Exploring SSD Performance In Battlefield 3, F1 2011, And Rift

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am i mistaken or the benchmark for Battlefield 3 only was done on missions ? not multiplayer matches...
I wonder how much different the data would be on the second case.
from a personal experience, my spec is : Corsair Obsidian 650D case|Corsair Hydro H80 Cooler|Asus P8Z68-V Intel Z68|Intel Core i7-2600K @3.40GHz|Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB CAS 9 1600MHz DualChann|OCZ Vertex 3 120GB|Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB|Corsair Pro Series Gold 850W modular and i can tell you im always the 1st among my group of friends to be already in the map while all the others using magnetic disk are still loading level... i suppose if you can afford it it just saves you to have to wait ages to load levels. Also in Rift, incredibly fast, didnt even have time to finish the loading screen, i was in after 10%. Definitely recomended to upgrade to SSD for gamers. Keep in mind though that it doesnt affect all the gameplay, like Fps etc.
 
[citation][nom]uruquiora[/nom]am i mistaken or the benchmark for Battlefield 3 only was done on missions ? not multiplayer matches...I wonder how much different the data would be on the second case.[/citation]
Would be similar, it still takes over a minute for me to load a multi level on a HDD, so an SSD should make a difference...Though while actually playing a multiplayer game, there should not be much difference between a HDD's and SSD's performance, assuming most of the read/writes are server side.

However, i also I know that there's a period of heightened HDD activity after i exit the game and return to battlelog.
 
The only issue I have with SSD's is the size, but I have found a partial workaround. I use Steam, which likes to install all games in the same place. For games that don't require the same level of performance with level loads and start-up I use junctions to move them to a conventional drive. Junction Link Magic has done well for me so far, but there are several options. Steam doesn't know the difference and I get to keep Steam and my "high-priority" games on a dedicated SSD with the OS on another.
 


Largely you get the same benefit. If OCZ is to be believed, their Vertex 3 speeds go from 525mb/s to around 260mb/s, but IOPs shouldn't really change.

Also today is a good day to buy an SSD. I'm looking at upgrading to a 120gb since there's some over $100 off with the MIR.

Just gotta decide... Force Series 3, Force Series GT, or Vertex 3...
 
This is the wrong GPU analysis. The right one is here:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22048/4

Analysis frame by frame.

I don't care if the card does 60 fps when it means half a second at 120 fps, and half a second freezed by disk access.

Far cry 2 was unbearable with HD, because it was loading textures all the time. With SD is another history, you can download large files from internet, run a virus scan, and no problem.
 
Question for Andrew Ku.

Great article, but how do you measure the I/O created by the games you profiled in this article ?

Is it using Sysinternal Procmon, hiOmon, Xperf, Perfmon disk counters ? So or something else. I'm curious because I'd like to profile a few applications on my on PC.

(I've looked for the details in this article and august one but have not found the details, other than the reference to Intel IPEAK which only works in XP x86.)

Any clues you can provide would be much appreciated
 


Errr.... I don't think we ever claimed this to be a GPU analysis. Second, Don has a more through writeup on Skyrim comparing graphic cards. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074.html

 


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991.html That explains it all. And the new IPEAK works in x64.
 


Ojas already covered it. But yes, our trace was based on a campaign mission. However, I did spend time tracing multiplayer games. Overall, I'd say its the same when it comes to storage I/O and memory management.
 
I am surprised that there was no measurement and comparison of "Minimum" frame rate between HDD and SSD. I was of the understanding that the "dips" one sees in play as a result of the slower response time in magnetic storage, is quantifiable as what the minimum framerate is (as opposed to using a youtube vid as evidence)
What I primary based my SSD purchase on, was reducing the amount of time that the game spends under 30fps!
 
[citation][nom]acku[/nom]http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2991.html That explains it all. And the new IPEAK works in x64.[/citation]

Hi Acku, I read that article a few time, and even posted the same question last august, What did Andrew Ku use, the last "official" version of the Intel IPEAK was 3.0 - 8/31/1999. The old Intel website is down, http://developer.intel.com/design/ipeak.
So "Ipeak version "v5.2" does not exist. If it does it would be nice to have the reference to it.

Did a private party acquire the source code and continue it's development as a new product ?
 
[citation][nom]watts_354[/nom]Hi Acku, I read that article a few time, and even posted the same question last august, What did Andrew Ku use, the last "official" version of the Intel IPEAK was 3.0 - 8/31/1999. The old Intel website is down, http://developer.intel.com/design/ipeak. So "Ipeak version "v5.2" does not exist. If it does it would be nice to have the reference to it.Did a private party acquire the source code and continue it's development as a new product ?[/citation]
It is only available directly through Intel. We do not have permission to distribute it. Sorry.

Other companies have licensed the code base, as I understand it. PCMark 7 and Vantage both use IPEAK as the basis of their HDD test suite.

