Game lags when there's high disk activity

[Shreyas Tripathy]

It might be a dumb question but I am not sure what is causing the issue so I am going to post all my observations here and hopefully you guys can help me narrow down problem.

 

My laptop's specs: GTX 1050Ti, Intel i5-8300H, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD+1TB SSHD (Asus ROG Strix GL503GE)

 

I used to be able to play Cities: Skylines without any lags and with a decent FPS (around 45-60) but of late, since a few of the most recent Windows 10 updates, my game takes ages to load. Earlier, my saved game used to take a little under 4-5 minutes to load but now it takes substantially longer. Once it took over 13 minutes to load. And even after loading, the game doesn't run smoothly and ever time I pan to a new part of the map, it take a lot of time to render it. During all of this, I noticed that my disk usage light stay on and this happens every time I pan to a new location on the map. After noticing this, I added a mod that shows details while loading assets of the game initially. On my Macbook Pro (2018), about 200 assets get loaded per second while on my Asus, the rate is about 8 assets per second. So, I reinstalled the game on the SSD (it was earlier installed on the SSHD) and it didn't improve the loading times by that much. Now, the asset loading rate was about 15 assets per second.

 

I also noticed that the RAM usage reaches the limit (goes upto nearly 6GB and then drops back down)

 

In order to be sure that it is a disk related issue and not graphics-related issue, I fired up some graphic intensive games and they worked fine. While testing it with GTA V, the game ran just like before, but after a while (an hour or so), the same lag started showing up when I visited densely populated or busy areas of the map. The same spike happened with the disk usage.

 

TL; DR

 

1. Cities:Skylines lags. Load times are atrocious. Never had this issue earlier, cropped up in the last month or so.

2. Assets load very slow. On SSHD: 8/sec. On SSD: 15/sec

  2.1 Assets load at a rate of 200/sec on my Macbook Pro

  2.2 Disk usage goes to max

  2.3 RAM limit also hits

3. No such problems while playing games like Oxygen Not Included, Mini Metro (duh), 60 Seconds, GTA V

  3.1 In GTA V, similar lag appears when at a densely populated area of a map. Disk usage hits max

 

Is it a RAM related issue? If so, I have actually ordered another stick of 8GB RAM and will be installing it soon

Is it a disk related issue? If so, why did it crop up all of a sudden? And how do I fix it?

[Turtle Rig]

39 minutes ago, Shreyas Tripathy said:

It might be a dumb question but I am not sure what is causing the issue so I am going to post all my observations here and hopefully you guys can help me narrow down problem.

 

My laptop's specs: GTX 1050Ti, Intel i5-8300H, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD+1TB SSHD (Asus ROG Strix GL503GE)

 

I used to be able to play Cities: Skylines without any lags and with a decent FPS (around 45-60) but of late, since a few of the most recent Windows 10 updates, my game takes ages to load. Earlier, my saved game used to take a little under 4-5 minutes to load but now it takes substantially longer. Once it took over 13 minutes to load. And even after loading, the game doesn't run smoothly and ever time I pan to a new part of the map, it take a lot of time to render it. During all of this, I noticed that my disk usage light stay on and this happens every time I pan to a new location on the map. After noticing this, I added a mod that shows details while loading assets of the game initially. On my Macbook Pro (2018), about 200 assets get loaded per second while on my Asus, the rate is about 8 assets per second. So, I reinstalled the game on the SSD (it was earlier installed on the SSHD) and it didn't improve the loading times by that much. Now, the asset loading rate was about 15 assets per second.

 

I also noticed that the RAM usage reaches the limit (goes upto nearly 6GB and then drops back down)

 

In order to be sure that it is a disk related issue and not graphics-related issue, I fired up some graphic intensive games and they worked fine. While testing it with GTA V, the game ran just like before, but after a while (an hour or so), the same lag started showing up when I visited densely populated or busy areas of the map. The same spike happened with the disk usage.

