Modder ‘Archost’ has released a must-have mod for everyone who currently plays Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition or Starfield.
This plugin basically makes these three Bethesda games use OS’ file cache, which leads to less disk access over time. According to the modder, owners of both SSDs and HDDs will benefit from it. Since this plugin reduces the disk calls, it can lead to less freezing and fewer sound drops.
Archost shared some additional tech details about this plugin.
“On Windows, we use “CreateFile()“. When you access a file or a device, and this function gives you some options to play for specific purposes.
The game “Starfield” which uses “Creation Engine” has a dedicated binary reader like many other game engines. This binary reader part reads files from filesystems.Unlike other major game engines, Starfield uses the following flags for CreateFile(): FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED, FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING, and FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN.
Okay. However, there is a problem with “FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING”. This flag tells the OS not to leave file on memory after it is read.Workloads in Games are pretty predictable. Like character animation, footstep sounds, textures or anything soon will eventually be used again and will not change. Without the file cache, the system must read from disks whenever needed, which results in a considerable performance impact on slow drives like HDD.
If Starfield is installed on SSD, this plugin may improves I/O-related performance but not much. Less disk I/O, better performance.”
Since this plugin can improve overall performance, we highly recommend using it. In theory, it could resolve or at least minimize Starfield’s stuttering issues. So, those interested can go ahead and download it from the following links.
Skyrim Special Edition Disk Cache Enabler
Fallout 4 Disk Cache Enabler
Starfield Disk Cache Enabler
To give you an idea, in Fallout 4, this mod can reduce the average disk access calls per second from 1800 to 200. The modder also claims that the performance increase is even higher in Starfield.
Speaking of Starfield, Bethesda released yesterday a new patch for it. As we’ve stated, this patch fixed an upscaling issue that could result in some blurry textures. Now while the update fixed the mipmap issues, it did not fix moiré. As such, the game now suffers from extreme shimmering on some textures. So, PC gamers will have to use this mod in order to make the textures look the way they were supposed to.
Be also sure to check out our Best Skyrim Mods article.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I noticed no change apart from it freezing for a bit when saving and opening the save file menu. Mod removed and everything works fine again
Totally unrelated, but I think I found on Steam the game with the longest name ever. 🤣
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ddef81713c3abe15873e39611ef194ffabaa51fa2934b54f0f815ed6621ef9cf.png
Funny stuff.
I went and took a look on Steam and this silly game is selling for $50.
And the listed Recommended System Requirements:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: 2.2 GHz speed or better
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1920×1080
Storage: 2 GB available space.
I hope everyone has 64GB of RAM and their pagefile turned on… They’re going to run out of RAM fast allowing Windows to cache game asset files like that…
Is Windows really that dumb?
Linux has this nifty feature called MGLRU (Multi-Gen. Least Recently Used) developed by Google which keeps track on every file inside RAM and evicts those which haven’t been accessed for a period of time, thus automatically making room for newly requested files from disk on-demand.
It’s what allows even bottom-of-the-barrel ultra-cheap Android smartphones from China to work decently with a recent enough Linux kernel that has the above feature.
And even Valve has activated MGLRU on SteamOS 3.5, which will help the Steam Deck deal with RAM-eating games going forward on its shared 16 GB of RAM, where the GPU side can dynamically use upto 8 GB of it.
Just the usual benefit of the open-source development model, where a feature coded by one company can help many others as well, without having to re-invent the wheel all the time…
Is this the year 2001? People still think Linux is useful for domestic use?!
useful if you know the techicnal details but its not what I’d call user friendly for gaming, although its improved much on what it used to be.
I work with it for more than 20 years now. It sucks as a domestic use system.
What you’re talking about is called paging on Windows, and has existed since at least Windows 2000 if I remember right. Windows 10 actually introduced a new advancement where it attempts to compress memory pages when free RAM is low to try to reduce the need to page things out of RAM, because paging is detrimental to performance.
As for the RAM caching, on Windows that’s called “Standby Memory”, and both Windows and Linux can be really bad about releasing that cached memory quickly enough to prevent problems. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked away from a Linux system and come back to it essentially frozen with all of its memory in use (a problem I could prevent with a CRON job that cleared the RAM cache every 15 minutes or so), which is honestly significantly worse than the inconvenience of system slowdowns from paging that happens on Windows (how’s that for “the usual benefit of the open-source development model”?)…
There’s a reason why games on Windows don’t fill the Standby Memory. Once the RAM is full, things start paging, which means system slowdowns. This can make the rest of the system so unresponsive that it can become detrimental even to playing the game, and no amount of caching sh*t is going to solve that problem.
