Best gaming settings I've found

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Dunring
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Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Dunring »

Hey gang,

Well after trying 100's of setting combinations I wanted to share the best settings I've found for smooth and fast gaming. I have an Evo 960 boot NVME drive, and a pair of Crucial SSD's. I tried stripe sets, playing games in all combinations and this is the best setup I found and staying with.

One the NVME drive (just 256gb) I put everything like 4GB swap, browser cache, temp and all things Windows on it. Disable windows write cache, and set Primocache to 4GB (have 16GB ram) with read/write, 4k sectors, 300ms delay using buffer setting. Then I installed all games to the SSD drive and play from there. This way the game drive is completely available for just the game (I play Destiny 2, Warcraft, Star Wars Battlefront 2, and Battlefield 4). The operating system is handled by the cache and it's by far the fastest and smoothest setup. Game load times are less than a second difference from playing off the NVME, but the main thing these days is waiting to login for a multiplayer game, so 1 second isn't an issue for me. The fun is playing from an SSD that's completely free to do one thing, and the overhead of 4k sectors in Primocache doesn't cause any problem for the CPU, even during writes after 5 mins it doesn't go over 80 percent.

I have a I5 Kabylake at 5.1ghz, RAM overclocked to 3333mhz, and a 1080TI at 2100mhz all the time (since it won't go over 50c) on air cooling for everything. So happy with the consistency using Primocache setup this way. If you have 8GB of ram you could easily set it to 512MB or 1GB and write only and get similar results I'm sure. Cache the system drive and play off an SSD that's not being interupted by anything except the game you're playing. Hope you try it, works great :)
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Re: Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Support »

Thank you very much for sharing your experience!
It's very useful :!:
Dunring
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Re: Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Dunring »

Sure thing, also to size the time delay to write, I used HWmonitor and increased the time but checked to see when it did a write in games, that the CPU utilization never hit 100% on a write. 5 mins is best, if it spent 10 mins before a write then it would spike to 100% and I'd feel it in game, but at 80% CPU usage in game during a write, you don't even notice. 4GB is the sweet spot for a 51% hit rate.

Also the "burst mode" on the Samsung 256gb NVME is only 4 gigs before it goes down to 250MB/sec, the bigger capacities have a bigger buffer, but on the small one extending it with Primocache basically makes sure it never hits that wall, if anyone does a lot of copying and the drive buffer keeps running out on them during big copies, you could size the cache accordingly so it's in NVME speeds all the time. The Samsung cache software won't work with the 256GB version, so this really helps if you didn't know about the limitations of the 960 EVO 256gig.
Dunring
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Re: Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Dunring »

Here's the best settings I found so far. A 50% hit rate off the boot drive basically makes games so smooth it feels like you're playing at a much higher framerate than you actually are. Pile everything (swap file, apps, shader cache, etc.) and 6gigs is good, but 4gb is good too if you have a lot of other things going on like browsers open in game. The lesson I learned was you'll never get a good cache rate on a 90gb installed game, but you've got plenty to make the boot drive smooth as glass if your games are installed on a second SSD. Hmm image link doesn't seem to display, so here's both.

https://imgur.com/a/172dTA5

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Jaga
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Re: Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Jaga »

You'd get a much higher hitrate if your L1 was larger. I also find the "Intelligent deferred write mode" to be superior to native, when caching for daily use and gaming.

I just rebooted my gaming system last night so numbers aren't as high/large as they'd normally be. I usually float around 95% hit rate, zero urgent writes, fully populated L1. Many of the games I play are larger than 10GB, so the size of the L1 can accommodate their data sets well. Fallout 4 (fully modded w/4k textures) weighs in at over 40GB, but due to not all of it being used at the same time, it still fits in the cache.

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Dunring
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Re: Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Dunring »

Hey,

I tried larger but even with only Destiny 2 running if I open 5 Firefox tabs to look up a quest while a game is running I get swapping going on or low memory errors with 6 or 8 gigs on the cache. Six wasn't too bad but the hit rate wasn't any higher than at 4. With every game update it seems they get more piggy about RAM if it's available. I'm going to try SetSystemFileCacheSize.exe to see if limiting the Windows cache will help, all non essential services and apps aren't running. In theory all games today run in 8gig total, I'll also revisit disabling the swap file but half the people I talk to insist keeping it on or disabling it...
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Jaga
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Re: Best gaming settings I've found

Post by Jaga »

Dunring wrote: Sat Jan 12, 2019 6:28 amI'll also revisit disabling the swap file but half the people I talk to insist keeping it on or disabling it...
That usually depends on your total RAM and the software in use. With 4GB I would absolutely leave it on. With 8GB I'd still leave it on, but reduce the size significantly. With 16 you can safely turn it off if you want, and any more than that it becomes wasteful.

However some software (if memory serves the Adobe family of professional products) have historically relied on swap being available. If you just use office products, browsers, and games, then you can probably reduce the swap file to ~1 or 2 GB and make it static in size. You could turn it off, but with an 8GB setting for Primocache, I'd have some in reserve for the OS. With my 64GB gaming/work rig, I have it set to 8GB, but I -do- use Adobe products, and have a rather large cache setting. I've even increased it to a 40GB L1 at times for certain software.

Most games will run fine in 8GB, you're right. But if they see more they can try and use it, even at the cost of system swapping. And that discounts any mention of memory leaks, which can and do occur. Browsers are rather memory inefficient, in that (like with Chrome), they will open new instances for each tab and ignore their own memory use. Efficiency isn't something they pride themselves on.

The only good way I've found to watch hit rate for a particular set of software is to reset the cache contents, reboot, use the software/system repeatedly for several days, and write down your hit rate. Then change the cache size, clear it, reboot, and watch it for several more days. Just a few hours with different cache sizes is a poor indicator of performance, unfortunately.

As a sidenote for gaming systems - 8GB isn't suitable anymore on a new build. I would consider 16GB to be a minimum installation nowadays, with 32GB for a system using Primocache in a "good configuration". 16 is almost too small to fit games weighing in at 10-30GB into, along with the OS files, browser cache, etc. It's why I usually double the RAM on any system I build, so that I can be confident it will run whatever I throw at it, and last that much longer. When I rebuild the current rig (64GB) in another 2-3 years, I'll probably go for 128GB or even 256, and may even end up using a server motherboard (their quality is unmatched).
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