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.

Gameplay In Sid Meier's Civilization V

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Overall StatisticsCivilization V: Gameplay
Elapsed Time41:48
Read Operations714
Write Operations6468
Data Read49.11 MB
Data Written0.46 GB
Disk Busy Time1.56 s
Average Data Rate332.53 MB/s

Playing a game is almost purely write-oriented because its progress has to be updated continually to a temporary location on the drive. Civilization V follows that trend to some degree, but it does so using fewer write operations than Crysis 2 (and more than World of Warcraft).

Most of the write operations are 128 KB sequential transfers at a queue depth of one. There are a fair number of higher-depth transfers, but they are all evenly distributed between two and eight.

I/O Trends:

  • 85% of all operations are sequential
  • 49% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
  • 46% of all operations occur between queue depths of two and eight
  • 53% 128 KB, 30% 4 KB

Seek Distance

QD

Transfer Size