Personally I wish it was possible to turn these stupid caching technologies off. Yes they do improve performance, however I often find them to be more trouble than they are worth. I absolutely hate that my OS is automatically wasting RAM that I have for virtual machines and games, and which I didn’t buy just for it to cache a ton of sh*t. These technologies should be option rather than mandatory, and they should be configurable so that users can set limits for how much gets cached and what can be cached.
See dude, that’s the problem with you:
You think you know what you are talking about, while everything you write makes it clear that you in fact don’t.
Tell me, with your supposed knowledge about how Linux works, I’m sure you are employed by one of the big tech companies making top dollars, right?
And if you aren’t, then what are you waiting for?
After all, Linux experts are always in high demand!
And no, MGLRU has nothing to do with paging or page files (the Linux equivalent being swapping or swap files) and nothing to do with caching/standby memory.
It’s a highly efficient mechanism which completly prevents any slowdown when your RAM is fully saturated and new files are requested, and no, Windows has no equivalent.
Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to your highly technical response, just to prove my point…
You think that preemptively dumping things into swap space prevents system slowdown? When something in the swap space is needed by a running application, it causes extreme slowdown, so moving things out of RAM when it isn’t necessary is only going to hurt performance.
By contrast Windows at least tries to intelligently page things when necessary, and not when they haven’t been used in a while, thus preventing any sort of performance degradation when paging isn’t necessary. And as I already said, Windows 10 will try to compress memory pages rather than page them out of RAM to prevent slowdown issues, which I’ve never heard of Linux trying to do.
As for what I do or do not do for a living, that’s irrelevant as it wouldn’t be verifiable anyway. Besides, I have no need to measure my e-pen*s against a random person in a blog’s comment section.
I understand that you’re a Linux fanboy, however you have a tendency to take it too far. There is no perfect Operating System. Yes there are some things that Linux is excellent at. There are also some things that Windows is excellent at, and gaming is at the top of that list. As for which is better at memory management, that’s probably more situationally dependent than a definitive black and white, but I’ve certainly had a rougher time with memory management on Linux with desktop Linux distros. When I have problems with memory management on Windows, it’s usually because I disabled my pagefile and some stupid application decided to reserve 20+ gigabytes of RAM for no good reason.
Since you can play 99 percent of games on Windows without issue, no, it’s not. Unless you write your game or application to stupidly do that. It’s called “flexibility”. Windows has quite a lot of it.
“I have no idea how to properly use Windows, so I’m going switch to a far less user friendly OS and pretend it’s better”.
A story as old as computer illiteracy. Yeah you do that man. Good luck.
I saw that but by that time had moved this to an ssd which moots it and the others are so much smaller in size that of course they’d be on an ssd if not nvme so moots it also. I also wish they could figure out a way to not get saves to be so comparatively large sized, after a bit you have over a gb of saves hidden away in obscure folders. I think even those fraudsters cpdr improved that for cp77 vs tw3.
And come on johnnyboy there are plenty of lewd/nude mods for SF, or does the AI writer you employ have protocols against that? Man different site then it used to be including the toxic commenters and such, seem like bots not real people. Chatgpt must have a black hole plugin.
https://media4.giphy.com/media/AX3PyFFZHwApjr4jBm/giphy-downsized-small.mp4
Oh look the trannycunt parade shows up, big surprise. effucunt.
Settle down child. Settle.
The list sais its for CreateFile() = For saving new files, so basically telling windows NOT to waste memory on keeping new saves /logs etc loaded into the cache. So unless the game reloads that same file frequently while in game… what’s the benefit beside saving some memory for files you do want cached? Please enlighten me :O
Seems more a case of snake oil UNLESS something have been poorly documented ie read() and forced the cache off or the game keeps reloading its saved files nonstop…. doubt the latter
Only place i could think of that could benefit from this CreateFile() cache enabler is every time the shader’s are compiled but should not really add much beside the first sec or two of gameplay.
Note to self: Dont post on tech stuff when been up 27+ hrs in a row. Missed that the create file was to the API handler rather than the actual file system function. So yeah it could work
Umm, I’ve never once had such issues in any of those games at any point but uh, okay.
I haven’t noticed with Fallout 4 and Skyrim, but when I first load up Starfield or when it’s saving, I do notice some stutters
God your ilk is going to kill off the human race all by yourselves if you don’t slowly get over your backwards way of thought.
It’s BS for HDD enjoyers, does nothing for SSD in Starfield I tried it. Who tf uses an HDD for gaming in 2023 man
I have some old games on an HDD, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 don’t benefit much from an SSD. A lot of old games are in the same boat. But it’s getting really cheap to buy SSDs now, just got a 2TB one just for newer games so I can can keep my NVME drive free for operating system use. If you’re willing to just get regular SSDs in 2.5 inch format, even cheaper