SSD Performance In Crysis 2, World Of Warcraft, And Civilization V

[plum]

Hey acku, nice article. You forgot an important SSD gaming title though!

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - SSD performance enhancement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwfuiOno3Vg

I don't know how many other games out there that take advantage of SSD speeds to make the gameplay smoother/faster, but this sure puts a SSD on the spotlight.

 

[ejb_99]

My first thought is a prot Pally in Tier 11 gear. Stop writing reviews and get a move on with those Valor Points!

 

[ejb_99]

My first thought is a prot Pally in Tier 11 gear. Stop writing reviews and get a move on with those Valor Points!

 

[NeilV]

I'm sorry, I haven't read through all the comments so I don't know if this has been covered already but.....

Delays & stutters can be annoying but for me, if I have an hour free for gaming, the last thing I want to do is spend 2 mins waiting for the game to load, 20 secs each time I move from one area to another & 1 min everytime I die and have to re-load (this happens a lot in Crysis ;-))

OK so I'm not a hard core gamer with a smoking rig but I would enjoy my gaming a lot more with out these issues. Is a SSD for me??

 

[silverblue]

I know the perfect test for an SSD vs. magnetic competition... Aion during a zerg vs. zerg siege. Everyone knows how this turns into a lagfest tabfest at 10fps and I'm curious to know whether an SSD would make any difference in this situation.

 

[Guest]

great article.
shows for instance that anandtech's assumptions about daily usage are completely off.
don't mind the retards whining because the article is "too abstract", there are people around capable of understanding this stuff.

 

[Guest]

Your Crysis 2 gameplay numbers are interesting. Is something incorrect, or information left out? (1.37GB*1024MB/1GB)/((23m*60s/1m)+13s)= ~1 MB/s in writes. That is not 359.23 MB/s.

 

[Maximus_Delta]

I don't think SSDs should be used as gaming drives. A typical Steam library can easily be 200-300GB and is waiting an extra 10-15 seconds for a level to load worth huge expense. A small SSD as an OS drive is a good idea to minimize any delays associated with the same, but I really don't think it's A) worth the money or B) a good idea for your SSD to be spending more time writing data than reading which is what seems to happen while gaming. Very minimal benefits over a decent HDD that is reguarly defragmented. A badly written game that doesn't pay due attention to how it loads up is another thing entirely...

 

[Guest]

I agree with Achoo2 and a couple of the other comments - its all well and good to give theoretical information, but where is the actual concrete comparisons to some HDDs? I'd love to see the same three games benched across 5400, 7200, 10000rpm HDDs and a couple different SSDs. Show us actual app launch time, level load time and maybe qualitative comments on stutters or performance issues actually in-game.

 

[watts_354]

Hi I have question about using the intel Ipeak software Version 3 from 1999, I found a link to download the demo software (Version 3 from 1999).

As the Ipeak suite is made of of 32bit application including the WinTrace (ntwoit.sys) disk filter driver, I was wondering how this article claims to be using Ipeak when the setup page lists Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as the OS of the test computer ?

Were the traces done using Windows XP 32 bit ? or is there a different version of Ipeak that has 64 bit filter drivers ?

Thank for you sharing any info you have.

Watts.

 

[natx808]

How Does Storage Performance Affect Gaming? this article certainly does not answer the question.

show us FPS in games SSD VS 7200RPM.

 

[WyomingKnott]

[citation][nom]icepick314[/nom]how about comparison between drives in RAID 0?I imagine since large capacity SSD are VERY expensive, most people use 2 or more middle-of-the-road SSDs in RAID 0 striping method...I hear 10000RPM HDDs are very fast in loading when in RAID 0 configuration...I imagine in real world situation, 2 of 10000RPM HDDs in RAID 0 are just as fast as 2 of the most SSDs in RAID 0....[/citation]
Yes and no. You would get decent sequential read speeds. But the seek speeds are not improved with RAID0, and the seek speeds of SSDs totally blow away those of mechanical drives.

 

[Guest]

I would be very interested in seeing a handful of productivity tasks broken down like this like a video encode, and an office benchmark.

 

[Gnug315]

[citation][nom]WyomingKnott[/nom]Yes and no. You would get decent sequential read speeds. But the seek speeds are not improved with RAID0, and the seek speeds of SSDs totally blow away those of mechanical drives.[/citation]
I'm pretty sure it's been established that SSDs do nothing to improve your FPS.

 

[Gnug315]

Obviously that was meant for the previous poster asking about a FPS comparison =)

 

[seaborn]

Good article. Cleared up some thing that were making me hesitate. My brother bought one. I didn't want to spend that much back then and decided wait and see how they performed and lasted I know they had some issues back when the the came out but newer ones are better now.

