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

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We use a ton of terms to quantify storage performance. If you're a gamer, you have to be wonder how such dry terminology can apply to having fun. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect three more popular titles to illustrate for you instead.

Launching F1 2011

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Overall StatisticsF1 2011: Launching
Elapsed Time00:49
Read Operations8 686
Write Operations505
Data Read592.30 MB
Data Written3.28 MB
Disk Busy Time1.82 s
Average Data Rate326.91 MB/s

Most transfers are 128 KB in size, which makes sense considering that a majority of accesses are sequential. Only 21% of the process is random. This reflects the structure of the Steam-based F1 2011 installation. There aren't many files of varying sizes strewn across the drive. Instead, all of the game data is localized to a few large files. However, SSDs excel at speeding up random accesses. As a result, you don’t have queue depths stacking up like you would see on a hard drive.

I/O Trends:

  • 62% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
  • 36% of all operations occur between queue depths of two and four
  • 79% of all operations are sequential
  • 5% of all operations are 4 KB in transfer size
  • 10% of all operations are 8 KB in transfer size
  • 80% of all operations are 128 KB in transfer size