<1% read hit rate with Diablo 3 Topic is solved

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dustyny
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Re: <1% read hit rate with Diablo 3

Post by dustyny »

I know you probably don't want to hear this but the USB flash drive is the problem and new H/W is really the simplest and best solution.

There is to much overhead, not enough bandwidth and the way that your particular USB flash drive stores data may not lend itself to caching at all. Flash drives are great for moving data around (super sized floppy disk) but they aren't practical for running applications from them. If you check out the portable apps forums you'll see just how difficult it is to get apps to run reliably & stably from flash drives.
Incriminated
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Re: <1% read hit rate with Diablo 3

Post by Incriminated »

High-Speed-USB3 is a bloated synonym for universally plugging in any device at average max speed 33MB/s, sure tehcnically the specification should provide more but never worked for me. Please not that higher speed can only be achieved when device and controller are synrchornised to an extra fiber-optical channel.
...
My very old 5400rpm 120gb drive might be faster than your High-Speed-USB3 device.
...
Anyhow stutters of games.. especially when not appearing to any other game... are a problem of GPU driver incompatibility or Games-GPU-engine-bottlenecke.

The problem with cache-hits is that they happen on the 2nd-time, 3rd-time and so on but NOT on the very 1st data access. So when it needs to load a new map/level/video you hadnt had loaded before... there is no possibility of acceleration and your "superfast" :oops: usb3/memory-subsystem-connection may bottleneck the regular read-throughs.

Install the game on a SSD, if not available HDD.
Dont use L2-cache on any usb-3 device... it might slow down seq-r/w of any "properly attached" drive/disk at any moment (USB2-speed-drop/ SATA and even PATA-66 is faster than USB2).
Only use L1-cache in RAM.
Update drivers and install latest game-patches, NO 100% cure, latest still may BE fault, in doubt check OTHER game.


Edit: Well i tested it again, after i woke up my HDD @ USB§-Case and tried ATTO it achieved 78MB/s and file transfer from SSD had seq-write @ 63MB/s. Strange thing, when i reboot PC and the case is plugged from the start (boot) it only gives 33MB/s (USB2-Mode), so i need to replug or send once to suspend.... see maybe a USB3-Controller-FW/driver problem....like in your case, so thats why i not recommend oyu USB3 for cache.

Please no trolls saying they have up to 400MB/s with HighSpeedUSB3...:D i know whats theoretically possible!
dustyny
Level 8
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Posts: 118
Joined: Sun Sep 02, 2012 12:54 am

Re: <1% read hit rate with Diablo 3

Post by dustyny »

Most of what you said is exactly right but there are some things that are making bad assumptions on.
High-Speed-USB3 is a bloated synonym for universally plugging in any device at average max speed 33MB/s, sure tehcnically the specification should provide more but never worked for me. Please not that higher speed can only be achieved when device and controller are synrchornised to an extra fiber-optical channel.
Sounds like you are making a broad statement based on a very limited amount of experience. I did built a parallel processing cluster using USB 3 flash drives in place of SSDs and we saw anywhere from 120-190MB Reads depending on file size. USB still has a massive overhead but we were able to address it in Linux (windows doesn't have the proper support).
My very old 5400rpm 120gb drive might be faster than your High-Speed-USB3 device.
This would only be true if you didn't have seek time to consider.. flash drives have much lower latency (since there is no head to move to find data) and a USB 3 flash from Patriot is MUCH faster than a 5400RPM spindle drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820220585
Anyhow stutters of games.. especially when not appearing to any other game... are a problem of GPU driver incompatibility or Games-GPU-engine-bottlenecke.
That is only one of hundreds of possible causes. There are simply to many configs to build for and though the game may work perfectly on one PC while another that is way more powerful will choke to death on it. Conflicts, driver issues, out of date OSs, antiviruses, spyware, viruses, flaky hardware, full drives, bad ram, this list can go on for ever..

That's why we have consoles it frees the developer up to focus on content and alleviates the pain for users when games don't perform properly on their specific config.
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