Black Ops 2 Awating Textures?

[camer0]

So I went to play Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and went into a multiplayer game and it took 2 minutes for the map to load! The loading screen said "Awaiting Textures". How can I fix this?

I have an SSD, Intel i3-4330, and an AMD R9 280x

I recently updated to the Windows 10 technical preview from Windows 8.1, Black Ops 2 worked fine before this. I don't know if this has something to do with Windows 10. Thank you!

 

[techgeek]

Did you give system restore a try. Hopefully you have a restore point that you think is slightly before it started acting up.

Umm actually since I had to install Windows 10 clean I have no system restore points. So I could reinstall Windows, but I don't want to go to that much trouble.

However, I did remember this. I recently updated the firmware on my SSD (which Black Ops 2 is installed on). Do you think that could have something to do with it?

Edit: I am going to delete BO2 (again) and reinstall it on my hard drive and see if that helps at all.

Quite honestly, it should load the fastest from your SSD. As for firmware change, what SSD model do you have?

Silicon Power S70 and I know it should load fastest but at this point I don't know what else to try

Have you tried to benchmark the SSD to see if general performance has dropped off?

 

[camer0]

Did you give system restore a try. Hopefully you have a restore point that you think is slightly before it started acting up.

Umm actually since I had to install Windows 10 clean I have no system restore points. So I could reinstall Windows, but I don't want to go to that much trouble.

However, I did remember this. I recently updated the firmware on my SSD (which Black Ops 2 is installed on). Do you think that could have something to do with it?

Edit: I am going to delete BO2 (again) and reinstall it on my hard drive and see if that helps at all.

Quite honestly, it should load the fastest from your SSD. As for firmware change, what SSD model do you have?

Silicon Power S70 and I know it should load fastest but at this point I don't know what else to try

Have you tried to benchmark the SSD to see if general performance has dropped off?

No I haven't done that before. How can I do that?

 

[techgeek]

There are several benchmarking utilities out there. AS SSD is one. Crystal Disk Mark is another. HDTune and HDTach are also pretty good even though they are meant more for traditional HDD's. One thing about the last two is they graph the read speed across the entire volume instead of giving you just a single average number. Now traditionally this wasn't too useful on SSD's since they ideally should just be more or less a straight line (unlike an HDD). However it was good at revealing the problem with Samsung's 840 EVO problem with TLC.

So any of these should be good. HDTach needs to be run in compatibility mode (Windows XP SP3) because it's a little older. My two choices would be AS SSD and HDTune.

 

[camer0]

There are several benchmarking utilities out there. AS SSD is one. Crystal Disk Mark is another. HDTune and HDTach are also pretty good even though they are meant more for traditional HDD's. One thing about the last two is they graph the read speed across the entire volume instead of giving you just a single average number. Now traditionally this wasn't too useful on SSD's since they ideally should just be more or less a straight line (unlike an HDD). However it was good at revealing the problem with Samsung's 840 EVO problem with TLC.

So any of these should be good. HDTach needs to be run in compatibility mode (Windows XP SP3) because it's a little older. My two choices would be AS SSD and HDTune.

I don't know much about SSDs or Hard Drives, but here are my results. Is this good or is there something wrong?

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a230/camer0/WHAT_zpshdjfcouj.png

EDIT: I reinstalled BO2 on my hard drive, no change in loading times. Any other ideas to try?

 

[techgeek]

Well I had a look at your screeny there and there is something a little off there. Your write speeds all look a little low. Some of your read speeds are also low. Here is a screeny of mine next to yours:

I don't think this would cause your problem, but it maybe something you'll want to look into later.

Do you have AHCI set in the BIOS for your SATA controllers?

 

[camer0]

Well I had a look at your screeny there and there is something a little off there. Your write speeds all look a little low. Some of your read speeds are also low. Here is a screeny of mine next to yours:

I don't think this would cause your problem, but it maybe something you'll want to look into later.

Do you have AHCI set in the BIOS for your SATA controllers?

Yes it is set to AHCI

 

[techgeek]

If you look under your SATA controller in Device Manager, what does it have for a driver? Is is iaStorA.sys or something like that?

