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

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There are a ton of terms used to quantify storage performance. If you're a gamer, you have to be wondering how such dry terminology can apply to having fun. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect three popular titles to show you instead.

Loading Levels In Sid Meier's Civilization V

Overall StatisticsCivilization V: Level Loading
Elapsed Time00:21
Read Operations2 907
Write Operations109
Data Read238.22 MB
Data Written754.50 MB
Disk Busy Time0.70 s
Average Data Rate342.20 MB/s

Levels, as typically know them, don't exist in Civilization V. Selecting single-player mode opens a map with your desired civilization settings. However, the I/O workload for generating a map looks very similar to what we saw in Crysis 2 because most of the operations are 128 KB sequential read accesses at a queue depth of one.

But Civilization V is a turn-based strategy game. It’s not a first-person shooter, which is why it's also far less graphically-intensive than Crysis 2. The amount of data being read reflects this, as the system loads fewer textures and less game data. 

I/O Trends:

  • 42% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
  • 50% of all operations occur between a queue depths of two and 32
  • 80% of all operations are sequential
  • 51% 128 KB, 10% 8 KB, 4% 16 KB

Seek Distance

QD

Transfer Size
97 Comments Comment from the forums
  • the_krasno 18 August 2011 12:00
    If it doesn't improve FPS I don't see competitive gamers adding SSD's to their rigs for nothing but main OS drive.
    Longer loading times are not crucial when all you want is to frag your enemies!
    Reply
  • Soma42 18 August 2011 12:10
    This just confirmed what I knew already. I will probably upgrade to a SSD with my next build, but they are still so bloody expensive for the storage they offer. Plus, SSD are supposed to have better reliability compared to magnetic drives.
    Reply
  • AbdullahG 18 August 2011 12:13
    If only SDDs were a few cents a GB...
    Reply
  • Gamer-girl 18 August 2011 12:27
    Gameplay: Nearly all writes.

    Doesn't this reduce the life of a SSD?
    Reply
  • crewton 18 August 2011 12:43
    I took WoW off my SSD for 2 reasons: space and performance. WoW is just way too big of a folder with addons and everything else it was around 35GB and like this article states the start and initial load is really the only benefit. Once you are in the world (of warcraft) it's not used.

    I'd like to see how the witcher stacks up with SSD. You are constantly having to load different areas the entire game so I made sure to have that on the SSD while playing it hoping to reduce the load times. Would like to see if that really paid off or not.
    Reply
  • Nnymrod 18 August 2011 12:58
    It's all about the bottleneck, which isn't storage for actually playing a game. That said, SSDs are definitely cool, and I have one.
    Reply
  • cngledad 18 August 2011 13:01
    a comparison with a 7200rpm hdd for example will be great.
    Reply
  • AlexIsAlex 18 August 2011 14:36
    So it looks to me like game loading and level loading is not significantly hard-disk bound, if the disk is busy for such a short period of time. For example, loading a Crysis 2 level taking 58s, of which the disk is busy for 2.

    Does that mean if you had an infinitely fast disk, the level loading would take 56s? In which case, where is the bottleneck for level loading? Is it CPU bound? (if so, why isn't CPU usage at 100% when loading a level?) Memory? Graphics card?
    Reply
  • agnickolov 18 August 2011 14:38
    There was supposed to be a comparison with a 1TB Barracuda, but nothing made it into the article itself. How hard could it be to display two adjacent bars on every graph instead of 1? E.g. red for the SSD and blue for the HDD.
    Reply
  • celuloid 18 August 2011 14:52
    Why don't we see how long are those loading times with HDD drive? Maybe we find out 2x faster loading is not worth 30x times more money per GB.
    Reply