Does raid 0 help frames per second????

[shmills]

I am wondering if a person is to Raid 0 a couple hard drives will it result in better frames per second gaming?? What do people think?? I have heard it could reduce even that it will only help in loading I don't know what to think......Some other opinions would be nice,


Thanks,
Shane

 

[airwolf]

Can FPS be attributed to slow loading, i thought it could, but i am a bit clueless about these things. If a hardrive is slow at loading textures e.t.c. then surely that would slow it down?

 

[bc4]

don't have personal experience but I believe it would only increase your FPS if you are low on ram. I you have 4+ gigs of ram I don't think you would see much improvement --- well like you said: a little bit when loading but not during game play.

It probably also depends on the game and on how often it loads new maps and such.

My opinion is to spend the money on ram and a 64 bit OS

btw: welcome to the forums

 

[paxiam]

It depends of the circumstances. To give an example, I have two hard disks, and when I run Flight Simulator X with Fraps enabled (which records a live video of the game ) I notice that if I save it the same disk as the game is running on, the FPS go down considerably (about 50%). But if have Fraps set to record to a separate drive, the FPS are not affected that much (about 15%).

Th real question is, does the game I run constantly access the harddisk? If this is the case, then raid 0 would help, provided you did not have a cpu bottleneck. But to what degree, it is hard to say. If the game runs totally in ram, and loads prior to each section, then hard disk speed would have no affect at all on the frame rate.









q6600 @ 3.3Ghz, 9600Gt (overclocked), Veloca Raptor 300 g, Samsung 500g,460 Coolmaster Power Supply.

 

[stoner133]

Absolutly not, RAID-0 will not help your FPS in any game.

 

[nukemaster]

In general your fps should not be affected by raid. most games should load textures into memory anyway(thats the reason we have a loading screen).

In rare occasions some MMO games load on the fly, then raid may help a bit.

Load times on games that do not use compressed files will be faster. but of they are compressed your cpu may be the bottle neck.

As said above. FRAPsing is better on its own drive(less fragmentation) or raid. If you large uncompressed video raid0 will help.

 

[shmills]

Thanks mostly it is what I was hoping but never have enough opinions, anybody have any links to actual facts or trials, and anybody with actual experience.....please reply thanks. And how do you know stoner???

 

[4745454b]

How does he know? Think about how a game works.

Data is pulled from the harddrive and loaded into your ram. How fast this happens depends on three things, the speed of your harddrive(s), CPU, and Ram. If you don't have enough ram, then setting up AID0 will help, because when you need to pull info from the array, it will come quickly. Its also a dumb idea to do this, as increasing your ram will help much more.

For many games, once its loaded into ram, thats it. (MMOs are the obvious example of games then need to go back to the drive.) A FPS game shouldn't need to go back to the drives until its done with that level, and needs to load the next one. It doesn't matter if your drives are lightening fast, once the level is loaded, its running from your ram, not your drives.

As was mentioned, games can use compressed textures, that need to be decompressed. Info also needs to be feed to and from the RAM and video card. This is a CPU load, and has little to do with your harddrives. This is why synthetic apps show huge gains for AID0, while real world apps tend to be much smaller.

If you want more info, start reading Tom's and Anand's harddrive reviews. Make sure to look at real world game testing, not PCmarks and 3DMarks.

 

[nukemaster]

Thanks mostly it is what I was hoping but never have enough opinions, anybody have any links to actual facts or trials

I use (R)AID0 and have for years, Since i have used games with and without it i can say there is no increase in frame rate since once the textures are in system ram and your video card ram the hard drive no longer comes into play. As i said some MMO's DO load textures on the fly so the extra speed can help(but its extremely minimal). Load times can be faster, but only if a games files are lightly compressed or not compressed at all. If a game uses lots of compression your cpu can not decompress fast enough to let the hard drive use its speed.

Am i saying not to use (R)AID0? No there are advantages, but if you think your fps is going to go up(its not, there is slightly less loading lag in some MMO games, but its still there), your better off getting a new video card for that.

 

[wip99gt]

Nukemaster's right. I've been using Raid 0 for a while now and my fps did not increase. My load times decreased quite a bit though.

 

[shmills]

Thanks for the info everybody, helpful, first time in these forums, almost any forum really.

Shane