Though you have a different SSD than I do, some of your numbers look a little low, particularly your write values. Almost like Trim isn't working. I assume you had another OS (or even an old Windows 10 Preview) before you installed the present OS, did you do a secure erase of your SSD prior to installing the OS?

 

[camer0]

If you look under your SATA controller in Device Manager, what does it have for a driver? Is is iaStorA.sys or something like that?

Though you have a different SSD than I do, some of your numbers look a little low, particularly your write values. Almost like Trim isn't working. I assume you had another OS (or even an old Windows 10 Preview) before you installed the present OS, did you do a secure erase of your SSD prior to installing the OS?

Where exactly do I find the SATA controller in Device Manager? I am having difficulties locating it.
No I just let the Windows 10 "format" the drive to install it

 

[techgeek]

If you look under your SATA controller in Device Manager, what does it have for a driver? Is is iaStorA.sys or something like that?

Though you have a different SSD than I do, some of your numbers look a little low, particularly your write values. Almost like Trim isn't working. I assume you had another OS (or even an old Windows 10 Preview) before you installed the present OS, did you do a secure erase of your SSD prior to installing the OS?

Where exactly do I find the SATA controller in Device Manager? I am having difficulties locating it.
No I just let the Windows 10 "format" the drive to install it

An SSD operates differently than a HDD with regards to writing data. When you format a drive, the data isn't erased, the format deletes and remakes the file location table. So technically all the data is still there, but there is no way for the OS to find it because the map to locate each file is gone. Then as data is written to the drive it overwrites the old data. For HDD's this isn't an issue. For SSD's though, it can cause write performance problems. When data is written to a NAND cell, the firmware checks to see if there is data stored in that cell. If it has data, the drive first has to erase what is stored in the cell and then write to it. It's actually a little more complicated than this, but these are broad strokes. If you want a more detailed explanation have a look at this article:

Trim and Garbage Collection explained

This becomes more complicated when all the data is orphaned by the OS (in the case of it being wiped and re-installed), but the process is the same.

So if you don't secure erase the drive, and then re-install the OS, you could actually be causing performance problems. There is another component in the firmware of your drive that almost guarantees this behavior. It's called wear leveling. Since NAND has a finite number or write cycles, you firmware will not likely write to a location that has data in it (although it's no longer valid) in an attempt to share the write cycles around.

Now if used long enough, the TRIM function and garbage collection should clean this up. However I'm not sure the TRIM function will work on orphaned data (data leftover from a previous OS install) since the OS isn't aware of the data that was on the drive prior to you installing it. So garbage collection maybe the only automatic fix. Again though this may take a long time depending on how aggressive the garbage collection subroutine is in the firmware of the drive.

There is a quick fix though. You can run Defraggler's SSD Optimizer. I'm not a 100% sure that it will work on Windows 10, though I would think as long as your SSD was formatted NTFS, that it should work.

However I'm not sure that this will necessarily fix your original problem.

As for the driver, yes you find this in Device Manager under Driver Details.

 

[camer0]

If you look under your SATA controller in Device Manager, what does it have for a driver? Is is iaStorA.sys or something like that?

Though you have a different SSD than I do, some of your numbers look a little low, particularly your write values. Almost like Trim isn't working. I assume you had another OS (or even an old Windows 10 Preview) before you installed the present OS, did you do a secure erase of your SSD prior to installing the OS?

Where exactly do I find the SATA controller in Device Manager? I am having difficulties locating it.
No I just let the Windows 10 "format" the drive to install it

An SSD operates differently than a HDD with regards to writing data. When you format a drive, the data isn't erased, the format deletes and remakes the file location table. So technically all the data is still there, but there is no way for the OS to find it because the map to locate each file is gone. Then as data is written to the drive it overwrites the old data. For HDD's this isn't an issue. For SSD's though, it can cause write performance problems. When data is written to a NAND cell, the firmware checks to see if there is data stored in that cell. If it has data, the drive first has to erase what is stored in the cell and then write to it. It's actually a little more complicated than this, but these are broad strokes. If you want a more detailed explanation have a look at this article:

Trim and Garbage Collection explained

This becomes more complicated when all the data is orphaned by the OS (in the case of it being wiped and re-installed), but the process is the same.

