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

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AsTheDeath

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[citation][nom]acku[/nom]My suspect list:amount of RAMstorageI doubt it's graphics related. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 063-8.html The 5850 does relatively well. I've seen a limited number of scenarios where increasing RAM helps. But this only applies if you're running with 2 GB. BF3 takes up as much as 2 GB of space, and it performs a memory dump between multiplayer map loading and level loading in campaign mode. Storage could be a potential bottleneck given our results in the article. I wonder if there are background processes running that's inducing the sudden drop off.[/citation]

Ah, I should have added that. I have 4 GB of memory (1333 MHz, with a CAS I forgot but it was pretty average). I don't think that's the issue, I don't remember it spiking or filling up completely.
I just played some BF3 with GPUz and perfmon on my second screen, but it was the end of the SP, in which the maps are too small to be able to recreate the issue. However, I did notice GPU memory usage and GPU load on Ultra settings were 100%. I'll try the MP tomorrow to see if I can see what it does when I get these lagspikes, and I'll play some less taxing games to see if 100% GPU load and full GPU memory usage are normal. Thank you all for your advice so far : )

-I don't normally have many applications running in the background while playing games, other than Outlook and for BF3 of course the shitload of applications that has to be run in order to play.
 

x Heavy

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5 OCZ Vertex 3 in raid Zero assisted by a 60 gig cache SSD makes for a fast install, launch and trouble free play. I am already aware that newer SSD's already outperform my raid stack.
 

humble dexter

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I think installing both Windows and the games on the same drive is a worse case scenario for HD performance, because the HD head has to physically move a lot between Windows related read/writes and gaming related read/writes.

But what if you install Windows on a small affordable SSD and install the games on a big HD, instead of installing both windows and the games on the same HD like you did here.

Wouldn't that that be enough to remove the HDD choppiness you noticed, because the same HD head would no longer be moving around to perform Windows partition related disk activities between it's Gaming partition related disk activities ?

Where are the Gaming writes happening anyway : On the Gaming partition (where the games are installed), or the Windows partition (where the Windows user application data is stored) ?
 

acku

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[citation][nom]humble dexter[/nom]I think installing both Windows and the games on the same drive is a worse case scenario for HD performance, because the HD head has to physically move a lot between Windows related read/writes and gaming related read/writes.But what if you install Windows on a small affordable SSD and install the games on a big HD, instead of installing both windows and the games on the same HD like you did here.Wouldn't that that be enough to remove the HDD choppiness you noticed, because the same HD head would no longer be moving around to perform Windows partition related disk activities between it's Gaming partition related disk activities ?Where are the Gaming writes happening anyway : On the Gaming partition (where the games are installed), or the Windows partition (where the Windows user application data is stored) ?[/citation]

Remove the choppiness. In theory. However, IF a game writes to a disk, it's doing so to the Windows User application file path (usually). I haven't found an exception to that case, but I'm sure there is one. :p
 

sheol

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They're not as sexy as a new six-core CPU or a Radeon HD 7000-series graphics card.

Was that a hint and do you have a card/cards of the 7 series in house for testing already? :) Please tell me that is the case here.

Also, good article, however: I would say the first part of the article just perhaps included too much in depth information that is not really useful. Next time I would assume less details regarding the specific percentages might make it easier to read.

Thumbs up. :)
 

Badelhas

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Guys, based on your own experience, do you think we see any real world benefits when upgrading from a 1st generation Vertex 1 60Gb to a 3d generation Vertex 3 120Gb?
 

ojas

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[citation][nom]acku[/nom]Well, you're totally right. It's very difficult to separate the read and write data rates. You could calculate overall IOPS by combining read and write operations and then multiplying by the (weighted) average transfer size. You bought up a very valid point. I'll check to see if there's a way I can separate the data into more discrete information for articles that come after.
Any games you want to see specifically traced for round three?[/citation]

Glad i could help! :)

Hmmm....well it seems pretty clear (and i've kind of been thinking the same for quite some time now) that normally storage isn't really a bottlneck as far as the actual gameplay is concerned, because there are only some periods in between (the game) that the game loads textures, however i think newer games do it more frequently. Obviously loading times are reduced, so that would be the biggest game-related benefit that one would gain from getting an SSD. So i guess if there's any point in co-relating storage performance with choppiness, it would be games that load in-between the maps.

