On my new mobo/cpu/memory upgrade I decided to test the 3d game playing ability with Unreal 2.
The frame rate was perfect, but every now and then it would pause for about 5 seconds.
Then I downloaded and ran (and paid for - flipping pointless it turns out) 3dmark 2003. In two of the game benchmarks (but not the flying one) the same thing happened.
I thought about defraging the drive, but considered fragmentation unlikely to be the cause. I went into defrag and it told me the drive was 58% fragmented :eek:
It also showed me which were the most fragmented files (cool) by showing how many parts there are of the files. Turns out very near the top of the list were large files belonging to Unreal 2 and 3dmark. in about 200 parts each. So I ran the defragmentation.
This seems to have solved the pausing problem. I would have thought a game would shove all it needs into memory before running. The pausing suggests it reads data from the HD concurrently with running the game. Is this true?
Why has 3dmark 2003 got so FEW demos/benchmark parts??? I remember 3dmark 2002 had FAR more in it than this!