Resident Evil 2 Remake: HDD can't load game zones at time and freezes

[Letrix]

I recently installed Resident Evil 2 Remake on my second drive, a new Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD. Game runs smooth without stuttering but in some zone, sometimes, they aren't loaded. When I try to access a new zone, by a door for example, there is nothing and I can see the other room that was already loaded. It stays at that for some seconds and then it load and I can enter that zone.
In one of the hallways, I saw a zombie standing in in front of a window that was frozen and after zone seconds, it appears outside the window and started breaking the window. Also, there are randomly freezes in-game for some seconds and the HDD it's like it stopped working.

I checked Task Manager and Resource Monitor. HDD usage is 100% when this happens. Resource Monitor tells me that re_chunk_000.pak is being read by RE2.exe at 3.5-4.5MB/s and by System at 8.5-12.5MB/s. As this file is 22.1GB, the HDD "can't" load it a time so some zones aren't loaded in game and get freezes. (In GTA V the game only freezes and sometimes crash because of this)

I have defragged my HDD (the game folder and all the disk for make sure), checked page file is enabled and checked RAM usage in-game. Page file weren't used at all and 6GB of RAM (like much) where used while playing and when the game got freeze. For this, I think HDD could be the responsible. I also ran a Crystal Disk Benchmark and these are the results:

I moved the game to my SSD and this stopped happening. It's the HDD problem.

Some pictures:

Spoiler

This isn't the only game where this happens. In GTA V also does (I made a thread, but I never played the game anymore) and in CSGO also but this mostly never does. Also, in other games happens but not to much.

Can this be solved?
Sorry for long post.

My system specs:
i5 3340
8GB RAM DDR3 1333MHZ
GTX 1050 Ti
Gigabyte H61M-S1
Crucial BX300 120GB SSD (where Windows is installed)
Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD (for game and media storage)
Userbenchmark bench

 

[silentbogo]

Can this be solved?

Nope. It's probably best to invest into a cheap 240-500GB SATA SSD just for games.
Also, your Seagate is actually slower. If you do an extensive test, you'll see that depending on the head position you can get somewhere between 70 and 120MB/s. Your bench result for sequential is only higher due to caching and small chunk size for testing. Random R/W is still abysmal.

 

[Edwired]

That a problem with normal hdd it cant keep up with the large data. I had a similar problem all i had to do is copy the the main folder to the ssd better loading time and quicker access time. As for me the freezing issue where i could walk into a room but get blocked by a non existed wall then the game will crashed to desktop. As for now that problem im having is related to ram timing as i have overclocked the ram all is needed is tweaking the timings. The game is awsome .

theres a few fixes that can help with slow hard drives is to disable search indexng and sysmain aka prefetch as both will bog down the system while accessing slow hard drive

 

[newtekie1]

I think the main issue is that System is also accessing the files, which I don't think should be happening. As said above, disabling indexing and superfetch might help remove the load from the System process, you can also try disabling anti-virus to see if that is causing the problem.

One solution might also to get an extremely cheap SSD, like another 120GB, and use PrimoCache to create an SSD cache for the hard drive. You'll likely notice a pretty big difference doing that.

 

[Argyr]

The game is using 6GB? are you playing on ultra? I'm playing on high settings with HBAO+ and it's only using 3.5GB

 

[Edwired]

As well theres another compressing software called compactgui.exe can be found by github handly to gain more space depend per game

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Is your ram a single 8GB module or 2x4GB?

 

[Letrix]

Is your ram a single 8GB module or 2x4GB?

2x4.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Only thing i can think of is maybe turning down the settings. Your system is basically the bare minimum system requirements for the game but 8GB of ram is debatable as no-one knows how many services and apps you have loaded on your PC before you decide you want to jump into a game.

Upgrade to an SSD and try to get 16GB of 1600mhz DDR3 - The ram shouldnt be hugely expensive on the pre-owned market.

is the ram a matched pair? Because if they are different then, that could also cause issues when gaming.