[citation][nom]acku[/nom]Remove the choppiness. In theory. However, IF a game writes to a disk, it's doing so to the Windows User application file path (usually). I haven't found an exception to that case, but I'm sure there is one.[/citation]

why should the game be affected by background processes? Once stuff is in the RAM, i suppose there's going to be only some occasional periods of read-write when it loads stuff...or is it continuous? (the article's kind of worn off, so sorry if i'm repeating things!). Because if it's not continuous, then as i see things, background read writes shouldn't be too much of a bother, at least that's what i think.
Also, aren't most saved games written to the "my docs" folder? So if my Documents folder is sitting on a separate drive, wouldn't that help?

You've already tested quite a few more, but from the games that i've seen causing any storage-related performance hits, i remember:

Halo CE, Halo 2
America's Army 2
Crysis 1 (i think, seems logical)
Mass Effect 1, 2.

Now with halo ce it's mostly a non-issue because given any 7200 RPM drive, it's not noticeable.

Can't remember much about Halo 2, but i know it does load in between, and in fact that game spends a lot of time loading, iirc.

Now America's Army (specifically 2.8.5) is a very poorly coded game (but very intense :) ), in particular the co-op missions.
The AI is dumb, annoying, CPU intensive and spawn right under your nose. And the performance hit is significant. I get 85 fps (vsync) on the multiplayer maps but 20-30 fps on the co-op maps after the NPCs spawn and 40+ fps without them (on the same map). And god! the stuttering that takes place when they spawn!! very, very poor coding.
So yeah, i think this is one game that deserves to have the fps and IO ops logged together, though that causes a slight issue if the log will be writing to the disk too, unless there's a way to separate the two I/O streams. lol that reminded me of iostream. :p
I'm suggesting logging fps and IO ops because i'm not sure that if the disk is actually read when the NPCs spawn or is it simply a CPU spike when the NPCs spawn because the CPU is loading them from memory and initializing/drawing them or something like that.
This game is not GPU bottlenecked at all, though it's bloated, i got a buffer overflow when forcing 16xQ SSAA at 1024x768 on a 1GB 9600GT :D

Then we have crysis. I know you reviewed crysis 2, but crysis being more open-world and intensive on everything should be more intensive with storage, since it has to load different parts of the map in-game, NPCs, textures, etc.

Mass Effect (both) reads/writes a lot in-game (ok, maybe not a lot, but i know loading/saving is frequent) so maybe ME 2 would be a good game test too?

That's all i can think of really.

p.s. AA 2.8.5 co-op could be good as a CPU bench too...
 

ojas

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[citation][nom]acku[/nom]My suspect list:amount of RAMstorageI doubt it's graphics related. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 063-8.html The 5850 does relatively well. I've seen a limited number of scenarios where increasing RAM helps. But this only applies if you're running with 2 GB. BF3 takes up as much as 2 GB of space, and it performs a memory dump between multiplayer map loading and level loading in campaign mode. Storage could be a potential bottleneck given our results in the article. I wonder if there are background processes running that's inducing the sudden drop off.[/citation]
[citation][nom]AsTheDeath[/nom]Ah, I should have added that. I have 4 GB of memory (1333 MHz, with a CAS I forgot but it was pretty average). I don't think that's the issue, I don't remember it spiking or filling up completely.I just played some BF3 with GPUz and perfmon on my second screen, but it was the end of the SP, in which the maps are too small to be able to recreate the issue. However, I did notice GPU memory usage and GPU load on Ultra settings were 100%. I'll try the MP tomorrow to see if I can see what it does when I get these lagspikes, and I'll play some less taxing games to see if 100% GPU load and full GPU memory usage are normal. Thank you all for your advice so far : )-I don't normally have many applications running in the background while playing games, other than Outlook and for BF3 of course the shitload of applications that has to be run in order to play.[/citation]
I just suggested temperature because a friend of mine managed to fry his processor on a laptop while playing this game...sandy bridge i5...temps suddenly shoot into the 90-100 range...i got to know too late before i could tell him that he's being a moron :D
But yeah he had the same symptoms.
And i find it strange that only one core is being used, i have all 4 cores active and above 50% while playing BF3...
 

ojas

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[citation][nom]acku[/nom]I consider you a good example of why a gamer here is different from a gamer on some of the other hobby-eqsue sites. You want to learn more and that's what I love. While there certainly people here that just want raw benchmark scores, it's even cooler that there are more readers who want to really understand benchmarks and peel back the layers.[/citation]
hehe...well, i guess it's because Tom's readers are more of the enthusiast kinds than simply the gamer types...i for one am curious as hell ;)
Plus i realise that raw benchmarks while being enjoyable to read and perform (tiring to perform really), mean very little unless you can interpret them and apply that knowledge.

