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[HOWTO - RAMDRIVE] Increasing SWTOR System Performance


Lemon_King

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Erm, where is?

 

Scrolling down you should see a folder called SWTOR, go in it and Copy the settings folder to INSTALLLOCATION\Star Wars-The Old Republic\SWTOR\

 

Installlocation located?

 

 

Edit: O wait am I a durp do you mean just copy to where it's located in your C drive? Man i'm tired...

Edited by goobinator
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That is correct, sorry about making this a tad cryptic. :(

 

Hey no worries man, it was fun tinkering around with it ^w^ And thanks for popping this up, my usual frame rate was in the 20's now it's high 30's to mid 40's. Still not so great, I know, but it's one hell of an improvement!

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Erm, where is?

 

Scrolling down you should see a folder called SWTOR, go in it and Copy the settings folder to INSTALLLOCATION\Star Wars-The Old Republic\SWTOR\

 

Installlocation located?

 

 

Edit: O wait am I a durp do you mean just copy to where it's located in your C drive? Man i'm tired...

 

INSTALLLOCATION is just a generic value, since each users system might be different.

 

So example:

 

I have 3 Hard drives

C:

E:

F:

 

 

When I installed Star wars the old republic I selected my F: Drive. I also have a folder on that drive name "Games".

 

 

The complete install path is : F:\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\SWTOR\

So in this example

 

INSTALLLOCATION = F:\Games\

 

The completed string looks like : F:\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\SWTOR\

 

 

For others it could be any combo of C:\<Directory>.

 

 

In Windows 7 if yo navigate to the folder you want and click on the address bar it will display the path. This is what you would want to copy.

 

 

This is by far one of the easiest ways that I've found to increase my performance with this game. Ram is cheap right now.

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While the instructions looked simple enough, i don't think i understand what issue this is fixing...

 

Will this help with load times to planets? Performance during wz's or on the fleet? CPU load?

 

Sorry if this was obvious and I missed something... :cool:

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I might be off here, but it looks like it's moving the game's DiskCacheArena from the hard drive to a much faster RAM drive. What exactly and how much is being written to and read from that cache I couldn't tell you but, it should be much faster in RAM.

 

The only drawback I can see, assuming you have sufficient memory not to tax your system, is that the cache is being moved to volatile memory and disappears every time you reboot the computer. That means the cache will have to be restarted from scratch every time you play after a reboot, and that translates to longer load times early on in your game play session. If you play for hours on end, using that cache for longer periods, you'll probably see better performance the longer you play.

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That cache is cleared after each session when you exit (Can take quite some time on some systems with low memory), and I've tested loading with and without it at app start. Barely adds a few seconds to the initial load as the 1gig cache file is created.
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Not a problem when it is this fast. ^^ And ill just replace them with newer stuff late this year. Or whenever revodrive 4x2 comes out.

 

I'm running 2 revoerdrives 3x2's in stripe atm. Works great but was a ***** to setup. Though down side is I need to leave computer logged out and on for garbage collection until trim support is enabled for native scsi

 

 

 

What is your whole setup like?

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Mmmmm...

Do you think this would help push a little extra performance out of a Macbook Pro running windows 7 through Bootcamp? Currently SWTOR is playable on it, but it's choppy, and frustrating in pvp.

 

I've been looking for ways to increase performance on this thing until I get to building my new PC.

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Appreciate this post because I know nothing about symbolic links, and because my boot drive is an SSD but I didn't feel like putting the full 20+gb of SWTOR on there. The game is on an HDD, so at least now I can try putting DiskCacheArena on the SSD and see if that squeezes out any additional performance.

 

Quick question (which I might be about to answer myself...) You mention this:

 

Right now this focuses on placing DiskCacheArena and 2 buffer files DiskCacheStatic / DiskCacheStream on a RamDrive

 

But you only mention DiskCacheArena specifically in the symlinks. You also move "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\SWTOR" around with symlinks, yet that only appears to hold a handful of tiny INI files on my machine.

 

I'm guessing DiskCacheStatic and DiskCacheStream are created in that folder after the game is launched, and only remain while it's running? (Otherwise I'm confused on both counts: why move that folder around, and where do the other two files come in?) If that's the case: great, since C: is already on the SSD and I don't need to bother fiddling with that.

 

 

(Still not sure I understand the difference between the /J and /D flags for mklink but, like I said, I'm a noob to this.)