 

[Letrix]

Only thing i can think of is maybe turning down the settings. Your system is basically the bare minimum system requirements for the game but 8GB of ram is debatable as no-one knows how many services and apps you have loaded on your PC before you decide you want to jump into a game.

Upgrade to an SSD and try to get 16GB of 1600mhz DDR3 - The ram shouldnt be hugely expensive on the pre-owned market.

is the ram a matched pair? Because if they are different then, that could also cause issues when gaming.

Yes, they are different. My Windows installation is fresh and no software is running in background. The Ram isn't fully used in-game.
Setting config make no difference, only in FPS.
I'm actually running the game on the SSD and these problems are gone.

 

[Edwired]

Sure the bare spec for games can be wrong at times sure i can run resident evil 2 on xeon e5450 with asus gtx 750 ti oc as the stuttering is not a problem for me i can get 60fps most of the time and drop down to 40fps depending on place

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD (for game and media storage)

That drive should have better 4 KiB performance than that. I'd try replacing the cable and see if the numbers improve, if they do not, I'd try a different SATA port on the motherboard. If still no improvement, I'd try updating the SATA/chipset drivers. 90% says one of those three things will fix it. The cable/port is most likely experiencing high packet loss.

Here's my Seagate Exos 12 TB with matching settings:

 

[Metroid]

This happened to me many times and because of it, i lost countless of game hours, was checking disk usage and nothing on that regard, my hdd is a 8tb seagate, I dont think is the drive itself, I think is how re2 devs made the thing and at ratio of 20% which is high, this problem tends to happen if you leave your games on hdd. So if some of you play hardcore, change to an ssd cause if not then you will be pissed like me, a perfect game on hardcore close to the end of game, no saves at all and this thing happened. I haven't touched the game ever since.

Sure the bare spec for games can be wrong at times sure i can run resident evil 2 on xeon e5450 with asus gtx 750 ti oc as the stuttering is not a problem for me i can get 60fps most of the time and drop down to 40fps depending on place

Graphical slowdown is not an issue here cause you can always lower settings, now concerning the cpu you have no way to make it better if you have less than 4 cores. So dual core on this game is pretty much dead.

 

[Letrix]

That drive should have better 4 KiB performance than that. I'd try replacing the cable and see if the numbers improve, if they do not, I'd try a different SATA port on the motherboard. If still no improvement, I'd try updating the SATA/chipset drivers. 90% says one of those three things will fix it. The cable/port is most likely experiencing high packet loss.

Here's my Seagate Exos 12 TB with matching settings:
View attachment 116174

I tried to enable AHCI to see if improves performance. SSD gain a really good boost but HDD loses performance in sequential and some in 4K tests.

SSD AHCI:

HDD IDE:

HDD AHCI:

I will try to search for any driver to see if there is any improvement.

 

[newtekie1]

Use a bigger sample than 50MB, use the default 1GB at least.

 

[Letrix]

Use a bigger sample than 50MB, use the default 1GB at least.

 

[Edwired]

This happened to me many times and because of it, i lost countless of game hours, was checking disk usage and nothing on that regard, my hdd is a 8tb seagate, I dont think is the drive itself, I think is how re2 devs made the thing and at ratio of 20% which is high, this problem tends to happen if you leave your games on hdd. So if some of you play hardcore, change to an ssd cause if not then you will be pissed like me, a perfect game on hardcore close to the end of game, no saves at all and this thing happened. I haven't touched the game ever since.




Graphical slowdown is not an issue here cause you can always lower settings, now concerning the cpu you have no way to make it better if you have less than 4 cores. So dual core on this game is pretty much dead.

Ha the xeon e5450 is capable enough to play game s as well it alot less poeer hungry unlike some cpu nowadays. If i paired it to an asus gtx 1050ti oc expedition it will do better well at the moment cpu is overclocked 4.12ghz @ 1.240v.. i have already pushed the same cpu to 4.37ghz a few months ago i believe i can gain more headroom so yea 4 cores 4 threads does work in my case

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I tried to enable AHCI to see if improves performance. SSD gain a really good boost but HDD loses performance in sequential and some in 4K tests.