And i guess it also depends on your exposure to computers. Most people on Tom's used comps even before i did (earliest proc was PII for me, but hey, i was 5 then, so it was mostly for dad!) so they've seen the industry grow and change. Plus more people here have programming experience, so again, they understand things in depth.

When i started reading Tom's a year ago i just would NOT read the descriptions of the various architectures in reviews because it wouldn't make sense to me. Hell, still can't make complete sense of them, and that's likely to remain like that until we cover Intel's 8080 arch in college!
So i think that's what happens to some here, they just can't make sense of things. But hey, there's a conclusion page too! lol.

Besides i think most people born before 1995 understand computers way better than the more recently born ones... After 95 it's the Apple generation :lol: (couldn't stop myself :p )
 

AsTheDeath

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[citation][nom]ojas[/nom]I just suggested temperature because a friend of mine managed to fry his processor on a laptop while playing this game...sandy bridge i5...temps suddenly shoot into the 90-100 range...i got to know too late before i could tell him that he's being a moron But yeah he had the same symptoms.And i find it strange that only one core is being used, i have all 4 cores active and above 50% while playing BF3...[/citation]

I didn't mean BF3 only uses one core for me, I meant not all cores were completely filled, much like you. I'm not a native speaker so you'll have to forgive me for causing a slight misunderstanding : P. Also, I checked temperatures, but they seemed to stay below or around 60 (Celsius, that is) for the most part... I believe as long as it stays well below 80 I'm fine, right?

Also, @ojas, I wasn't born before 1995 (Januari of that year, so I was close...), and though you're probably right generally speaking, I hate Apple probably more than a lot of older people do. In fact, I think I hate Apple as much as anyone : D.
 

ojas

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[citation][nom]AsTheDeath[/nom]I didn't mean BF3 only uses one core for me, I meant not all cores were completely filled, much like you. I'm not a native speaker so you'll have to forgive me for causing a slight misunderstanding : P. Also, I checked temperatures, but they seemed to stay below or around 60 (Celsius, that is) for the most part... I believe as long as it stays well below 80 I'm fine, right?[/citation]
Ah i see...i guess the bottleneck is somewhere else then, like Andrew said, could be storage...sub 80 is fine, though people like keeping temperature as low as possible...my processor reaches 65-75 on BF3 on stock cooling...

[citation][nom]AsTheDeath[/nom]ojas, I wasn't born before 1995 (Januari of that year, so I was close...), and though you're probably right generally speaking, I hate Apple probably more than a lot of older people do. In fact, I think I hate Apple as much as anyone : D.[/citation]
hehehe...by Apple generation i meant the mobile-device generation, not just the i-Fans. To be honest here in India there are more people from my parents' generation who think apple is great.

1995 is an approximation really...though i put it around that date because generally people who're currently less than 16 years old can't (or simply don't want to) understand computers in depth. Some do, a lot don't, but the majority is into phones or tablets or stuff like that. You're a Tom's reader, hence an exception! ;)

between 1990 and 95 (my generation) you've got the jailbreakers, gamers, budding enthusiasts, etc. who're exploring technology, and saw rapid growth in the sector without really being a part of shaping it. People older than that are the ones who're actually working in the Industry and know their stuff pretty well, like the Tom's staff. Then come the people born between 1900-1960 who were pioneers. Of course i'm generalising so...

Excuse me for my random history class, but i just had a sudden urge to reflect on this... :D
 

shompa

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1) The tests show how gaming today is console optimized. 2) I would love to see a test with everything loaded into memory. 64gig memory is not to expensive with the new 8 memory socket Intel motherboards. 3) Would love to see an SSD test on PS3. The main thing I hate about console gaming is the long loading times, even if I install games to Xbox/PS3 hard drive. I wonder if an SSD would solve the problem.
 

bucknutty

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[citation][nom]silverblue[/nom]I see what you did there.[/citation]
If the slow HD and the Fast SSD did about the same, Perhaps he is expecting the fast HD to out perform the fast SSD?
 

tpi2007

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Interesting.

