Why does my friends PC load MW2 faster than mine?

Rroff · 8 Jul 2010 at 01:31

whitecrook said:
generally the fastest part of the disk is the start, so conventional wisdoms states. So if you've loaded mw2 at the end of the disk it could be the reason.

You might get better performance by not using raid, and dedicateing the start of disk 2 to your games, the start of disk 1 to you os, and then the rest for docs etc.

To illustrate this:

Whole disc:

Short stroke (equivalent of a partition to keep stuff on the faster part of the disc)

As you can see the minimum transfer rate is around 50% slower at one edge of the platter and overall seek times are double. So if his installation is mostly on the faster part of the partition and yours is spread over the whole disc with quite a bit in the last 1/3rd its going to make a massive difference to load times.

Ryan111 · 8 Jul 2010 at 01:36

How do I do that then? How do I make a short stroke? Could I keep it on thr RAID0 to increase it further?

My HD tune

whitecrook · 8 Jul 2010 at 02:14

your benchie there is pretty peaky -- look at line go between 260-210 MB, and look at the bench above which stays within about meg either way... You must have something 'poking' your disk like a pg file or something.

To 'do that then' generally will involve backup, repartion and reformat.

Your array trails off after about 40%, so you may find the first 1/5th of your disk is significantly faster, so don't make the first partition bigger than 100GB.

I'm on Mac just now, but I think if you load up MyDefrag (awesome app) it shows a nice graphical display of your disk, and crucially you can hover over it to find out what files are what and where they are, it may be able to place your game at the start and it also should at least show you where the data is on the disk.

Rroff · 8 Jul 2010 at 03:58

Win 7 tends to do that to HD Tune results (the peaky bit).

mame · 8 Jul 2010 at 05:16

Could be because he has a 32bit OS. Each application can only use 2gb of RAM whereas you don't have that limit. He might have more loading when playing the game.

pcAnywhere · 8 Jul 2010 at 07:56

I'd go for this reason..

He uses AVG, I dont have an Anti Virus

With all those worms, trojans and general malware taking up CPU time

Thiassi · 8 Jul 2010 at 10:05

pcAnywhere said:
I'd go for this reason..

With all those worms, trojans and general malware taking up CPU time

This.

/worldofhurt.

Ryan111 · 8 Jul 2010 at 12:42

Okay, will install kaspersky and do a full scan and see if it picks anything up.

Could anyone answer the other question, would I see a difference between the two options I had above? (in post 16)

iTek · 8 Jul 2010 at 12:50

This might sound stupid, but when you say loaded, do you mean the connection to the game server? take it you both wired into the router?

wozza2k · 8 Jul 2010 at 14:04

His milkshake is better than yours, damn right its better than yours!

stulid · 8 Jul 2010 at 14:06

Ati drivers, known issues with loading times on Battlefield Bad company2, maybe similar?

Thiassi · 8 Jul 2010 at 14:17

Ryan111 said:
Okay, will install kaspersky and do a full scan and see if it picks anything up.

Could anyone answer the other question, would I see a difference between the two options I had above? (in post 16)

Well, my setup is a 64gb Crucial C300 as my OS with download and profile sat on a 150gb Rapter and I've noticed a big difference in speed.

Can't comment on game loading speed, though, going to try later to test.

Mak3R · 8 Jul 2010 at 15:11

Perhaps his internet connecton is better than yours?

JonJ678 · 8 Jul 2010 at 16:58

Ryan111 said:
Okay, will install kaspersky and do a full scan and see if it picks anything up.

Getting viruses then installing antivirus is rarely as effective as starting off with it installed and updated before connecting to the internet for the first time. Devils advocate here though, I don't use one either.

I quite like the driver conflict theory.

Ryan111 · 9 Jul 2010 at 00:26

Mak3R said:
Perhaps his internet connecton is better than yours?

This is definatly not the case, he has 1.5 meg down through BT, im on 20mb virgin.

I can understand the driver theory, but still believe that the disk theory is by far the most reasonable solution...

wilko49 · 9 Jul 2010 at 10:05

can you check the dev console in mw2? might be like hl2, starts slowing down because of thousands of errors....

Corasik · 9 Jul 2010 at 10:55

Ryan111 said:
I thought about the RAID being the problem, but could work out why. I get much fast read/write speeds in crystal disk mark etc.

Raid is a mixed bag of fish, yes it boosts "maximum" transfer rates, but it slightly slows down access times compared to non raided drives. Also for very small reads (any read smaller than your raid slice size), then even the transfer rate is reduced to the same as the single drive.

The reason SSD's give such good performance in general isnt the transfer rates, its the fact that they find the data almost instantly, and then transfer it at a decent speed.

I was thinking along the lines of your graphics cards. Many games stuff as much texture data, and other bits and bobs into the graphics cards ram as the game loads. Your graphics cards combined have a lot of ram to be filled up, so it could be the game is making use of it all, by preloading a lot more on your PC. End result longer loading times, but smoother in game experience.

Corasik · 9 Jul 2010 at 11:00

mame said:
Could be because he has a 32bit OS. Each application can only use 2gb of RAM whereas you don't have that limit. He might have more loading when playing the game.

Well spotted, the game could well be doing a lot more pre-loading on the 64bit OS. In addition to what I already said about more ram available on the GPU for the game to fill up too.

Really loading times (while annoying sometimes) are not a good benchmark for drastically different PCs... Many games are designed to get the most out of your hardware, by preloading and even pre-rendering parts of the game while loading. This takes time, but saves work later on, giving you a smoother stutter free play.

Anewbe4u · 9 Jul 2010 at 11:53

Being throttled by virgin?

Ryan111 · 9 Jul 2010 at 12:15

The internet is not the problem. I know that.

Its the loading bar, accross the bottom of the screen, takes ages before its finished and before it can start to connect to the host/join game. It will frequently stop mid loading and then pause for a while then jump to the end. I realise that its not any kind of bench mark but I just feel it should be a lot faster than it is...