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
 


Please read page 12 and 13. We use 1920 x 1080 in our ssd vs hdd comparison.
 
[citation][nom]BrightCandle[/nom]Wow benefits from an SSD in a few circumstances. With a normal HDD in Dalaran players will pop in very close to the player. An SSD on the other hand ensures the players are loaded much further away and the odd popping never happens. The SSD also seems to load faster between areas, twice as fast or so. However I have never seen Wow suffer frame rate issues related to its continuous use of the drive, and the other benefits are of marginal utility.[/citation]

With WoW a couple of Vertex 2s in RAID-0 loads instances very very fast. However I still see plenty of "popping" of monsters when flying in quickly to a heavily populated zone. Distance at which monsters appear is server controlled and thus "popping" can be the server's fault. At least with an SSD though, you know that its not your machine's fault for being slow to load textures.
 


Well, it doesn't change the fundamentals of our trace. It's only going to scale the numbers ever so slightly higher. The ratio and percentages will remain the same.

I used 1680x1050 because it allows me to monitor IO in real-time as I'm playing the game, as well as keep an eye on CPU and RAM utilization. The last is important because it helps explain if a game is loading into RAM or caching onto the disk.
 
I for one am so glad that I found this site in the last year. I went from a laptop which i had been using to picking components from scratch to build up a desktop. I found this site in the process of relearning about computer parts and getting up to speed on the new tech. I mainly play games on my pc but occasionally do other stuff and reviews such as this one are welcome in my book. I read most every review that Tom's does, and reviews such as this are a bit hard to come by. I would love to see more of this, keep it up.
 
[citation][nom]acku[/nom]http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 991-4.html512 bytes per sector, yielding 4 KBYeah so its the same as the previous article.[/citation]
Ah, silly me, i didn't see that the chart said sectors!! Thanks for pointing that out...

So yeah if a vertex 3 does about 60k IOPS ideally, lets assume for a moment that it's not ideal and does 50k IOPS.
SO now, do the 128KB transfers get transferred at 128*50,000=7,680,000 KB/s = 7500 MB/s???
That's hardly possible, but 4KB transfers at 50k IOPS at 195 MB/s is a fair calculation.

Or are IOPS strictly for an average? It's a bit confusing how to use them.
 
Id have to say that the biggest benefit I see when using my ssd is that when the game locks up or is loading it loads a few seconds faster. Ive seen youtube videos of guys loading games on their xbox or pc with normal hard drives in them and Im stunned at how long the loading screens are compared to mine. Like loading a game of mass effect on xbox... when the little movie for the load screen comes up I expect it to be gone in about 5 seconds... on xbox it takes fully 10-15 sec. I actually exclaimed "Come on already while Im young" at the video... While playing BF3 Im almost always the first guy to load the level and be ready... doesnt help though cause you have to wait 30 seconds for everyone else to choose their stuff and get ready too. It doesnt help at all when it comes to frame rates but it does help when the games crash 😀 I can get back in game ten times quicker than with a normal hard drive... great use of 250 bucks huh?
 
[citation][nom]ojas[/nom]Ah, silly me, i didn't see that the chart said sectors!! Thanks for pointing that out...So yeah if a vertex 3 does about 60k IOPS ideally, lets assume for a moment that it's not ideal and does 50k IOPS.SO now, do the 128KB transfers get transferred at 128*50,000=7,680,000 KB/s = 7500 MB/s???That's hardly possible, but 4KB transfers at 50k IOPS at 195 MB/s is a fair calculation.Or are IOPS strictly for an average? It's a bit confusing how to use them.[/citation]

Ah. I see the confusion. (Pulls out glasses and queue school house rock music....) 😛

IOPS * TransferSizeInBytes = BytesPerSec

Remember your units. Second to get IOPS, you'd have to do the weighted average of the transfer sizes. In the scenario of 93% being 4 KB, 2 % being 128 KB, etc.. etc...
 
[citation][nom]adjman[/nom]I for one am so glad that I found this site in the last year. I went from a laptop which i had been using to picking components from scratch to build up a desktop. I found this site in the process of relearning about computer parts and getting up to speed on the new tech. I mainly play games on my pc but occasionally do other stuff and reviews such as this one are welcome in my book. I read most every review that Tom's does, and reviews such as this are a bit hard to come by. I would love to see more of this, keep it up.[/citation]

I'm glad you liked it. Honestly, sometimes these traces have me scratching my head a bit. For example, I expected more games to be similar than different. That's actually turning out not to be the case, and it should have dawned on me earlier since I'm a programmer.

What's interesting is that intensive graphics =! a lot of benefit with an SSD. There are games like WoW and Rift that are clearly random and generic looking to the more impressive Battlefield 3, which is basically all sequential reads.

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
 
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