So if you don't secure erase the drive, and then re-install the OS, you could actually be causing performance problems. There is another component in the firmware of your drive that almost guarantees this behavior. It's called wear leveling. Since NAND has a finite number or write cycles, you firmware will not likely write to a location that has data in it (although it's no longer valid) in an attempt to share the write cycles around.

Now if used long enough, the TRIM function and garbage collection should clean this up. However I'm not sure the TRIM function will work on orphaned data (data leftover from a previous OS install) since the OS isn't aware of the data that was on the drive prior to you installing it. So garbage collection maybe the only automatic fix. Again though this may take a long time depending on how aggressive the garbage collection subroutine is in the firmware of the drive.

There is a quick fix though. You can run Defraggler's SSD Optimizer. I'm not a 100% sure that it will work on Windows 10, though I would think as long as your SSD was formatted NTFS, that it should work.

However I'm not sure that this will necessarily fix your original problem.

As for the driver, yes you find this in Device Manager under Driver Details.

I will do that with my SSD later. Any more ideas on how to fix the BO2 problem?

 

[techgeek]

Can you tell me what motherboard you have?

 

[camer0]

Can you tell me what motherboard you have?

MSI H81I

 

[techgeek]

Found this, don't know it you've tried it, but I'll give you the tip and see if it works.

Under Device Manager, find your drives. Now is BO2 on your SSD or on the HDD. I'm assuming your OS drive is on the SSD. If BO2 is back on the SSD, then uncheck Enable write caching on this device. Now if its on you HDD, just to be safe, do this on your SSD and HDD. The reason I say this, is I don't know how BO2 caches the shaders. It maybe written to cache them off the drive the game is being run on, or it could default to caching them on the OS drive.

 

[techgeek]

There is something to check in your BIOS. There are two settings:

1. Initiate Graphic Adapter [PEG], the default is PEG, just make sure it is PEG

2. IGD Multi-Monitor [Disabled], the default is Disabled, just make sure it is.

These are stretching it.

I'm starting to think it might be Windows 10. Did this problem start immediately after moving to Windows 10?

 

[camer0]

Found this, don't know it you've tried it, but I'll give you the tip and see if it works.

Under Device Manager, find your drives. Now is BO2 on your SSD or on the HDD. I'm assuming your OS drive is on the SSD. If BO2 is back on the SSD, then uncheck Enable write caching on this device. Now if its on you HDD, just to be safe, do this on your SSD and HDD. The reason I say this, is I don't know how BO2 caches the shaders. It maybe written to cache them off the drive the game is being run on, or it could default to caching them on the OS drive.

No it doesn't seem to help much, if at all. I am seriously considering selling my 280x and buying a gtx 770 lol :lol:

 

[camer0]

There is something to check in your BIOS. There are two settings:

1. Initiate Graphic Adapter [PEG], the default is PEG, just make sure it is PEG

2. IGD Multi-Monitor [Disabled], the default is Disabled, just make sure it is.

These are stretching it.

I'm starting to think it might be Windows 10. Did this problem start immediately after moving to Windows 10?

It is still set to PEG and Multi-monitor is disabled in the BIOS. I do believe it started after moving to Windows 10. I am just going to hope it's some kind of incompatibility problem with WIndows 10 (and yes I have tried compatibility mode). I guess I will wait until Windows 10 consumer launches and maybe it will work better then. Thank you for all your help though!

 

[Reyaz123]

Not to bud in here,techgeek deserves a round of applause for working hard to help you fix the problem. But did you try reinstalling black ops 2?

 

[camer0]

Not to bud in here,techgeek deserves a round of applause for working hard to help you fix the problem. But did you try reinstalling black ops 2?

Yes I have reinstalled it twice on two different drives. Doesn't help. Thank you for the response though. And yes, techgeek, you have done an awesome job trying to help me. Thanks so much 😀

 

[techgeek]

I was going to mention about the Defraggler optimize, you can do this if you want. However with Windows 10's release less than a month off, if you intend to do a full "clean" install rather than an upgrade, I'd just wait and do a secure erase of you SSD before installing the OS. This will set your drive back to a "factory fresh" state.

Sorry we couldn't get this problem sorted. I'm thinking that it's probably a Windows 10 thing, but no way to prove it short of installing an alternate version of Windows and seeing if the problem goes away.