Edited by overfloater
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But you only mention DiskCacheArena specifically in the symlinks. You also move "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\SWTOR" around with symlinks, yet that only appears to hold a handful of tiny INI files on my machine.

 

I'm guessing DiskCacheStatic and DiskCacheStream are created in that folder after the game is launched, and only remain while it's running? (Otherwise I'm confused on both counts: why move that folder around, and where do the other two files come in?) If that's the case: great, since C: is already on the SSD and I don't need to bother fiddling with that.

 

 

(Still not sure I understand the difference between the /J and /D flags for mklink but, like I said, I'm a noob to this.)

DiskCacheStatic and DiskCacheStream can't have a direct symlink due to the engine creating the files and deleting them once used which would break the links, so we use a directory link to get around the issue.

 

As for testing I've left those 2 files off the ramdrive before with DiskCacheArena in the RamDrive.

The performance difference was noticeable which is why I stuck them into the drive itself via a directory symlink.

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DiskCacheStatic and DiskCacheStream can't have a direct symlink due to the engine creating the files and deleting them once used which would break the links, so we use a directory link to get around the issue.

 

As for testing I've left those 2 files off the ramdrive before with DiskCacheArena in the RamDrive.

The performance difference was noticeable which is why I stuck them into the drive itself via a directory symlink.

 

Kind of wish there was a check box for this for those with more memory. Would be nice to have the game do it automatically

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You have to remember even if you have the game installed on an SSD the buffer files are still on the windows install drive unless you junction the folder.

 

Slightly different setup from mine.

Windows is a standard HDD, along with my Applications drive.

My SSD is reserved for things like WoW and SWTOR.

Due to SWTOR slamming my SSD (before and after the junction/symlink) by moving and deleting data so much during gameplay I looked into setting up an Ramdrive.

 

I also run Windows and such on mechanical drives and games on solid state drives. However, I have no hitching problems. I run a RAID 0 of three Velociraptors for Windows and programs, and a RAID 0 of three OCZ Vertex 2 SSDs for games. I get 692.8MB/s average transfer rate from the SSD array (699.7 max and 635.5 min). Those are SandForce-based SSDs so they don't suffer from the buffer underrun problems of previous gen SSDs.

 

Since 600-700MB/s transfer is super smooth, and latest gen SandForce 2 SSDs hit 500MB/s, a single, newer SSD should be more than plenty. This process only helps older gen SSDs and HDDs.

Edited by cipher_nemo
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I only have 4 Gigs of RAM, do you think I might get some better performance with this?

 

I have:

Dell Inspiron 518

Windows Vista Home Premium

Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2200 @ 2.20GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz

4GB RAM

300 GB HD with 170GB Free Space.

ATI Radeon HD 4300 1GB

 

I also already have a program called Virtual Clone Drive. Does this program do an entirely different thing than the two you suggest?

Edited by Zebular
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Yup you do, just got everything figured out myself after finding this topic last night. So for the default installation route, it should look like this:

 

 

mkdir T:\SWTOR\swtor

mklink /J "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\SWTOR" "T:\SWTOR\"

mklink /J "T:\SWTOR\swtor\settings" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\swtor\settings"

mklink "C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\swtor\DiskCacheArena" "T:\DiskCacheArena"

 

The OP doesn't say this, but you have to delete the DiskCacheArena file from the original directory in order to create the junction (just like you deleted the SWTOR folder in your Users\Local directory). Otherwise you will get an error saying the file already exists.

Edited by Rion_Starkiller
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With ImDrive this is a bit easier, just stick it in the boot batch file.

imdisk -a -s 2G -m T: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y"
mkdir T:\SWTOR\swtor
mklink /J "T:\SWTOR\swtor\settings" "INSTALLLOCATION\Star Wars-The Old Republic\SWTOR\retailclient\settings"

 

What's the boot batch file in Win7? In the DOS days it was config.sys, I believe. Right now I've created a TXT file with my specific command lines so that I can run CMD and paste every time I boot up. Win7 is still new-ish to me.

Edited by Rion_Starkiller
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What's the boot batch file in Win7? In the DOS days it was config.sys, I believe.

There is no direct boot batch command file, you'll need to use Task Scheduler.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/make-vista-launch-uac-restricted-programs-at-startup-with-task-scheduler/616

 

The OP doesn't say this, but you have to delete the DiskCacheArena file from the original directory in order to create the junction (just like you deleted the SWTOR folder in your Users\Local directory). Otherwise you will get an error saying the file already exists.
Its in the OP, right under it too.
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