I have one game request: GTA IV or GTA: Episodes from Liberty City. I have benchmarked it with HWINFO64 sending CPU and GPU usage data to Afterburner's Rivatuner's OSD statistics server and I'm not hitting a CPU bottleneck, let alone a GPU bottleneck, yet framerates can drop into the teens or twenties when I'm driving fast across the city - since there is a lot of streaming, this would possibly be the best example to showcase the benefit of an SSD.

Even more so because GTA V is around the corner.
 

ojas

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Why not run a virus scan in the background too? That's like the most IO intensive thing i can think of that runs in the background...or maybe even compression for that matter...but i saw the hard drive queue hitting 12 during a virus scan...
 

AsTheDeath

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[citation][nom]acku[/nom]My suspect list:amount of RAMstorageI doubt it's graphics related. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 063-8.html The 5850 does relatively well. I've seen a limited number of scenarios where increasing RAM helps. But this only applies if you're running with 2 GB. BF3 takes up as much as 2 GB of space, and it performs a memory dump between multiplayer map loading and level loading in campaign mode. Storage could be a potential bottleneck given our results in the article. I wonder if there are background processes running that's inducing the sudden drop off.[/citation]

Well, as I originally thought (I've been having this problem ever since release) and as you correctly suspected, it was the HDD. GPUz showed ~98% GPU activity and a comparable GPU memory usage percentage, memory, CPU and network were fine. But my HDD was spiking, and it seemed System was keeping it busy. Does anyone know what System is actually doing to screw up my game and how I can remedy this? Thanks again for all your advice so far, Tomshardware has turned out to be very helpful and informative once again!
 

tfbww

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How is BF3 operating when you switch servers? It appears that you are reloading both the game and the level consecutively. If that's the case, it seems like the value of SSDs is potentially far greater (due to a horrible mp browser approach). Is that right?
 
G

Guest

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thats why i prefer my 3x1TB raid... cheaper(not now with hdd rip off) and better
 

acku

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[citation][nom]Tfbww[/nom]How is BF3 operating when you switch servers? It appears that you are reloading both the game and the level consecutively. If that's the case, it seems like the value of SSDs is potentially far greater (due to a horrible mp browser approach). Is that right?[/citation]
Hmm.... I need to test that scenario out. Between map loads its definitely just the map, but that's on the same server. I'm not sure what happens when you switch servers. Check back on Monday, I'll do a quick trace to find out.

Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
 

tfbww

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[citation][nom]acku[/nom]Hmm.... I need to test that scenario out. Between map loads its definitely just the map, but that's on the same server. I'm not sure what happens when you switch servers. Check back on Monday, I'll do a quick trace to find out.Cheers,Andrew KuTomsHardware.com[/citation]
Thanks, Andrew!
 

livebriand

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[citation][nom]gmcizzle[/nom]Storage can actually make a difference in FPS in certain situations. Only put in 2gb or so of RAM in the test system and rerun Battlefield 3, and the difference in frame rates will be different between HDD and SSD as the game switches to secondary storage once RAM is exhausted.[/citation]
Most gamers can afford to get at least 4GB ram, since it's dirt cheap nowadays.
 

Phoenixlight

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Well I've got a 1TB caviar green drive so these results are very interesting to me, I thought that there was something wrong with BF3 at first because the load times are INSANE. Still not going to bother with an SSD until they come down to the same price as HDD's or take their place. I don't like jumping on new technologies, I'd rather let other people use them and have the issues now so that there won't be any later on.
 

shin0bi272

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well this just kind of turned into a tech support thread now didnt it? LOL

Phoenix I noticed that the load times to like every game seem excruciatingly long when I watching them on youtube. skyrim, mass effect, bf3 and rage... all of them seemed 3x longer on the movie compared to my pc. Which is the only real benefit a gamer will see with an SSD is shorter load times.
 

suradi

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In my opinion the biggest difference between HDD and SSD would be in the Grand theft auto 4.
Although it's not the newest game in the market, it can easily kill my 5400rpm laptop hdd while I'm playing.(I know it's the slowest hard drive on the planet, right?). I have 8gigs of ram and 2gigs of VGA memory, but if i turn fast with my character on the detailed parts of the map(like on the rooftop, or in the air) my hdd is swapping and the gameplay will be very laggy. Just of curiosity i want to try it with a normal ssd, how can it improve this kind of gaming performance.
 
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