SSD AHCI:

HDD IDE:

HDD AHCI:

I will try to search for any driver to see if there is any improvement.

Did you try a different cable or port? Whenever I see terrible HDD performance, that's what usually fixes it.

SATA has error correction code. Packets that are bad get dropped which presents only as decreased performance. A 1 TB drive should be able to handle far more than 2 MB/s.

 

[Shambles1980]

i still use mechanical drives for near everything. i run most in raid pairs. and i also have a 250gb ssd as a cache. Works out ok.
I like to keep a good handfull of games installed, becuase nothing is worse than having to download a game you randomly decide you want to play.

havent had any issues yet and the strangest part is res 2 is installed on a non raid mechanical drive.

 

[John Naylor]

How old I that Seagate... we talking 7200.14 or ancient 7200.10 or older. we blind tested a 72001.12 against SSDs and SSHDs with 5 users for 6 weeks .... no one noticed the difference.

Note the recommended system requirements:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: WINDOWS® 7, 8.1, 10 (64-BIT Required)
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-3770 or AMD FX™-9590 or better
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon™ RX 480 with 3GB VRAM
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 26 GB available spac

Asked my youngest son ... he's playing it with a 2600k, 2 x 8 GB and S Seagate SSHD @ 1440 with no issues.

 

[Letrix]

CS:GO and Apex Legends also stutters, this last a lot.
This started happening when I installed the SSD.

 

[Edwired]

Then stuttering could be related to ram timings or drivers or something bogging in the background. As for hard drive it depends on the cache level most preferrable 64mb or higher is better anything below 32mb is slower takes longer to access have you tried disable shadow cache in resident evil 2 to see if the problem goes away?

 

[Letrix]

Then stuttering could be related to ram timings or drivers or something bogging in the background. As for hard drive it depends on the cache level most preferrable 64mb or higher is better anything below 32mb is slower takes longer to access have you tried disable shadow cache in resident evil 2 to see if the problem goes away?

With everything in Low and with Shadow Cache disabled, it feels that the game runs at lower framerate. Still freezing but only for a few seconds.

 

[Edwired]

Have you used msi afterburner to display the fps as for me most of the settings are on low as well 1600x900, 60hz, variable fps and vsync on as i can get 60fps most of the time and dips down to 35fps depends on area as i got to nest lab and it stuck there found an out of bound wall which i ended up in a black hole and non existed wall in one of the doors before the game crashed again which could me either the cpu or ram is unstable. I get stuttering most of the time as the game is accessing the pak file as it a massive file. I may say it could be nvidia driver that could be lacking resident evil 2 profile. What is your system spec?

Here a link if it any help
http://frondtech.com/resident-evil-...-guide-fix-lag-fps-drops-bugs-and-stuttering/

 

[Letrix]

Have you used msi afterburner to display the fps as for me most of the settings are on low as well 1600x900, 60hz, variable fps and vsync on as i can get 60fps most of the time and dips down to 35fps depends on area as i got to nest lab and it stuck there found an out of bound wall which i ended up in a black hole and non existed wall in one of the doors before the game crashed again which could me either the cpu or ram is unstable. I get stuttering most of the time as the game is accessing the pak file as it a massive file. I may say it could be nvidia driver that could be lacking resident evil 2 profile. What is your system spec?

Here a link if it any help
http://frondtech.com/resident-evil-...-guide-fix-lag-fps-drops-bugs-and-stuttering/

It's only feeling. The game runs at 60FPS most the time. Entering a new zone drop FPS to almost 45 but no freezes. Back to high settings (Shadow Cache turned off) it stutter. In the first encounter with William Birkin I have times where the game freezes for a few seconds.

My system specs:
i5 3340
8GB RAM DDR3 1333MHZ
GTX 1050 Ti
Gigabyte H61M-S1
Crucial BX300 120GB SSD (where Windows is installed).

This isn't exclusive for RE2 Remake. Also happens in GTA V, CSGO, Apex Legends and other titles.