[citation][nom]perfectblue[/nom]Quite surprised to see Skyrim and WoW left out of the pool. In my opinion games like these give a lot of improvement in SSD. Just think how many times you load in BF3 and compare that with skyrim. Pretty insane Notably, my laptop with a Intel 510 250GB, my in-game load times are about 2 seconds in skyrim compared to the desktop running 1TB spinpoint at raid takes 4-5 seconds. The same desktop with a crucial M4 takes around 2 seconds. Moreover I never had any spikes/lags with SSDs while gaming.[/citation]
He did WoW in a previous article.
I would like to have seen Skyrim too, but really Andrew's test suite should be about displaying different facets of storage solution performance before it's about pleasing the readers with games they want to see - and the games he chose are extremely popular. In my opinion, Rift isn't "the latest craze" in MMOGs, it's kind of old news, but it is still a good test to run at least once in that we see how it runs and how it is different than, say, WoW, or the other non-MMOG games.
One thing is very clear, games aren't all the same; not even games of the same type. One of the reasons I kept asking for WoW to be used as a bench in the past was because it was so CPU intensive, and most game weren't. In Cataclysm, that changed, and it became a game that could stress both CPU AND GPU, so I think it is a very good game to use for benches. However, MMOGs are harder to bench with than other games.
You can only use so many games for benchmarks, and some people are going to wish other games were used so an article relates to them more directly. I think it's good to make suggestions, but have trouble understanding why people get surprised when a game isn't used, talk in terms of something being "left out", or seem to take things personally.