Lag issues just appeared in games on SSD

Hello everyone,

I have had my new Hailstorm II for about two months now.  My favorite game, and one I play with a large group is Arma 3.  When I got the new rig, I was playing with all settings maxed out and it was smooth as silk.

A few weeks ago that all of a sudden changed.  Now I get brief spurts of lag that remind me of resources loading from the drive.  I have an intel 750 series installed by DS when I got the PC.  Occasionally I will play, and the lag will get so bad it seems like the game has frozen.

The only games I have on the SSD are Arma 2, and Arma 3.  The rest of my games are on an HDD.  The Arma games have just developed this lag/stuttering.

I have verified all my drivers are up to date.  Never had any issues with anything other than the Logitech G930 headphones turning on and off every few seconds - but that's not hardly an uncommon thing with those.

I have checked the drive for errors, and there were none found.  I have trimmed the drive once a week since I got the PC.

Anyone have ANY idea what could have caused this to literally just come out of nowhere?  I am not having any issues in Windows (which is on the SSD) or on non SSD games.  Could it be some other issue than the SSD I might need to look into?

I'm at my wits end and really annoyed, as I am missing game time with my group.

I am running 2 GTI 980 Ti on the DC liquid cooling.  I did the Steam checks, and looked in task manager.  I am using a total of 17% of my 32GB memory, and a peak of 30% of my CPU. 

DS Control Center says the GPUs are at 30c on average, and the CPU is at 34c average when gaming.  I can verify with that other software though.

It hardly seems like the PC has ever really had to work too hard at all, and that's what surprised me when this just started happening.

Here are my specs in case that might help:

Processor: Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 5960X at 4.5GHz
Motherboard: ASUS X99 RAMPAGE V USB 3.1
System Memory: 32GB DDR4 2666MHz Corsair Dominator Platinum DHX
Power Supply: 1200W Corsair AX1200i
 SSD PCI-E Card (400GB Intel 750 Series)
Graphics Card(s): 2x SLI Dual (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB
Asus XB270UH G-Sync monitor

All liquid cooled (processor, GPUs) on Digital Storm's system - which rocks by the way.

Originally posted by bprat22 ............ Your rig should run pretty much anything. ....................

+1

That is one sweet system.

With your specs  the only blow-back a developer could try is...

Are the temps too high, causing throttling on cpu or gpu.....Yours are great.

Are resources too high, meaning are the cpu or gpu hitting 100% .  Task manager for cpu and ram and EVGA Precision for the cards can be used to check that.  Your ram and cpu and 980t's are top of the line.  Can't blame old hardware, bottleneck, etc.

Different gpu drivers... some can be the cause of various issues.

If its an online game, the servers and your connections can come into play. 

Most likely the answer will be a poorly optimized game or dated coding  that doesn't take advantage of what you have and there's nothing they can do. 

There's still the SSD question if the drive is slow in loading background, etc,.  Not sure Arma 3 would fall into that category.  Does the game load a lot of refresh scenes during game play or pre- load at start of game? 

If your other games play great, I'd say the game.   Lots of complaints online of it running great on one system but not so good on even better rigs.

If the game runs fine in single player but lousy online, then I would suspect the server.  maybe try another. 












Edited by bprat22 - 23 Dec 2015 at 10:01am

Congrats on excellent detective work. Thanks for posting the problem and fix. Hope you keep getting problem free use of your great system. I'm sure DS doesn't mind "shameless plugs"

Yes, the resource monitor on Task Manager. It's at the bottom of the screen. It's useful for monitoring the activity of your CPU, RAM and Disks.

This is what I was using:

http://028499.com/how-to-use-the-resource-monitor-in-windows-10/

It was pretty helpful. Without it, I am not sure I would have made the connection between Steam and my SSD.