PC game data streaming

[swaaye]

Is it possible to stream off the HDD on a PC running Windows without causing huge stuttering in games? I ask this because it's rather obvious Oblivion tries to do just this and fails miserably. Even with a Raptor and 3 gigs of RAM, the game is always stuttering whenever it is doing its stream loading.

And most PC games seem to try to precache/preload everything right at the start.

I constantly see benchmarks of hard disks, with CPU usage tested. You'd think that if the drive is using 5% CPU to do its thing that it would not impact games trying to stream data. Consoles seem to have much more luck at streaming.

 

[AlNom]

Hm... it seems to happen with Halo 2 Vista too, though I have seen the memory usage of that spike up to 1GB which is just really odd.

The best way on PC is probably just to load the level in sections. Quake IV did this, and so did Halo:CE.

 

[Davros]

i know in morrowind you could tweak the streaming settings
maybe oblivion has something similar

 

[swaaye]

It just occurred to me that Test Drive Unlimited on PC actually does stream quite well..... It has been a while since I played it but it certainly was much smoother than Oblivion and has a similar open world style.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Is it possible to stream off the HDD on a PC running Windows without causing huge stuttering in games? I ask this because it's rather obvious Oblivion tries to do just this and fails miserably. Even with a Raptor and 3 gigs of RAM, the game is always stuttering whenever it is doing its stream loading.

And most PC games seem to try to precache/preload everything right at the start.

I constantly see benchmarks of hard disks, with CPU usage tested. You'd think that if the drive is using 5% CPU to do its thing that it would not impact games trying to stream data. Consoles seem to have much more luck at streaming.

Im not sure whats going on there but I don't get stuttering in my Oblivion and thats just with a regular HDD and a ton of mods. It does pause slightely when loading a new area but so do the console versions (and for much longer at that).

 

[swaaye]

Whenever it changes out LOD (or loads a new cell I guess), it stutters a bit. It's obviously related to hard disk access. I have 3 GB RAM. This is just the engine doing its thing.

 

[Davros]

Swayee talking about test drive unlimited i had huge corruption with that game big black triangles filling up large parts of the screen, blades of grass and foliage being rendered 20 times normal size in the middle of the road and mahor screen flickering then i upgraded the cpu from a 3ghz northwood to a q6600 and it now works perfectly same vid card + same drivers - very strange......

 

[pjbliverpool]

Whenever it changes out LOD (or loads a new cell I guess), it stutters a bit. It's obviously related to hard disk access. I have 3 GB RAM. This is just the engine doing its thing.

Ah if your just talking about when a new cell is loaded then a little stuttering is actually very good. The console versions actually pause with a loading indicator for several seconds at the same points.

On my PC with a regular HDD and 2GB I get about a 1 second pause (I removed the loading indicator).

 

[Rainbow Man]

Oblivion isn't actually streaming. It loads terrain in chunks just like Morrowind did, it just loads things a bit smoother that's all.

WoW streams pretty seamlessly. Even when you're flying.

There's nothing technical that prevents PC games from streaming smoothly.. PC harddrives are very fast after all compared to console optical drives. It's just a programming thing really.
Peace.