Gamplay In Rift
The 15-minute trace captured in Rift involves walking through Sanctum and grinding through Silverwood.
| Overall Statistics | Rift: Gameplay |
|---|---|
| Elapsed Time | 15:33 |
| Read Operations | 10 234 |
| Write Operations | 1 982 |
| Data Read | 306.46 MB |
| Data Written | 34.66 MB |
| Disk Busy Time | 1.84 s |
| Average Data Rate | 185.73 MB/s |
Rift's gameplay is substantially different from WoW, at least as it pertains to storage. Whereas the latter hit our SSD with a lot of writes, this title turns out to be more read-heavy, just like Battlefield 3. According to the trace, there’s a wide variety of transfer sizes, and we continue to see a preponderance of random accesses, which makes sense given what we know of the game structure. Most operations occur at a queue depth of one, and nothing happens beyond a queue depth of 12.
Interestingly, WoW is the only game we've tested thus far with more than 5% of its commands stacking up at a queue depth in excess of 32. Rift gamers are going to find an SSD upgrade less beneficial than those loyal to WoW.
I/O Trends:
- 32% of all operations are 16 KB in transfer size
- 27% of all operations are 64 KB in transfer size
- 85% of all operations are random
- 63% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
- 31% of all operations occur between a queue depth of two and eight