 

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]executor2[/nom]I bought my SSD for 2 reasons:1. Level loading with dragon age ( which dramatically improved over my 1 TB Samsung F3 , in reality the level loads 2x faster from 1 minute to around 22-28 seconds )2. My OS which was transfer to the SSD ( which brought faster windows loading , extremely faster shutdowns , instant application lunch , and better multitasking because i have my browsers on the SSD )If any of you don't wanna invest into a SSD believe me , IT IS WORTH IT !If you wait for performance to not cost you , you will wait an eternity.60GB SSD CORSAIR NOVA FORCE[/citation]

Dragon Age is a game that shows just how fast the SSD is. Levels are loaded in about 10 seconds. Also, the micro-stuttering phenomena almost disappeared. On my old WDC Blue 500GB, there micro-stuttering was noticeable even though the FPS rarely dipped below 60

If there's one game I would like to see dissected, it'd definitely be Dragon age origins. Particularly, the Denerim Market District, where the FPS go down to 35-45 range.

 

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]Maximus_Delta[/nom]I don't think SSDs should be used as gaming drives. A typical Steam library can easily be 200-300GB and is waiting an extra 10-15 seconds for a level to load worth huge expense. A small SSD as an OS drive is a good idea to minimize any delays associated with the same, but I really don't think it's A) worth the money or B) a good idea for your SSD to be spending more time writing data than reading which is what seems to happen while gaming. Very minimal benefits over a decent HDD that is reguarly defragmented. A badly written game that doesn't pay due attention to how it loads up is another thing entirely...[/citation]

You don't play all these games at once unless you're not working or you're a kid. Granted, the SSDs are too expensive for the limited capacity they offer but, a typical 120GB SSD should allow you to install at least three games with your OS.

 

[humble dexter]

Where do games usually write most of their gameplay data to :
- Usually in the folder where the games are installed ?
- Usually in the "Documents and Settings" folder, that Windows uses to store it's user data ?

Meaning if you install Windows on a SSD, and the game on a HD, should you expect those gameplay writes to be made on the SSD (where Window's "Documents and Settings" folder is), or on the HD (where the games are installed) ?

 

[Guest]

Either a trivial or useful question to answer: how and when do motherboards (RAM included in analysis) impose bottlenecks on SSD read/writes? If this question is not trivial, how would the bottlenecks compare to a standard hard drive?

Also, the seek problem needs more description, especially relative to data processing or video editing (there might be additional read/write phenomena that gamers don't care about). Given the way the data is presented (and also that I've yet to had to be greatly concerned about any hard drive bench marks beyond RPM and IDE v. SATA), would this imply that instead of getting an SSD, one could improve performance with a standard hard drive of smaller size? For example, for video editing software, might a non-SSD 80GB hard drive outperform a non-SSD 1TB hard drive in terms of seek time?

Overall, I think a description of relative importance for the statistics of SSD drives v. standard hard drives for given software functions would be very useful.

Finally, I'd really like to see an article that compares SSD RAID arrays.

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]johnsontr[/nom]... For example, for video editing software,
might a non-SSD 80GB hard drive outperform a non-SSD 1TB hard drive
in terms of seek time? ...[/citation]

No (because the newer drives use much smaller processes, data
densities, etc.), but if you do care about seek/random-access
of non-SSD drives, then just get a 2nd-hand 15K SAS which will
knock the socks off any mechanical SATA for seek times, etc.,
and beat them for sequential I/O aswell, eg. the Seagate 15K.7
series. See my results page:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/diskdata.html

Newer SATA has pretty decent sequential I/O, but its access time
is nowhere 15K SAS, etc. (the 2nd table on the page). Thus,
Enterprise SATA RAID should be quite good for video I/O, but SAS
will be much better if one is dealing with lots of small files intead.

Ian.

 

[Adroid]

Sorry I guess this one is way over my head. How about a "yes it does increase FPS" or not?

I am one of those gamers that doesn't really care about load times as much. I can wait another 15 seconds for my game to load up. But once it is running, I want it to run FAST. Does SSD impact that? Can anyone respond in layman's terms to that question? There may be a SSD purchase in my distand future, but I bought a WD caviar black a year or two ago that is going into my next build. I don't see a need to shell out the bucks for a small capacity SSD to make windows load in 8 seconds, I typically turn my computer on and leave it for a few minutes anyway.

I want to know about game Peformance ONLY

 

[phx08]

The I/O trends on your pages are WAY off from what your graphs show...FYI