Now I know that this post is probably not very scientific. I could probably do better. For most battles before when run on my Hard Disk with a read speed of 30 MB/s, the game would slow down to a simulation speed of -5, with a unit cap of 1500, 4 Sorian AI, and myself, in a skirmish match.
After installing the game onto my new Solid State Drive, I upped the unit count to 2000. The simulation speed for most of the game stayed at 0, and for only a part of the match did it slow down to -1. 4 Sorian AI, and myself, in a skirmish match.
Anyways, just for the sake of a test, I ran an 80 KM map, with 7 Sorian AI, myself, skirmish. I cheated each team 1999 units near each other. Simulation speeds reduced to -10. Predictable, lol. But for a standard match, a Solid State Drive really does kick some serious butt. It does make me think that maybe Forged Alliance has some memory caching problems; in that it's not caching all the files necessary to play the game, and is accessing them during play continually from Hard Disk.
System Specs:
CPU: Intel i7 920 @ 3519 MHz, 4 cores, 4 threads, 167.7 MHz Bus Speed, QPI Link 3016 MHz. Core temps average on Prime95 after 2 hours, 72 degrees Celsius. For faster speeds with the 920, it is best to disable hyper-threading. The extreme core however has dynamic hyper-threading.
Physical Memory: 6 Gig DDR3 RAM.
Motherboard: MSI X58 Gold (MS-7522)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275, 1792 MB GDDR3 RAM
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)
Solid State Drive: OCZ RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD 50 GB. Read: Up to 540 MB/s. Write: Up to 480 MB/s. Sustained Write: Up to 400 MB/s . Random Write 4KB (Aligned): 75,000 IOPS.
Mod List:
Sorian AI
AI Ally Control
BlackOps Adv Command Units
BlackOps Global Icon Support Mod
BlackOps Naval Rebalance
BlackOps Special Weapons
BlackOps Unleashed
BlackOps Unleashed Balance Changes
Friend/Foe SAM
Supreme Shields
Total Annihilation Music
External Mod: Core Maximizer
If anybody else can test running the game on a similar Solid State Drive with similar specs to what I have, and post the results here, that would be great!|||Yeah, I did read somewhere that FA does a lot more HDD access than vanilla SupCom. Also, inefficient memory allocation is also a problem; an employee of GPG said that FA cached hundreds of MB of sound files during play, easily overloading the RAM on some computers once combined with everything else and forcing paging.|||I just recently migrated my system over to an SSD and have seen a similar result. One function that certainly benefits is the storage of the replay file - which is constantly writing to the disk. Likewise, the ongoing load of new blueprints and such during the game benefits as well.
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