stuttering/pausing (hdd thrash?) clarification. high end

Cokey

I built myself a new PC yesterday . C2D E6600, 8800GTS 640MB , 2Gig Corsair VS DDR667, Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, Seagate Barracuda 320Gig HDD. (in an Antec P180B with NeoHe550)

Now the game can look very good for me (either Highest or High Quality) at playable framerates .. but .. when running for the first time into places like Veskal's exchange and Leth Nurae - I get intermittent pauses as I assume it is continually loading graphics/animations etc for the new areas I ride into.  For 95% of the time these problems don't affect gameplay, but when I want to to a quick recall to city and run through, its very annoying to have a high end system and still suffer these kinds of problems.  I even get these pauses (albeit fleeting and minor) when running for first time through Jade Depths.

I had assumed these problems were mainly my old PC being old, but it appears Vanguard doesn't preload game data in an efficient way (designed for smooth travel).

Does everyone with high end systems get this stuttering/pausing when entering/moving through high pop'n areas for the first time, or is there some setting I have thats not right?  I assume that more than 2GB ram wouldn't see any noticeable improvement?

Isometrix

I have roughly the same PC, except an X1950Pro card. Same issues here, annoying but I blame the engine .

MX13

It's definatly a pre-loading player characters issue, and Sigil needs to get on it. However, if you tweek your in-game settings it should help. Check out the Tweaking Help Threads above & GL!

bmjames80

I have an extremely subpar system to yours.  7300GT OC'd 2g of ram and sempron 3200 and get very little thrashing.  As the previous poster suggested go into the .ini tweaks and set your engine cache.  Mine is set at 64mb if i remember. It may help you

apocalance

Personally, I suspect drive configuration is the difference but I can't get anyone to post on this. I will eventually have RAID 0 drives dedicated to games in the near future, so eventually I'll know for sure, but I think driver performance is the cause of the thrashing.

Any of you have system drives separate from your gaming drives? How about a third drive for storage and pagefile? I'd love to hear if this resolves a lot of the thrashing. Separating the system from the game and having an additional drive with the pagefile may have a huge impact. And when you can buy Seagate 7200.10 320GB drives for $100, it's very attainable.

bmjames80

I have Vanguard installed on a secondary HD that just has my games on it. 

Cokey

Originally posted by bmjames80

I have an extremely subpar system to yours.  7300GT OC'd 2g of ram and sempron 3200 and get very little thrashing.  As the previous poster suggested go into the .ini tweaks and set your engine cache.  Mine is set at 64mb if i remember. It may help you

This is strange - once I load an area for the first time I'm fine, but I still get the stuttering pausing, even on high/est performance (although a much lesser degree).  And I have 'tweaked' the cachemegsize on my old system to 128 and new system to 256 (which I change) - although I read somewhere this no longer helps?  It seems to me that no amount of tweaking could totally remove this problem.

So are you saying that you can run into a high pop'n town or city and get no or little stuttering/pausing as you run through?  Once I'm in and loaded an area my performance is fine - and certainly loading/stuttering is much reduced from my old PC (even on HQ).

I have considered (when I get round to ripping the old SATA2 out of my from my old PC), to install and run Vanguard from different hard drive to the system/pagefile.   Would be very interested to hear from more people about this.

Oh and something I forgot to mention - I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit edition.