 

TL; DR

 

1. Cities:Skylines lags. Load times are atrocious. Never had this issue earlier, cropped up in the last month or so.

2. Assets load very slow. On SSHD: 8/sec. On SSD: 15/sec

  2.1 Assets load at a rate of 200/sec on my Macbook Pro

  2.2 Disk usage goes to max

  2.3 RAM limit also hits

3. No such problems while playing games like Oxygen Not Included, Mini Metro (duh), 60 Seconds, GTA V

  3.1 In GTA V, similar lag appears when at a densely populated area of a map. Disk usage hits max

 

Is it a RAM related issue? If so, I have actually ordered another stick of 8GB RAM and will be installing it soon

Is it a disk related issue? If so, why did it crop up all of a sudden? And how do I fix it?

Blame it on Uncle Billy... Did you get 1903 update ?  Also why should your HDD or SSD work while your playing.  Are you doing something in the background or something on that nature.

[Shreyas Tripathy]

1 minute ago, Turtle Rig said:

Blame it on Uncle Billy... Did you get 1903 update ?  Also why should your HDD or SSD work while your playing.  Are you doing something in the background or something on that nature.

Yes, I get get the 1903 update ... *shudder* Don't tell me that is causing the issue

 

Also, no. I don't have anything running in the background. But, the disk usage light stays on steadily while I pan or zoom-in while playing Cities: Skylines. I thought it was loading/fetching assets or something.

[Turtle Rig]

7 hours ago, Shreyas Tripathy said:

Yes, I get get the 1903 update ... *shudder* Don't tell me that is causing the issue

 

Also, no. I don't have anything running in the background. But, the disk usage light stays on steadily while I pan or zoom-in while playing Cities: Skylines. I thought it was loading/fetching assets or something.

Can you please tell me the last time things were good.  You have 2 options.  DDU and also you can system restore to a previous date it was working fine.  You won't lose any day or anything,, It just takse you back to your desired time.  Note apps installed in this period won't show up and sh*T.

[Lipe123]

I wouldn't be that quick to resort to blaming windows. 

 

Those 128Gb+1Tb SSHD drives are amazingly bad, absolutely terribad. Our company had 5 or 6 of them installed and every single one of them had the SSD portion completely die and disappear after about 3 years. Or constantly blue screened windows as the ssd portion got close to end of life.

I don't know if the trim stuff wasn't working or if their write counts are just really bad but those mixed drives are from the devil.

 

It's very "normal" for a game to stutter if it has to load texture data from a hdd while playing, it literally cannot continue playing until that data is loaded into the ram and hdd's are not amazing at getting stuff into the ram really quick.

I'd very strongly urge you to look into an affordable 1Tb SSD instead, if for no other reason than to avoid a lot of data loss.

[Shreyas Tripathy]

11 hours ago, Lipe123 said:

I wouldn't be that quick to resort to blaming windows. 

 

Those 128Gb+1Tb SSHD drives are amazingly bad, absolutely terribad. Our company had 5 or 6 of them installed and every single one of them had the SSD portion completely die and disappear after about 3 years. Or constantly blue screened windows as the ssd portion got close to end of life.

I don't know if the trim stuff wasn't working or if their write counts are just really bad but those mixed drives are from the devil.

 

It's very "normal" for a game to stutter if it has to load texture data from a hdd while playing, it literally cannot continue playing until that data is loaded into the ram and hdd's are not amazing at getting stuff into the ram really quick.

I'd very strongly urge you to look into an affordable 1Tb SSD instead, if for no other reason than to avoid a lot of data loss.

Are you suggesting that both the SSD and the HDD started having read issues at the same time? Sounds pretty unlikely because, I installed the game on the SSD and even that didn't improve the situation by much.

 

Yes, I agree that the read/write speeds of my current setup is nothing brag about. But the reliability issue seems too early to crop up. My laptop is about 9-10 months old