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 Statistics
Civilization V: Gameplay
Elapsed Time
41:48
Read Operations
714
Write Operations
6468
Data Read
49.11 MB
Data Written
0.46 GB
Disk Busy Time
1.56 s
Average Data Rate
332.53 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
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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!
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.
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.
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?
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.