would find it hard to use megatextures because of the scope of what is rendered, i.e. at the Throat of the World the amount of texture that would need to be resident in memory or at least previously mipmapped to rended at any sane speed is a bit excessive. Also, I'm not sure why megatextures would be better in this case compared to more traditional approaches.

But I don't think this is impossible -- we humans are amazingly resourceful.

EDIT: You mean ID Tech 5 right?

 

[ALXAndy]

I'm not gonna bother posting anymore, it's pointless. He posted it 10 days ago....And the patch was not out 10 days ago. I give up.

There have been numerous patches. Five at last count.

I should know I've seen them all install on account of me not letting Origin start with my PC, so they don't just install in the background.

Sorry if I sounded crappy, that wasn't my intention. It could even be that the guy who did see it crash on him is running the naughty unpatched version?

The bottom line Nigel is I don't know. THAT is why I wanted people to run the test and post the results, not start arguing over whose Sinclair Spectrum is better than their Commodore 64.

Sadly though people just don't seem to grasp that and come into the thread acting like two year olds. I don't mean you in that, as your post was legitimate (hence my reply) but all day we have had people posting the most obscure and irrelevant crap.

There's still a couple doing it now. So far I've been told I am ignorant, a troll in my own thread and god knows what else.

FFS, all it was about was trying to decipher vram levels and usage, and rule out CPU and memory limitations.

Amazing how hard some people find that to grasp

 

[ALXAndy]

BF3 can't control what is paged and what isn't. The graphs in Windows are misleading in terms of physical memory usage, btw. They show what is part of the working set (i.e. pages that are resident in main memory) but AFAIK don't include kernel cached pages and definitely don't include the disk cache usage.

When you run out of physical RAM, the OS will use the paging file and, depending on your settings, potentially expand the size of it to satisfy processes.

Note that BF3 could be killed even if it is not allocating any new memory -- Windows tends to like to kill the process with the most memory when scrabbling to keep your entire system from blue screening when starved of memory.



I don't think DICE have control over these aspects. In fact, much of these allocations will be made by the Direct3D driver on behalf of the app (i.e. BF3) when it makes calls to the driver.



Megatexturing was all the rage a short while ago I'm not sure of the details, but as an educated guess, I'd say that Skyrim would find it hard to use megatextures because of the scope of what is rendered, i.e. at the Throat of the World the amount of texture that would need to be resident in memory or at least previously mipmapped to rended at any sane speed is a bit excessive. Also, I'm not sure why megatextures would be better in this case compared to more traditional approaches.

But I don't think this is impossible -- we humans are amazingly resourceful.

EDIT: You mean ID Tech 5 right?

I see. So yes, my suspicions were correct on Skyrim. I read a quote from Carmack today about how it would be of no use in Skyrim.

That also sort of explains why BF3 to me felt like such a let down. Could be one of two things really. Either they couldn't be bothered to make a decent single player game or they were held back because they wanted to make it look so pretty.

Not sure which to go for really. BFBC2 was a much better single player game.

 

[Rusty0611]

If you'd asked a couple of weeks ago I would have tried on my 6870. But it's bagged and tagged and in the garage now. RIP glorious 6870. Best £/performance upgrade I've ever made (from a 4850 originally)

 

[ALXAndy]

Well at least now the thread can take a different direction.

I guess if this crashing was down to the game not being patched then people with the patched version can disable their paging file and see if it helps performance in BF3.