[SOLVED] What would playing RDR2 with a HDD speed of 30 MB/s be like?

[tr4405]

Would it even be possible to game or would there just be extremely long loading screens?

 

[punkncat]

Does the rest of the system and particularly system RAM and GPU buffer (memory) meet spec?

 

[tr4405]

Does the rest of the system and particularly system RAM and GPU buffer (memory) meet spec?

Yeah

 

[punkncat]

Yeah

As far as I am aware, then, you should only have issue while waiting for game info to load in and out of the drive. If you happen to surpass system memory and go to page file it will likely be a crippling lag.

 

[tr4405]

As far as I am aware, then, you should only have issue while waiting for game info to load in and out of the drive. If you happen to surpass system memory and go to page file it will likely be a crippling lag.

By that do you mean as the world renders or only loading screens?

 

[punkncat]

By that do you mean as the world renders or only loading screens?

As far as I am aware, games like this cannot load completely to memory due to the size of the map. Seems like some other games like Skyrim and Witcher are in a similar boat. I play Witcher 3 some and from time to time you can tell it's loading some stuff in "on the fly".

I cannot imagine it being a seamless experience, but I could well be wrong. I have not played that specific game so cannot speak with total confidence. It would be worthwhile to see if someone else chimes in regarding that aspect.

 

[avg9956]

I played RDR2 while using a HDD as boot drive and installed RDR2 on a different HDD before I swapped to a M.2 boot drive
The loading times of the game were tolerable (I think around 1.5-2 min). I think if you're used to playing games using HDD, you wouldn't notice a difference, that's just me.
Its entirely possible to play games on HDD. The performance was ok. No lag and FPS was fine.
I would agree with punkcat, as long as you meet the system requirements, then playing the game on a HDD wouldn't hurt at all in performance.

I don't have time to test it out now on my SSD to record load times because I'm no longer interested playing that game.

Edit: Curious though about 30 MB/s HDD, what model is it? Or is the HDD defective?

 

[tr4405]

I played RDR2 while using a HDD as boot drive and installed RDR2 on a different HDD before I swapped to a M.2 boot drive
The loading times of the game were tolerable (I think around 1.5-2 min). I think if you're used to playing games using HDD, you wouldn't notice a difference, that's just me.
Its entirely possible to play games on HDD. The performance was ok. No lag and FPS was fine.
I would agree with punkcat, as long as you meet the system requirements, then playing the game on a HDD wouldn't hurt at all in performance.

I don't have time to test it out now on my SSD to record load times because I'm no longer interested playing that game.

Even if it’s on a really slow HDD. I don’t even have a slow HDD I was just wondering.

 

[avg9956]

I would then imagine that the loading times would be exponentially longer for a HDD with only 30 MB/S and can also cause the game to lag if it attempts to load files from the HDD (Read speed only 30 MB/s)

And the only practical resolution is to buy a new SATA 3.0 HDD.

 

[tr4405]

I would then imagine that the loading times would be exponentially longer for a HDD with only 30 MB/S and can also cause the game to lag if it attempts to load files from the HDD (Read speed only 30 MB/s)

And the only practical resolution is to buy a new SATA 3.0 HDD.

In RDR2 when would the game need to load files from the HDD?

 

[avg9956]

Yes, the game will load its asset files, etc. in the game directory, which is installed on the slow HDD (30mb/s). Loading = Read speed only of 30 mb/s.
This also goes for modding as well. Most game mods are stored alongside within the game directory.
If your mod is large in size (let's say 100mb or larger) and the game needs to load it, then it will be slow too (Read speed only 30 mb/s). Usually this could be map mods that expand the game beyond its original size.

Data is either stored in memory or in hard disk drive. Anything stored in memory is just temporary and is accessed instantaneously.
I would second again what punkcat said, AFAIK also this game does not or cannot load every asset onto memory (RAM), so it will load some of it off the hard disk drive.
If you want to know further which particular files or assets are loaded by the game from the disk, you may want to ask the game developer themselves.
Game devs dictate which file is loaded from RAM, which file is from hard disk and in what order are the files loaded, all in line with optimization and stability.

If almost the entire game was loaded onto RAM, you'd need to have a large amount of RAM in order to run the game (hence Minimum RAM requirement will be high)
However this is infeasible to do because naturally, game devs want to reach out to a larger market - people who may have less RAM in order to be able to sell their games.
Hence partly the reason why most of the game files are still loaded from storage and not from memory.

If RDR2 had a video recording feature (I forgot if it had) and you saved the video file onto the slow hard disk drive, it will also be slow (write speed only 30 mb/s).

 

[tr4405]

Yes, the game will load its asset files, etc. in the game directory, which is installed on the slow HDD (30mb/s). Loading = Read speed only of 30 mb/s.
This also goes for modding as well. Most game mods are stored alongside within the game directory.
If your mod is large in size (let's say 100mb or larger) and the game needs to load it, then it will be slow too (Read speed only 30 mb/s). Usually this could be map mods that expand the game beyond its original size.

Data is either stored in memory or in hard disk drive. Anything stored in memory is just temporary and is accessed instantaneously.
I would second again what punkcat said, AFAIK also this game does not or cannot load every asset onto memory (RAM), so it will load some of it off the hard disk drive.
If you want to know further which particular files or assets are loaded by the game from the disk, you may want to ask the game developer themselves.
Game devs dictate which file is loaded from RAM, which file is from hard disk and in what order are the files loaded, all in line with optimization and stability.

If almost the entire game was loaded onto RAM, you'd need to have a large amount of RAM in order to run the game (hence Minimum RAM requirement will be high)
However this is infeasible to do because naturally, game devs want to reach out to a larger market - people who may have less RAM in order to be able to sell their games.
Hence partly the reason why most of the game files are still loaded from storage and not from memory.

If RDR2 had a video recording feature (I forgot if it had) and you saved the video file onto the slow hard disk drive, it will also be slow (write speed only 30 mb/s).

Are some smaller open world games or closed world games able to load all the data onto the RAM?

 

[avg9956]

Afaik I don't know of any games that entirely load ALL the data onto RAM.

https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-game...ome-sort-of-software-for-this-to-be-automatic

Why can't smaller size games load their entire content into RAM to eliminate loads?

This should be a given for PCs with lots of RAM. For instance, with 32GB of RAM you can fit most games in there entirely. Sure, the initial load would be a couple minutes but after that, the game would not need to stream from the HDD. Plus, RAM is many times faster than a SSD even.

www.neogaf.com

https://forum.romexsoftware.com/en-us/viewtopic.php?t=1337
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1vh7by/32gb_of_ram_can_i_store_an_entire_games_data_on/


It is possible, but you can search for such a game if it does exist or code one yourself to instruct the game to load all assets from RAM.

If the game is small enough in size such that it would fit your RAM, you could try making a RAM disk and install the game from there.
The only downside is, remember RAM is temporary storage. Every time you shutdown your PC or suffer from a power outage, all the data stored in the RAM Disk is gone and you have to recopy all over again.

And what about games like Red Dead Redemption 2? That game hogs 150GB of space. Unless you're using an AMD Threadripper or Intel HEDT platform with 256GB of memory, you couldn't even try to put some games on a RAM disk.

What is a RAM Disk and should I use one for gaming?

This temporary performance boost to your PC comes with more headaches than it's worth.

www.pcgamer.com

This is why games are stored in storage.