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.

Loading A Race In F1 2011

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Overall StatisticsF1 2011: Race Loading
Elapsed Time00:36
Read Operations3 757
Write Operations284
Data Read417.70 MB
Data Written6.65 MB
Disk Busy Time1.03 s
Average Data Rate413.59 MB/s

We didn't spend a lot of time ranking up our player profile, which is why we went straight to a Grand Prix event. The wait time isn't that long, because most of it is loaded sequentially.

However, a majority of the transfers are smaller than 128 KB, which imposes a bottleneck. This negates the speed up you'd expect from higher queue depths on a SSD. As a result, a hard drive equipped system won't perform all too different given our experience here with a Vertex 3.

I/O Trends:

  • 30% of all operations are 32 KB in transfer size
  • 43% of all operations are 128 KB in transfer size
  • 35% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
  • 65% of all operations occur between queue depths of two and four
  • 88% of all operations are sequential