Flav wrote on Jul 27^th, 2015 at 2:30pm:

False.

The graphics card makes a significant difference for game performance at a given resolution, especially with regards to Draw Distance.

Flav wrote on Jul 27^th, 2015 at 2:30pm:


Northbridge determined PCIe type and lane count.  Not the processor.

P4 was paired with the intel 8xx (which could support AGP slots) and 9xx chipsets. 
The Core2Duo was paired with the 9xx chipsets (2006 which offers PCIe 1.0), P3x/G3x/Q3x (late 2007, introduced PCIe 1.1)

Only one generation separates these two.  There was no change in the data rate or bandwidth between PCIe 1.0 and 1.1.

In the middle of 2008, the Intel B4x/G4x/Q4x chipsets introduced PCIe 2.0.  Core2Duo was also supported by these chipsets, but that's not what I tested with.

PCIe 2.0 doubled the theoretical transfer rate and bandwidth, however there were no graphics cards at that time that could exploit this increase.


Flav wrote on Jul 27^th, 2015 at 2:30pm:


PCIe bandwidth is relevant when the bus is transferring enough data to saturate it.

This is not happening in the OPs system, nor is it happening with low-end PCIe cards (notwithstanding the rare duck who has 3x 5770s in Crossfire/SLI), nor is it likely to occur in single user / single disk environments.


The machine I was using this weekend was manufactured in 2007, is "limited" to PCIe 1.1, and ran DDO nicely with that old 5770.

danzig138 wrote on Jul 27^th, 2015 at 4:42pm:

Yeah, works fine here and frees up half a gig of ram.  Gotta do it every toon switch though.

danzig138 wrote on Jul 27^th, 2015 at 4:42pm:


I bet that player was talking about TurbineClientLauncher.exe.  If you kill that process, the game goes down,  Killing Awesomium.dll works fine for me and ALWAYS has, even back when we first had the wonders of Awesomium pushed on us in 2012?  2013?  2014?

DropBear wrote on Jul 27^th, 2015 at 8:08pm:


I try to keep things in balance.

Frill Distance Disabled?

I believe (but have no data on it) that the 3 or 4 recent updates have increased the overall graphic texture size. 

I've got an AMD Radeon HD 6670, but only with 1 GB of vid memory.  Recently, I've noticed that if the Texture Cache Size isn't set below .75, I start banging the top of my graphics memory (viewable in Process Explorer).  Jumping into a new zone or just walking into an area with different textures would peg my system - but not CPU or Memory or Disk.  (Rig is 4 proc, 8 GB).

I do remember checking this a couple of years ago, and would never see my GPU memory above 70 or 80%, but without changing the cache size, I constantly see it at 100%. 

The interesting thing is that I've got my CPU fan tied to the CPU output, and when I'm lagging, I can hear the fan slow down indicating that something other than CPU is being maxed.

Would have to check with a vid card with more memory, but not on the roadmap.

Revaulting wrote on Sep 30^th, 2015 at 1:36am:


Maybe he's a former coal miner.......   

Or he used to shovel the coal into the furnace on steam trains?   

Wow, I can't believe this thread is still going! Or how much useful information it contains!

Anyway, long story short, the DX9 change fixed it for me, but I stopped playing again. I think I've just gotten back into it, though, and am probably going to try running off an SDHC or thumb drive just because it sounds neat!

I'd never buy an SSD, though. They may be reliable in the sense that they don't fail randomly, but they wear out crazily fast(a year, give or take, some friends had there's fail in ~ 9 months). While I haven't lately had a much better track record with physical drives, I can typically get 2-3 years out of them, longer, depending on how many fucks I have to give about the machine it's in(I've actually got some 10+ year old mechanical drives still trucking).

noamineo wrote on Oct 5^th, 2015 at 7:06pm:


I'd suggest not putting your page/swap file on your SSD.
The thrashing can chew thru the finite read/write cycles quickly.
Were they running TRIM enabled SSD's?

For my main, I run with an SSD for the OS and some software like DDO that benefits from read/write access.
The rest (like Microsoft bloatware) I put on a mechanical drive where speed is less important, but reliability is.

For my laptop, I went with a 32GB USB3 and copied DDO onto it and have never looked back.
USB3 sticks are cheap and simple.  Only caveat is you need a reasonably modern machine with USB3 ports to get this benefit.

totally wrote on Oct 6^th, 2015 at 5:06am:


Right pick.
I have a Samsung 840 PRO 256GB SSD for 2 years now and I'm using it as my main drive without any problems.

kum-gulp wrote on Oct 6^th, 2015 at 4:06pm:


They last at least as long and probably longer.

noamineo wrote on Oct 5^th, 2015 at 7:06pm:


One person's failure within 9 months is pretty far from being representative of the population.

For the past three generations, SSDs in general have been very reliable and very long lived.  It's been more than 5 years since reliability was a valid concern for SSDs.

Some brands and product lines within brands are more reliable than others with Intel generally being the most reliable and Intel's server line being the most most reliable.  The difference in reliability between the top brands (Intel, Samsung, Crucial, Micron, OCZ, etc.) is small enough to make them substitutable for each other for most applications.

There are web pages that suggest that SSDs won't tolerate frequent and sustained writes "because it'll wear our the electronics", however these articles are written before 2011 or lack any cited sources (that's code for "they're unsubstantiated opinion"). 

The articles that cite actual testing, objective metrics such as rates of return, or in the case of TechReport.Com perform actual 18 month long endurance test themselves indicate that SSDs will outlast manufacturers' estimated lifetimes not merely by "significant margins", but by multiples.

Quote:


I keep my mechanical drives spinning 24x7 throughout their life (server with 18 drives (boot mirror and 2x 8drive raid-5)). 
They usually live a bit longer than their 5 year warranties, and I find that when one fails, the others within the same array follow within a year. 

If you're only getting 3 years out of your mechanical drives, you might look for environmental influences that are shortening their lives.

If you've for a 10 year old drive "that's still trucking along" you should probably give some serious consideration to moving that machine's task to a VM on contemporary hardware.  Abstracting the OS from the hardware will make it much easier to keep the role that machine performs going as hardware continues to evolve.


DropBear wrote on Oct 6^th, 2015 at 1:58am:

USB3 is much faster than USB2, but for DDO USB2 is fast enough to provide a significant improvement over mechanical hard drives because DDO's bottleneck in most cases is random access time, not transfer rate.

Don't deny yourself faster instance changes because you "only have USB2".

Agreed. People who don't read up on pretty much anything before buying these days, what with the plethora of good info on the web, are missing a trick.